U2’s First Television Performance Is Seriously Hard Rocking, And Adorable As Teenage Irish Upstarts Try To Make A Name For Themselves

Sit down before you watch this one ‘cause you might not be ready for teenage U2’s rockin’ first television performance! This blast from the past captured the Irish icons owning the stage in 1978 on the Irish public broadcaster RTÉ. The band was aged just 16 and 17 years at the time, and the show is certainly packed full of teenage exuberance!

The performance starts with a rocking guitar solo from The Edge, in a trad hard rock style that he completely moved away from in later years. The Music Man readers will note that the band’s vibe is a hard-hitting rock sound with a touch of glam, which they perform with a whole lot of passion. The performance is a great insight into the development of U2, as just two years later with their debut album, Boy, they had developed a completely different and much more distinctive post-punk sound.

The video has a graphic halfway through that shows that the broadcast was from June 1, 1978. However, this is a bit misleading, as that is the date the footage was re-aired by the station in a ‘best of’ episode. The performance was actually originally broadcast on March 2, 1978. At the date of the original broadcast, Bono and Adam Clayton were 17 years old, while the Edge and Larry Mullen Jr. were just 16 years old.

The footage in the video above is only part of the performance, and it cuts off the start of the song. For the TV appearance, U2 played a song called “Street Mission,” and you can hear the missing footage from the start of the song in the video below. The performance was broadcast on the RTÉ program Youngline, and at the time of the broadcast, the band were called The Hype. The boys appeared in a Limerick talent competition on March 17, 1978, and by this point they had changed their name to U2.

Here at The Music Man, we love to share classic performances like this from the greats of rock music. U2 fans were fascinated by the historic performance and added comments such as “The Edge plays more notes on his guitar in this one song than he has done in all the playing he has done since” and “These guys have traveled a long and winding road indeed. What a legacy; I don’t think we’ll ever see anything quite like U2 again.”

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