1976-10-10

Music Room, Mount Temple Comprehensive, Dublin, Ireland

Set List of Show:

Possible Songs Rehearsed (See Notes Below):

"Show Me the Way"
"Smoke on the Water"

Additional Music

Snippets of Other Songs Performed by Feedback:

Show Details:

Formed at the end of September, the band that would become U2 needed a place to practice, and turned to their school for help finding a location but it would take a bit of time to secure a location. The first known rehearsals happened over two days in October, the 9th and 10th, a Saturday and Sunday in the music room at the school. By this time the band had been pared down to Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen, as well as Edge’s brother Dick, and Ivan McCormick. Peter Martin who may have been present at the first meeting in Larry’s kitchen, was not present at these rehearsals.

The dates are known via Ivan McCormick’s diary. Ivan shares, “A couple of weeks after that first get together, we rehearsed at school in Mount Temple. I have another entry in my diary: Saturday 9th and Sunday 10th of October: ‘Rehearsed all day in the music room at school’. We wanted to get this band off the ground. I think we had a hi-fi amp from an old stereo and Bono had this little pencil microphone thing that you see in old Top of The Pops videos.”

At this point the band likely did not have a name, and Ivan shares, ““I don’t remember having any band name discussions back then, so I don’t know how the name Feedback came about. I assume that it happened after I was given my marching orders!”

Much of the information on what was performed over the first two days is lost, but McCormick does recall Peter Frampton’s “Show me the Way”, and a Bay City Rollers song. “Even at that early stage, I remember Bono being very much the man in charge and trying to get Dave [Edge] to play what he wanted him to play. He was saying ‘Give us more of this’ and ‘Give us more of that’. It’s funny, I think by then pop music was out and they’d got some idea that we could or would be a proper rock band. But of course everyone had a different sense of what ‘rock’ was. I think we would have done ‘Smoke On The Water’ at one stage.”

Jim Potter, who went to school at Mount Temple shared that the band advertised these practice sessions, hoping to get people interested in the band. “One Saturday morning they put up a notice saying there were going to be practice sessions. But no one took much notice. The truth is they weren’t playing so well then. But this I will say for them – they had guts and perseverance. They really got down to it. They knew what they wanted and they persevered despite everything.”

After these two sessions on the weekend at Mount Temple, the band would move to Wednesday afternoon sessions for further rehearsals, using Mr McKenzie’s music classroom to practice. At the time Mount Temple had operated as a half-day on Wednesdays, and it was easier for the youths to come together for practice by staying put after classes, rather than trying to find drives into the school on weekends.

Officially Released Tracks