1980-03-01

Arcadia Ballroom, Cork, Ireland

Set List of Show:

Main Set:

  • "11 O'Clock Tick Tock"
  • "Speed of Life"
  • "Life On A Distant Planet"
  • "Stories for Boys"
  • "Trevor"
  • "Another Time, Another Place"
  • "Another Day"
  • "The Dream Is Over"
  • "Pete the Chop"
  • "Cartoon World"
  • "Jack in A Box"
  • "Shadows and Tall Trees"
  • "A Day Without Me"
  • "Twilight"
  • "In Your Hand"
  • "Boy / Girl"
  • "Out of Control"
  • "The Electric Co."

Additional Music

Snippets of Other Songs Performed by U2:

Show Details:

Note: There was an unidentified song played between “Trevor” and “Another Time, Another Place”.

The band returns to the Arcadia in Cork. At this point it’s a familiar venue to them. They will finish the show tonight, and the following day will do a photoshoot on the roof of the Country Club Hotel. The photographer is David Corio, and the photo shoot is done before traveling to Tullamore. One of these photographs on the roof of the hotel is used for the album U218 Singles and the book U2 by U2. Corio travels with the band, as does Paul Morley from NME, and promoter Elvera Butler helps transport the band between the show and the later show in Tullamore.

A few notes about the set list. We list the third song as “Life on A Distant Planet” but by this point the song is being called “No Man’s Land” and is listed that way on the set list for the show this evening. And “11 O’Clock Tick Tock” is listed on the set list under that name and not the earlier “Silver Lining” name. We have confirmed both of these with visual evidence. As we are going on a written set list prepared before the show, the band may have deviated from this set list.

The set list is very similar to the set list from the next night in Tullamore but with a couple of additions. At first we thought there was an unidentified song between “Trevor” and “Another Time, Another Place”, but upon further examination, it appears that the band had started to write something, crossed it out, and this is not a separate song after all. The band plays “In Your Hand” between “Twilight” and “Boy / Girl” which wasn’t done in Tullamore.

In NME Paul Morley writes of the show, “Queues form early, the dancehall fills. Most of these people know an amp from a teabag. And because they’ve been given a tantalising series of glimpse of a fuller life, they’re aware and starving. It’s like an Electric Ballroom gig: rowdy, bawdy, hands outstretched, fingers touching, bodies crushing.” He also speaks of Bono, “He controls fights and calms down a stage invasion.” and “His performance is unruly but riveting.”

(There is some confusion that U2 may have played an earlier show in Cork at the Country Club on February 4, 1980. In U2 Live a show is listed for the Country Club for February 1980 with the exact date unknown. The show description, and the photographs accompanying that write up are for this show at the Arcadia. Similarly, a show listed for Tullamore in February 1980 happened in March as well. There has been further confusion because of an error in Getty Photographs identifying an image. There is a photograph which has been labeled as being taken at the Country Club on February 4, 1980, but it is clearly from the same set of photos taken in Cork at the Arcadia on March 1, 1980. The band and the audience are the same in photographs. Further, photos taken by Corio on the roof of the Country Club, where U2 stayed in March, are dated March 2. Corio confirms he traveled with the band in March 1980, and was not present at a February show. Further, The Country Club ran nightly ads in local papers, and the band Honey Well was advertised as playing the venue on February 4, 1980. There are no open days on which the band could have played, unless there had been a last minute cancellation. We’ve chosen not to list the February 1980 date, as with the knowledge above, there is little to no evidence that U2 played the venue in February, 1980.)

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Officially Released Tracks

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