1980-09-15

Marquee Club, London, England

Set List of Show:

Additional Music

Snippets of Other Songs Performed by U2:

Show Details:

U2 play the second of four consecutive Monday’s at the Marquee Club in London, England. The admission for the show tonight is £1.25 with a reduced admission available to students and members of the club. The doors open at 7pm.

The opening acts for the show are the club DJ, Jerry Floyd, and then a band called Vision Collision. Vision Collision is fronted by Andy Wickett, who also works with The Xpertz who open others shows on this leg of the tour.

U2’s set list for this evening is unknown.

In 2015, U2 released Another Time, Another Place, a recording from The Marquee Club, and Bono is recorded doing a spoken remembrance of the club. He remembers the four show residency in September 1980: “Anyway, the Marquee Club on Wardour Street was to be the site of a residency for U2. U2 would play every Monday for four weeks. The first Monday was half-full. The second Monday was nearly full. The third Monday they had to turn people away and the fourth Monday there were queues around the block, across the road, and Wardour Street looked like an A-bomb had landed on it. That’s a Jam reference if you care. Um, of course we thought this was the Irish invasion. It’s incredible what a few hundred people believing in you does for you self-confidence.” The recording on that fan club release was taken from the September 29 show at the Marquee, the last of the four appearances in U2’s residency. The Marquee had been established for years when it moved to the Wardour Street location in 1964. The club operated there until 1988. The club was at ground level in a busy Soho area famed for the night life and close to other clubs. The clubs capacity was around 1,000 people, although a well known performance by Jimi Hendrix saw 1,400 attend a show at the club. Based on Bono’s comments above, it is likely that the first show in the Marquee saw less than 500 people attend, with an increase with each subsequent Monday night.

Jack Barrie, the manager of The Marquee at the time would later remember U2’s run of shows in an interview with Q Magazine: “By the time they came back in September they knew they were in a stronger position. They came to Nigel Hutchings, who was the Marquee’s booking manager, with the idea that they should have a regular Monday night residency. This used to happen often in the ’60s with bands on the way up, but it had stopped, so U2 would be seen to be the first band to get a Marquee residency in many years. Across those four weeks, you could see the build-up in interest as the buzz went around.” Neil Storey, press officer with Island Records added, “The first two nights at the Marquee didn’t sell out, but the second two did and by then they were the hottest new act in Britain, the band everybody had to see.”

The Marquee was located at 90 Wardour Street. U2 are known to have played the club eight times in their career.

Officially Released Tracks