34cm x 37cm
21 years ago an up-and-coming young Irish band strangely named after a German war plane came to play in Gorey.
They were called U2.
Friday, August 15, 1980, was the day that the young Bono, Edge, Adam and Larry travelled down from Dublin in a van to play on the closing night of the 11th annual Funge Arts Festival, whose posters billed them as ‘Ireland’s newest rock sensation’ – little did they realise how accurate that would turn out to be!
Admission to the Theatre Hall for U2 was £2.50, which represented one of the highest prices for any event at that year’s Festival.
Only the performance by Freddie White in the Funge Arts Centre on the same night cost more, £3.
Interest in the gig was high amongst rock music fans throughout county Wexford and south county Wicklow, as the potential shown by the young U2 had already been spotted by the rock and roll press.
Bono and the boys had already released four singles – ‘U23’, ‘Another Day’, ’11 o’clock Tick Tock’ and ‘A Day Without Me’ by the time they came to Gorey, and belted them all out from the Theatre Hall stage, while the set list that night also included a number of other tracks from their first album, ‘Boy’, which would hit the record shops just two months later.
By all accounts, the venue was packed out with music fans.
