Swagger, Not Style

12. October (1981)

“I was walking, I was walking into walls / I’m back again / I just keep walking / I walk into a window to see myself.”

— “I Thew a Brick Through a Window”

Even Trekkie-level superfans like me kind of forget that U2′s sophomore album exists. The story goes that at a gig in Portland, Oregon in 1981, a 20-year-old Bono’s briefcase was swiped, including a notebook with all the new lyrics he was writing. He’d gripe about it at subsequent Pacific Northwest gigs for decades. That was perhaps the earliest documented episode of Bono annoying somebody into doing the right thing, because incredibly, the briefcase found its way back to him in 2004, notebook intact.

So the absence of lyrics are at least part of why this album sounds so tentative, but it’s pretty thin on musical ideas, too. The Latin-chroused opener “Gloria” spent much of the 80s as a live favorite, and “Tomorrow” — a kind of eulogy for Bono’s mom, who died suddenly when he was 14 — sounds appropriately funereal, with some haunting Uilleann pipes, a rare example of traditional Irish instrumentation on a U2 album. But there’s little else of interest here.

There used to be a lot of confusion about whether U2 were a Christian band or just a band that had some Christians in it. This nascent version of U2 sound like they don’t know, either.

In his acceptance speech when U2 were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2005, Bono spoke about this album’s failure, and how it was only the long view taken by Island Records founder Chris Blackwell that saved them from being dropped. “There would be no U2, the way things are right now,” he said. “That’s a fact.”