Behind the Album: How Faith Divided U2 on ‘October’

Recording the second album is a difficult prospect for most bands. Conventional wisdom says you have your entire life to write the first one. Then, between soundchecks and hotel rooms, you cobble together album number two.

U2 emerged from Dublin in 1980 with Boy. The band played post-punk, but this wasn’t Joy Division. Bono explained that “I Will Follow” is a song about unconditional love. The absolute love between a mother and her child. But it’s not hard to draw a spiritual conclusion.

That spirituality became clearer on October, the band’s follow-up album. However, faith divided U2 before they’d barely lifted off.

Can They Be Rock and Roll and Spiritual?

Bono, The Edge, and Larry Mullen Jr. had joined a Christian sect called the Shalom Fellowship. And the bandmates pondered how to reconcile their Christian faith with life in a rock and roll band.

But where “I Will Follow” softened its spiritual theme with vague language, October opens with “Gloria,” a post-punk single with a Latin hook.

Gloria
In te domine
Gloria
Exultate
Gloria
Gloria
Oh, Lord, loosen my lips.

Here, Bono uses Latin, a classical language, as if he’s speaking in tongues. He sang it plainly then, but looking back on U2’s career, it sounds more communal now, more like Springsteen’s poetic universalism. Also, Van Morrison’s garage rock anthem of the same name comes to mind, further closing the gap between what divided the band.

The religious language continues on songs like “Rejoice” and “With a Shout (Jerusalem).” But with the hindsight of knowing where U2’s career went, it seems like Bono uses spiritual language for faith and poetry. It’s no accident that his lyrics resemble the Psalms.

Irish Hymns

Of course, U2 did reconcile their faith with rock and roll. They didn’t have to choose. Bono told NPR how U2’s music is grounded in the structure of a hymn. It’s in the band’s DNA.

“And that’s the feeling we’ve been looking for in our music—yes we want punk rock, we want it to be brutal, we want it to be tough-minded, we wanted to have big tunes. But the ecstatic music is part of who we are,” he said.

October is the sound of U2 working it out. They struggled to write songs after a briefcase of lyrics had gone missing on tour. So Bono wrote quickly but things felt rushed. Compared to the two albums on either side of it, Boy and War, U2’s second album seems small—squeezed between two Goliaths.

War is the sound of a good rock band becoming great. It’s U2 beginning to touch the heights of their high ambition. Following their legendary 1983 Red Rocks concert, the rest of the world began to believe in the U2 gospel, too.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Adam Clayton was a reluctant convert. Bono explained how the bass player “just wants to be in a bad-ass rock and roll band.” But he remained loyal to the group.

Yet, U2’s history cannot be separated from Ireland’s political and religious history.

While promoting his memoir Surrender, Bono told Morning Edition’s Rachel Martin, “Could you imagine Ireland in the ’70s, it’s a civil war—all but a civil war. The country’s dividing along sectarian lines. I was very suspicious, and still am a little suspicious of … religious people, I mean, religion is often a club that people use to beat someone else over the head with. I learnt that at a very early age in Ireland.”

‘Surrender’

“Gloria” shares the swagger of Boy and War. But the second track is “I Fall Down” and hints at something bigger. The Edge layers his guitars with a sparkling piano, echoes of U2’s future grandeur. You can also hear Clayton and Mullen becoming a singular unit. This is a band finding their way to The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree.

For U2, October wasn’t an ultimatum, but a way forward.

In a 2022 conversation at the Washington National Cathedral, Bono explained to historian Jon Meacham a sentence in Surrender: “It takes great faith to have no faith.” He described the atheists in his life as “some of the most extraordinary people I’ve met.” People with a moral compass who “can’t quite give it a name.”

Bono said to Meacham about religion, “You’ve got to accept, that it’s absurd,” before adding, “I believe in the absurd.”

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Photo by Andre Csillag/Shutterstock