U2 frontman Bono has said that a lie lead to one of the band’s big breaks.
Bono was attending Dublin’s Mount Temple Comprehensive School with the Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. when a producer for the RTÉ show Youngline came to scout the band, which was then named The Hype.
“We had a big TV producer, a big cheese, he was coming to our high school because he’d heard we wrote our own songs,” Bono recalled during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “It was a big break, we were gonna get our break and get on the national telly.
“There was a knock on the door … and we’re like ‘f**k.’ What are we gonna do?’ He walks in, ‘So you write your own songs … Could you play me one?’”
Bono said he exchanged glances with his bandmates and they proceeded to play The Ramones 1977 hit “Glad to See You Go” as though it was their own.
“That’s improvisation,” he jokes.
U2 made its television debut on Youngline on March 2, 1978 performing “Street Mission” – an original.
Bono, 62, will be in Toronto on Sunday as part of a promotional tour for his memoir SURRENDER: 40 Songs, One Story.