Bono Said Listening to The Beatles’ for the First Time Felt Like ‘Life Force’

Many famous musicians remember where they were the first time they heard The Beatles. They are an incredibly influential band and jumpstarted a love of music for multiple generations. U2’s lead singer Bono was very young when he first heard The Beatles and still remembers it vividly. 

Bono said it felt like ‘life force’ when he first heard The Beatles

U2 emerged on the rock scene in the 1980s, about a decade after The Beatles had split up. The Irish band has garnered international acclaim and success, but none of that might have happened without The Beatles. In a letter published on U2’s website, Bono said listening to “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was his earliest music memory and the first time he remembered feeling alive. 

“It’s my earliest memory of music,” Bono wrote. “I was three years old and in the back garden of 10 Cedarwood Road… I associate the song with the smell of freshly cut grass as I was lying on my back on the damp green patch after my Da had cut the lawn… Beside me was a lawn mower with green-stained rotors that had to be repaired. My brother Norman could fix it… he could fix anything. It was the spring of 1964… the song on the radio felt like life force… like I was for the first time conscious that I was alive and that being alive was a really, really great idea!”

Bono said U2 models themselves after the fab four

The Beatles are still the most successful music act of all time. So, any band would wisely look to the fab four as a template for success. In an interview on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, Bono said The Beatles are “untouchable” and U2 uses them as a model for what four people can create musically. 

“We still look to [The Beatles] as models of what can be achieved when four people get into a room and start experimenting,” Bono said. “It’s sad that two of them are gone now. It’s always worth reminding ourselves how lucky we are to be alive at a time when we grew up with the Beatles.”

When you’re in a band, it’s like you against the world,” he added. “If you come from a neighborhood in Dublin or Liverpool and you come to America, and you discover the roots of soul music and blues and stuff, that may or may not have influenced you but certainly has opened your ears and eyes up – they were the first to do that.” 

U2 might not be The Beatles, but they’ve still made an impact on music

U2 released their first album, Boy, in 1980. Since then, U2 has become one of the most recognizable bands in the world, with dozens of memorable hits and albums. The band has two No. 1 hits, “With or Without You” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”, along with eight No. 1 albums, including The Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby, and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. 

The band recently released Songs of Surrender, a collection of acoustic versions of their most popular and iconic songs.