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It was Larry Mullen who set the dream in motion. He posted a note on the bulletin board of Mount Temple, a public high school in Dublin, asking if there was anyone interested in forming a rock band. That was in 1976, and he was 14. "Stories simplify how big a step that was at the time," says Clayton. "That one action of Larry's has affected the rest of his life and, indeed, everyone's." David Evans (yet to be called the Edge) was a top student in his Mount Temple class, but he had been spending spare time "strumming away" on acoustic and electric guitar. When he saw that notice, he felt a decidedly nonacademic stirring in his soul. "Ah," he thought, "this could be it." Mullen had been playing drums since the age of nine, charging money for household chores ("I should have done them anyway, I know") in hopes of getting his own kit. His parents finally gave him part of a set -- made by a toy manufacturer and retailing for $15 -- at which young Larry happily flailed away until his father, an environmental-health inspector and part-time optician, suggested he try to get a group together. "You are not going to get anywhere," the senior Mullen pointed out, "if you continue playing on your own."
The Saturday after the school notice went up, six or seven Mount Temple students appeared in the Mullen kitchen and started playing Rolling Stones tunes. "During the course of the afternoon," Mullen remembers, "I saw that some people could play. The Edge could play. Adam just looked great. Big bushy hair, long caftan coat, bass guitar and amp. He talked like he could play, used all the right words, like gig. I thought, this guy must know how to play. Then Bono arrived, and he meant to play the guitar, but he couldn't play very well, so he started to sing. He couldn't do that either. But he was such a charismatic character that he was in the band anyway, as soon as he arrived. I was in charge for the first five minutes, but as soon as Bono got there, I was out of a job."
The boys who became U2 -- the name, suggested by a local musician pal, refers ironically to the high-altitude spy plane -- all knew of one another, vaguely, from school. The Clayton and Evans families were friendly. The Edge, whose family is Welsh, and Bono (still generally called Paul Hewson back then) had briefly gone to the same guitar teacher. For his part, Bono had a distant but still vivid impression of Clayton, who was raised outside London and in Kenya, and had moved to Dublin with his mother and airline-pilot father at the ( age of eight. He had come to Mount Temple from boarding school "pretty freaked, terrified I was going to get beat up. I thought the quieter you kept, the more wary people would be. Intimidate them and not give anything away." It worked. "Clayton was an incredible rebel, in the true sense of the word," Bono recalls fondly. "He would come into class with a flask of coffee and put it up on his desk and start to drink. The people would blow their heads."