PRECISELY half a century ago this weekend, in a semi-detached family home in the Dublin suburb of Artane and a mere 13.7 billion years after the chart-topping cosmic original, came the follow-up to The Big Bang.
What Rolling Stone or NME or Hot Press, itself, might, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, call the firmament's "difficult second album." In a superheated moment of creative violence (a more prosaic description might announce it as a tentative gathering of four kids from a nearby school who scarcely knew each other but were desperate to form a band), a new musical universe was born.
On the fourth Saturday of September 1976, 14-year-old Larry Mullen's kitchen announced itself as a clamorous Ground Zero, the exact spot where the seed that would grow and bloom into the evergreen behemoth we know today as U2 was germinated.
The city was palpitating that weekend with an uncommon sense of anticipation.
A day after a youthful Paul Hewson , Dave Evans - the pair had not yet transformed into Bono and The Edge - and Adam Clayton arrived on Rosemount Avenue armed with a suitcase full of dreams, Kevin Heffernan would bullet the blue sky.
On September 26th, 1976, 50 years ago this very day, Jimmy Keaveney, Brian Mullins and a 20-year-old Kevin Moran would carry Dublin to a euphoric fever pitch.
Defeating Mick O'Dwyer's Kerry in an All-Ireland final rivalry that had gripped the nation, advancing Gaelic football to a new and rarefied anchorage in urban popular culture, they gifted a town devastated by unemployment and emigration and lack of opportunity a thrilling new sense of self..
Even as the Railway End was going barmy, as tens of thousands wishing to breathe the oxygen of belonging flocked onto Hill 16 to enlist in Heffo's Army, another immense force was stirring just three miles away up the Malahide Road.
Among the pots and pans of the Mullen household.
One that would itself come to hold Croke Park rapt, transforming the hearthstone of the GAA into its own secular cathedral, the congregation in thrall to evocative hymns from Achtung Baby and The Joshua Tree.
Sparking one of the more unforgettable fires Ireland has ever known.
In all likelihood, some of you will already have raised your eyes to heaven.
Call it the Bono effect.
U2 trigger a thousand different emotional reactions in the approximately seven million people who call this 32-county chunk of east Atlantic rock home.
Reverence and ridicule, infatuation and indifference, love and loathing, there is not a square foot of real estate on the bandwidth of opinion that has not been loudly colonised over their decades of dominion.
It is possible, as many of us often do, to simultaneously inhabit both sides of the divide.
To regard U2 as a supreme creative force, to recognise their artistry, to have been hypnotised by the megawatt power of their live shows, to marvel at Bono's pied-paper qualities, his abundant sense of showmanship...
And yet to wish he would sometimes sing the songs and then shut to f*** up.
There have been nights at Slane and Croke Park and Wembley when U2 have propelled so many of us to life's spiritual penthouse, a palace of high feeling, where surges of love and connection make us feel a little light-headed and giddy.
A place beyond the known latitude and longitude of ordinary human experience.
Those evenings can feel a little like a religious experience, the music instilling a rapture at the audience's core that is tinder, flammable and warming, blazing a communal joy into the midnight sky.
The flip side is that their earnest sermonising can sometimes be a little overwhelming.
But then, it would be hypocritical to aim flaming arrows of outrage at the FAI and Irish government for their moral torpor regarding the Israel fixtures and to then ridicule U2 for their social concern and....
