Exactly 50 years ago, on September 25th, 1976, a group of Dublin teenagers gathered in a suburban kitchen in Artane. Their musical talents took a while to emerge, as Róisín Ingle recounts in Drummer Seeks Musicians: The Making of U2, but their ambition knew no bounds. Nor did their politics.

Over the last half a century, U2 have borne witness to an interconnected world in turmoil. Although their earnestness still grates with some, the band deserve credit for joining the dots between so many global struggles, raising money for and awareness of a vast array of causes. Few artists before them or since have used their fame as a force for good on this scale.

Released in 1980, U2’s debut album, Boy, painted an abstract picture of adolescent alienation and grief. One track, The Electric Co, burned with anger about a schoolfriend who’d been sent to Grangegorman for electroconvulsive therapy.

This seed of social concern sprouted in U2’s third album, War, which opened with Sunday Bloody Sunday, one of the most powerful protest songs of the post-punk era.

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“This song is not a rebel song”, Bono insisted to audiences. But U2’s willingness to call out political indifference in the 26 counties over the Troubles (“We........

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