U2

Four teenagers answered a notice pinned to a board at Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin in 1976. None of them could really play yet. That’s the part that matters about U2: they learned in public, together, and never swapped a member. Bono on vocals, the Edge on guitar, Adam Clayton on bass, Larry Mullen Jr. on drums, the same four men for the whole of it.

For most of their first decade they were the great almost. Huge at home, respected by the British press, building a live reputation that ran ahead of their record sales. America kept not quite happening. Then The Joshua Tree landed in 1987 and the band that had been knocking finally walked through the door, with their first United States No. 1 and a sound the rest of the world spent the next few years trying to borrow.

What separates them from the bands they’re filed next to is the refusal to settle into one shape. The chiming guitars of the early records, the desert-rock of the mid-period, the irony and overload of the 90s reinvention; they kept tearing the thing down on purpose. The Edge builds his sound from restraint and space, not speed. Bono writes like the stakes are always personal, because for him they usually are.