Bono pays heartfelt tribute to ‘alchemist of the U2 sound’

He told the audience that the band is absolutely nothing without the creative community around them.

“You don’t see them, but you hear them and you feel them,” he said.

“They put up this production and they make it look great and sound great, they are just the greatest community.

“Right at the top of the pyramid in that community is a very unusual and inspirational spirit that started work with us 40 years ago this very night.

“Forty years ago, Joe entered our lives in the Arcadia Ballroom in Cork.

“Then he was but an apprentice wizard. Now he is a grandmaster, an alchemist of the U2 sound.”

Bono said that Joe’s bass frequencies once registered on the Richter scale during a 1985 gig in Brussels, and that when he has turned up the volume at gigs, pregnant women have gone into labour.

“But his ‘high-end’ always has a little bit of ‘down and dirty’ about it — and we love that,” he said.

“And tonight, we want to say how much you mean to us, how much you and Marian (Joe’s wife) mean to us, and how having Sarah O’Herlihy (one of Joe’s daughter) running this show also means so much to us.

“We are a community and no-one has a better sense of that community than you, Joe O.”

Photographs of Joe over the years were flashed onto the band’s giant video wall in Copenhagen’s Royal Arena before U2 dedicated one of its biggest hits, ‘One’, from the 1991 album, Achtung Baby, to him.

The crew and the Edge also wore special JOH:40 tribute t-shirts on the night, marking every tour Joe has worked on.

Joe O’Herlihy has been engineering U2’s live sound for the last 40 years. He has also worked with REM, The Cranberries, David Bowie, Stevie Nicks, and The Undertones.

He played with a Cork band, Chapter Five, in the late 1960s and played bass with another legendary Leeside outfit, Sleepy Hollow, before he began working on sound for the legendary guitarist Rory Gallagher from 1974 to 1978.

He was running a sound-hire company around the same time when he supplied the equipment for a UCC Downtown Campus gig in the city’s former Arcadia Ballroom in September 1978.

“I think U2 were the fourth or fifth band on the bill. They barely knew how to turn on their own gear they were so inexperienced but we looked after them pretty well and they got a good sound.

“Things like that are noticed in this business and, shortly afterwards, Paul McGuinness contacted me and said ‘we’d like you to become involved with the band’ and the rest, as they say, is history,” he said in a Hotpress interview.

The band’s current tour kicked off in the US four months ago.

Last month, there was concern about the future of the tour after Bono lost his voice on stage in Berlin, and the show had been cut short.

But he was back on stage performing three days later.

In an interview at the weekend, the band members spoke candidly about how they are coping with life on tour now that they’re in their 50s.

Larry Mullen Jnr and Adam Clayton require regular physio to cope with the physically punishing demands of several live shows a week.

And Bono, 58, also told The Irish Times that he had “a shock to the system” in 2016 that left him “clinging on to my own life”.

“This tour is particularly demanding. Whether you have a face-off with your own mortality or somebody close to you does, you are going to get to a point in your life where you ask questions about where you’re going.”

When asked if that means this is U2’s last tour, he said: “I don’t know. I don’t take anything for granted.”

The tour is due to land in Ireland on October 27 with two sell-out shows in Belfast, before the band plays four sell-out gigs in Dublin’s 3Arena on November 5, 6, 9, and 10.