Adam Clayton says that U2 owe a huge debt to Ireland's showbands and dismissed any lingering snobbery about the era as "ridiculous".
Clayton, who has been a member of U2 for nearly fifty years, is presenting Ballroom Blitz, a new two-part series in which he charts the rise and fall of hugely popular Irish acts such as The Clipper Carlton, Dickie Rock, and The Miami Showband.
"Less than 10 years after Irish independence, these bands were traveling the country and people were getting out and dancing. It was the social media of the day. This was how people met their partners, their wives, possibly lovers . . . that's if there was sex going on in the country before TV. I don't know."
Ballroom Blitz is a bit of a personal journey for Clayton. The showband acts played an integral role in the development of an Irish music industry that today is a global success, something that was unimaginable when U2 began their own career.
The series explores the phenomenon of the Irish showbands who provided the mood music as Ireland went through huge social change and economic growth in the 1960s.
"It was an amazing time in Irish history," Clayton says. "Car and tractor ownership was on the increase so you could actually get from different parts of the country to these ballrooms, to these dances, and meet people that you would never have met before.
"So, it was a great time for social movement as much as anything else, and these bands were filled with great musicians.
"They used to listen to the US Forces radio to get a lot of the American hits and Motown type music to play, and they also used to listen to radio Luxembourg to get the UK chart hits."
Sixty years before U2 played their own Las Vegas residency at the Sphere, Irish showbands entertained American audiences during sold-out residencies in Vegas and also packed out Irish ballrooms in New York, Boston and Chicago.
Even though future stars like Van Morrison and Rory Gallagher plied their trade in Irish showbands, some critics saw them as merely 'human jukeboxes’.
Asked if he thinks that there was always degree of snobbery around showbands from some people, Clayton says, "I think there is, and it may have been created by our generation, and I'm not pointing the finger at Bob Geldof at all.
"But I think the generation that comes after a successful generation is always going to argue that what they're doing is better than what's come before, and I understand that. And I know that Bob is not going to move from that position come hell or high water.
"But it was kind of kind of glorious. Some of the characters are still alive, and they spoke to me, and we had very frank interviews, and they did amazing things. To criticise them for playing cover versions is ridiculous, because all bands from the forties onwards were playing songs written by somebody else and reading it off sheet music."
Long before international touring acts even bothered to play shows in Ireland, the showbands were the soundtrack of their youth for countless Irish people.
"It was the sixties, and that was a great time of change," says Clayton. "We in Ireland didn't mirror exactly what was happening in America, or what was happening in swinging London but girls and men were conscious of how they looked, and they were conscious of fashions.
"A lot of the women that I spoke to for Ballroom Blitz from those days said they’d look at the fashions from London and would cut and stitch their own clothes to suit the fashions of the day and take them out to the dance that night, and it was fun. It was the craic! We were expressing ourselves."
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