U2's First Rehearsal — Larry Mullen Jr.'s Kitchen, Artane

On Saturday 25 September 1976, a fourteen-year-old drummer named Larry Mullen Jr. posted a handwritten note on the bulletin board at Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin looking for musicians to form a band. A handful of students responded, and that afternoon they gathered in the kitchen of 60 Rosemount Avenue in Artane — a northside suburb of Dublin — for what would become U2's very first rehearsal. Present that day were Mullen, Paul Hewson (Bono), Dave Evans (The Edge) and his brother Dik Evans, Adam Clayton, and two friends, Ivan McCormick and Peter Martin, who would eventually drift away to leave the classic lineup.

The session in Mullen's kitchen was by all accounts chaotic and enthusiastic in equal measure. Most of the players had only rudimentary skills on their instruments, and Clayton reportedly arrived with a bass guitar and even less idea of how to play it. What they had was energy and an audacity that outstripped their technical ability. Mullen later recalled that he had intended to run the group himself, but Bono quickly asserted himself as its creative centre of gravity — a dynamic that would prove permanent.

The house at 60 Rosemount Avenue is a private residence in an ordinary suburban street and carries no formal marker of what took place there. Yet among U2 fans and rock historians, this kitchen is considered one of the most significant rooms in the history of popular music — the unremarkable domestic space where a band that would sell more than 170 million records first made a sound together.