I Will Follow
Iris Hewson died of a brain aneurysm at her father's funeral in September 1974.
Iris Hewson died of a brain aneurysm at her father’s funeral in September 1974. She collapsed at the graveside. She was gone four days later. Bono was fourteen.
He has been writing about her ever since, in one form or another — but never more directly than on the song that opened U2’s first album, recorded when he was nineteen years old and had not yet learned to disguise what he was carrying.
“I Will Follow” is not a love song, or not only a love song. Bono has said plainly where it came from: a mother and a child, a bond that gets severed before either of them is ready, and a boy who keeps moving toward her anyway. “A boy tries to be like his mother / and he does if he can.” That’s the verse most people don’t quote. They quote the chorus, the blunt athletic promise of it — “if you walk away, walk away / I will follow” — because the chorus sounds like devotion to a lover. But the verses are something else. They’re a fourteen-year-old standing at a grave trying to figure out how to keep following someone who is no longer there to be followed.
He put it on Boy, U2’s debut, recorded in Dublin and London in 1980 with Steve Lillywhite producing. Lillywhite was twenty-three. Bono was twenty. The Edge was the same age, working out a guitar style that would eventually define how a generation thought the instrument could sound — but on this track, in these rooms, he was still finding it. The opening riff of “I Will Follow” is one of the most recognizable eight seconds in rock music, and it came from a kid in Dublin who had been playing guitar for four years. The Edge plays it with his right hand muted, a rhythmic chop that sounds like it’s already running before the song begins, like it’s been going since before you walked in.
Lillywhite recorded the drums in a stairwell at Windmill Lane to get the reverb. Larry Mullen Jr. was eighteen years old, and you can hear the youth in how hard he hits — not technically hard, but committed hard, the way you play when you haven’t yet learned to pace yourself across a forty-year career.
The band had been together since 1976, when Mullen posted a note on a school bulletin board at Mount Temple Comprehensive. He was the drummer. He wanted a band. Bono showed up and started talking and never really stopped. Adam Clayton showed up wearing a sheepskin coat and carrying a bass guitar he barely knew how to play, which Lillywhite and everyone else has noted was both unhelpful and somehow impressive.
They were four boys from Dublin who had decided they were going to be the biggest band in the world at precisely the moment when nobody in the world had heard of them. That’s not revisionism — they said it out loud, consistently, to anyone who asked, before they had any reasonable claim to it. People found this irritating. Then they found it true.
But before all of that — before Lillywhite, before Boy, before the bulletin board even — there was a funeral in September 1974, and a boy who lost his mother in the middle of it, and something that didn’t heal so much as get incorporated. You write from what you can’t put down.
The live version of “I Will Follow” from Under a Blood Red Sky — recorded in Colorado in 1983, three years after Boy — is three minutes and forty seconds of a band that has figured out how to make a room feel small no matter how large it actually is. Bono climbs the lighting rig. He hauls audience members onto the stage. The song becomes an event. It became the thing that made U2’s live reputation, the reason people who saw them in 1983 still talk about it the way they do.
But the studio version is the one I keep coming back to, specifically because it doesn’t have any of that. It’s just the four of them in a room, and a boy trying to hold onto something by saying he will follow it wherever it goes. The riff starts, and Mullen comes in, and there’s no gap between the song and the feeling the song is about — it’s already running.
“Your eyes make a circle / I see you when I go in there.” That line is strange and private, the kind of thing you write at nineteen when you haven’t yet learned which things to keep to yourself. It sounds like a memory trying to locate itself — looking for a face in a dark room and finding something like her eyes, something like the shape of her looking back.
Bono’s mother had brown eyes. He has blue. He noticed the difference as a child.
There is something particular about grief that comes at fourteen. You’re old enough to understand what happened and not old enough to have the emotional vocabulary to process it, which means it goes somewhere unresolved and stays there, and you spend the rest of your life finding it inside other things — inside songs, inside crowds, inside the habit of following, of moving toward, of refusing to stop even when the thing you’re following has already gone ahead.
“I Will Follow” is not a complicated song. It is 3:58 long and built on a riff a nineteen-year-old invented in Dublin, and it has been played live more than any other song in the band’s catalog. That’s a lot of nights. A lot of crowds. A lot of times Bono stood at the edge of a stage and sang a promise he made to a woman who had been dead since he was fourteen.
He still plays it. He’s still following.
