How A Stolen Briefcase Shaped U2's 'October' [Highlight From Episode 325]

Can you imagine losing a briefcase filled with song lyrics? Author Bradley Morgan shares the wild story of how Bono had his stolen during the making of U2's album 'October'!

Listen to Episode 325 - U2 at 50: A Retrospective

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Here's a highlight from a recent episode of Booked on Rock.
Bradley Morgan, the author of You Two Until the End
of the World be right Quote Boy, had been recorded
in a little over a month, with sessions finishing in
September nineteen eighty and would be the quickest Youtubo would
ever record An album reached number fifty two in the
UK sixty three in the US, a solid opening. They
followed that with nineteen eighty one's October, which has fire

(00:22):
and Gloria. The Edge assumed the band would work quickly
to develop new ideas for songs after touring and building
up confidence off of that, but that wasn't so. Making
matters worse was an incident in March of nineteen eighty
one involving a briefcase. What was in that briefcase and
what happened to it?

Speaker 2 (00:42):
Yeah, So you two were working on a really tight
deadline with touring. They weren't really making headway in the UK,
so their key to success early on was trying to
play these American markets, and it was really tight scheduled
doing all these shows and trying to make what would
become that second album, October. So it was a time
where a lot of things were just happening really fast,

(01:03):
and during a gig in Portland, Bono had a briefcase
that was stolen from the band's green room, presumably by
a couple of women who came and visited during the show.
And this briefcase, among other things like his work, visa
and letters from Ali, who was his then girlfriend and
would become his future wife, this briefcase contained the lyrics
and song ideas for what would become October. And naturally,

(01:26):
this was an incredibly disruptive thing and Bono had to
rewrite a lot of that material from memory. And you
can hear this on October because some of the songs
sound a little unfinished and more rougher than when you
listen to Boy Go and listen to Boy and October
back to back. There is a lot of thematic overlap
and even a lot of sonic overlap because they had

(01:49):
to make it very quickly and with less time to
get these song ideas together. And even then, Bono wasn't
much of a songwriter. He talks about songwriting as sketching,
just him putting, you know, words to music, because they
didn't think that lyrics were necessarily so important, and it
was an experience that really left an impact on Bono.
Whenever the band would play Portland, he would bring up

(02:11):
the briefcase, hoping someone would return it, which is what
happened twenty three years later, in two thousand and four,
a woman in Tacoma, Washington named Cindy Harris. She had
that briefcase in her attic, but didn't know that it
was stolen, and so she had made arrangements to give
it back to Bono. And there's a story of this.
You can read about this in a book of edited

(02:34):
essay collections called Exploring You two, edited by Scott Calhoun,
and there actually is a story from the person who
returned it telling that it's a really interesting story.