I Will Follow

The opening track of Boy was its second single, released in October 1980. It was written about three weeks before the sessions began. In early rehearsals the band argued loudly because Bono could not convey the aggression he wanted from the riff, until he took the Edge's guitar and hammered the two-string chord himself. Steve Lillywhite said the start was almost identical to Siouxsie and the Banshees' Jigsaw Feeling.

Bono wrote the lyric from the point of view of his mother, Iris Hewson, who died in 1974 when he was 14, about the unconditional love a mother has for her child. Bono and the Edge played the glockenspiel. For the middle eight Lillywhite recorded cutlery against the spokes of an upturned bicycle wheel, and Bono smashing bottles. The video was the band's first, directed by Meiert Avis in Dublin.

Live and reissues

It is the only song U2 have played on every tour since their first album, with over 1,000 performances. It was reissued in 1982 in the Netherlands as a live version, in 1983 as a live version from Under a Blood Red Sky, and in 2011 as a live version from Glastonbury. The band played it on the BBC television show The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1981, and re-recorded it for Songs of Surrender in 2023.