U2 Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free U2 trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This U2 trivia quiz follows the band from Larry Mullen's 1976 notice on a Dublin school board to the Las Vegas Sphere: the names Feedback and the Hype, the Limerick talent contest, Windmill Lane and Steve Lillywhite, the white flag of the War tour, Live Aid, Eno and Lanois, The Joshua Tree's desert photo shoot, the Rattle and Hum backlash, the Berlin sessions for Achtung Baby, the Trabants of Zoo TV, the PopMart lemon, the Super Bowl halftime show after 9/11, the 360° claw, the album Apple pushed to 500 million iTunes accounts and Songs of Surrender. Expect questions on all four members, from Bono's real name and the Edge's Welsh parents to Adam Clayton's English birthplace and the only run of shows Larry Mullen has missed. About a third of the questions are easy for anyone who owns The Joshua Tree, a third need a closer memory of the albums and tours, and the rest reward the fans who know the producers, the venues and the numbers. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the band, its members, albums and tours before publishing, and each question carries the sentence that establishes it. No lyrics are quoted. If you think one is wrong, use the report button and we will look again.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01At which Dublin school did the members of U2 meet in 1976?
Mount Temple Comprehensive
Mount Temple Comprehensive welcomed them back in September 2026, when the band played for about 1,000 pupils and staff to mark 50 years since their first rehearsal.
Q 02Which band member posted the notice board message that brought U2 together?
Larry Mullen
Larry Mullen was 14 when he pinned up a handwritten note reading "Drummer seeks musicians to form band"; the group first met in his parents' kitchen that September.
Q 03What did the future U2 call themselves first, before they became the Hype?
Feedback
Feedback gave way to the Hype in 1977 and then to U2 in March 1978, on the eve of a talent contest: the band feared that winning as the Hype would leave them stuck with the name.
Q 04Which Dublin punk musician suggested the name U2 to the band in 1978?
Steve Averill
Steve Averill of the Radiators from Space offered a list of names, and U2 was the one the band disliked least; he went on to design their album sleeves for decades.
Q 05Which early member left U2 with a farewell concert in March 1978, walking offstage mid-show?
Dik Evans
Dik Evans, the Edge's older brother, walked offstage during a set played as the Hype; the other four came back later in the show as U2, and he joined their friends the Virgin Prunes.
Q 06What did U2 win at the Pop Group '78 talent contest in Limerick?
£500 and a CBS demo session
£500 and a CBS demo session: the win came as a surprise, because the inexperienced Dublin teenagers were not generally rated the best band on the night.
Q 07Hot Press journalist Bill Graham introduced U2 in 1978 to which man, their manager for the next three decades?
Paul McGuinness
Paul McGuinness stayed until 2013 and was known as the fifth member: under their original deal, the band split its earnings with him in equal shares instead of paying a manager's percentage.
Q 08At which Dublin studio did U2 record their debut EP in 1979 and their first album in 1980?
Windmill Lane Studios
Windmill Lane Studios drew so many pilgrims that fans covered its walls in graffiti; when the old building was demolished in 2015, a stretch of the graffiti wall was spared.
Q 09Who produced U2's debut album Boy after Martin Hannett was passed over?
Steve Lillywhite
Steve Lillywhite had a rule against making a second record with the same band, yet he came back to produce both of U2's next two albums as well.
Q 10What did Bono lose backstage at a Portland nightclub in March 1981, as U2 prepared to record October?
A briefcase of lyrics
A briefcase of lyrics: Bono had to write October's words again in the studio, and the case only came back 23 years later, after a woman found it in the attic of a rented house in Tacoma.
Q 11Which U2 album was their first UK number one?
War
War knocked Michael Jackson's Thriller off the top of the UK album chart in 1983, though in America it stalled at number 12.
Q 12What did Bono famously wave during performances of "Sunday Bloody Sunday" on U2's 1983 tour?
A white flag
A white flag: filmed through rain and red-lit mist at Colorado's Red Rocks that June, the image went into heavy rotation on MTV and broke the band across America.
Q 13Which two producers first worked with U2 on The Unforgettable Fire in 1984?
Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois
Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois were hired over the objections of the band's label boss, and Bono recalls American fans asking what they were doing with a "hippie Eno album"; the partnership lasted 25 years.
Q 21Bono described which U2 album as "the sound of four men chopping down the Joshua Tree"?
Achtung Baby
Achtung Baby even opens with a burst of distorted noise, meant to make listeners think their stereo was broken or that they had been sold the wrong record.
Q 22Which East German cars were gutted and hung as lighting rigs on the Zoo TV Tour?
Trabants
Trabants: the band had grown fond of the little car, by then a symbol of the fall of Communism, while recording in Germany, and their stage designer turned recycled ones into spotlights.
Q 23Which alter ego did Bono adopt for the encores of U2's European stadium shows in 1993?
MacPhisto
Q 14Where did U2 record part of The Unforgettable Fire in 1984?
Slane Castle
Slane Castle: the band moved into its ballroom three years after opening for Thin Lizzy in its grounds, and came back in 2001 to headline two sold-out concerts of their own there.
Q 15Where did U2 play Live Aid on 13 July 1985?
Wembley
Wembley: midway through the song Bad, Bono left the stage to dance with a fan pulled from the crowd, and was gone so long that the rest of the band began to panic.
Q 16Which single gave U2 their first US number one in 1987?
With or Without You
With or Without You got there first, and "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" followed later in 1987; by 2025 no other U2 single had topped the US chart, Desire stalling at number three.
Q 17Which photographer shot The Joshua Tree's desert sleeve images with U2 in December 1986?
Anton Corbijn
Anton Corbijn shot the cover at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley; the lone Joshua tree was spotted from the road, and a fan later set a plaque at its site asking, "Have you found what you're looking for?"
Q 18Which working title did U2's album The Joshua Tree carry before its name was changed?
The Two Americas
The Two Americas came from Bono's sense of "the mythic America and the real America"; the name changed after a photo shoot in the Mojave introduced the band to the tree.
Q 19U2 recorded three Rattle and Hum songs, including "Angel of Harlem", at which Memphis studio?
Sun
Sun Studio, where Elvis Presley made his first records: U2 squeezed the session into a single day between tour dates in November 1987 because, Bono said, "this is where rock and roll was invented".
Q 20In which city's Hansa Studios did U2 begin recording their seventh album in October 1990?
Berlin
Berlin: they landed on the day Germany reunified, but the sessions split the band so badly that Bono spoke of a wall down the middle of the studio, until the song One pulled them back together.
MacPhisto, an ageing, world-weary devil with horns, took over from the American-style Mirror Ball Man; in London he shared the stage with Salman Rushdie, who was then in hiding.
Q 24Which 1995 film soundtrack featured U2's "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me"?
Batman Forever
Batman Forever got a cast-off: the song was dropped from Zooropa at the last minute, rewritten for the film, and became a bigger hit than anything on that album.
Q 25In the video for Pop's lead single "Discothèque", U2 dressed as which group?
The Village People
The Village People: director Stéphane Sednaoui set the video inside a mirrorball, with each member in a different disco-era costume, from motorcycle cop to cowboy.
Q 26What fruit was the giant mirrorball on U2's PopMart stage shaped like?
A lemon
A lemon: the band rode out of it for the encores, except when it jammed; in Oslo it failed to open, leaving them stuck inside, and it broke down again on later dates.
Q 27In which city did U2 become the first major group to play after the Bosnian War, in September 1997?
Sarajevo
Sarajevo: the connection went back to 1993, when the band beamed live satellite link-ups from the besieged city into their Zoo TV shows.
Q 28What did Bono reveal inside his jacket at the end of U2's Super Bowl XXXVI halftime show?
An American flag lining
An American flag lining: he opened the jacket as the set ended, moments after the names of the September 11 victims had scrolled up a giant screen behind the band.
Q 29Which album did Rolling Stone call U2's "third masterpiece"?
All That You Can't Leave Behind
All That You Can't Leave Behind was a deliberate retreat from the band's 1990s dance experiments; their manager called it a good idea to make a record that "actually sounded like U2 again".
Q 30Which single launched U2's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb to first-week US sales of 840,000?
Vertigo
Vertigo doubled as an iPod television advert, and the album's first week nearly doubled its predecessor's; the album and its singles then won all eight Grammys they were nominated for.