U2Baby's Dublin pilgrimage continues. Ahead of the sold-out #WelcomeToTheNorthside fan gathering show at the Button Factory on 26 September, marking U2's 50th anniversary, we sat down to talk about what these songs have meant to a generation of fans — and why the band still matters at fifty.

Let's start at the beginning. What actually made you a U2 fan in the first place?

Under a Blood Red Sky. I was about fifteen. You have to remember what music on TV looked like back then — everyone miming, note-perfect and completely lifeless. And then this came on: a band drenched in red light, playing in the rain, sounding ragged and real. It was the proof that music could still happen to you live, in real time, rather than being performed at you off a backing track. That was the moment it got its hooks in.

So you've been a fan for decades. What's it like, all these years later, playing these songs yourself rather than just listening to them?

It's a privilege, honestly. You spend your teenage years feeling something enormous from a record, and you don't really expect to end up on the other side of it. Getting to help recreate that feeling for other people — even for one night — is a strange, humbling thing to get to do.

Tell us about the 26 September show. What's the significance of the Button Factory date?

It's part of the #WelcomeToTheNorthside fan gatherings around U2's 50th anniversary, and it's sold out. Around 600 U2 fans are in Dublin for the events around it, which is the part that gets me — that many people, from all over, converging on the city where all of this started, purely out of love for what this band has given them.

This isn't your first Dublin fan event. What's the history there?

We've been part of these Dublin gatherings for years now — the 40th, and now the 50th. Every time, what strikes me is the same thing: it's never really about us. It's about a room full of strangers who turn out to have the same songs woven into their lives, meeting each other and getting to shout those songs together for one night.

What does playing these songs mean to you, given your own history with the band?

We're roughly the same age as U2 — a bit younger, but close enough that we've grown up alongside them rather than discovering them after the fact. We heard The Joshua Tree when it was new. We lived through Achtung Baby, through Songs of Experience, in real time, same as everyone else in that room. So when we play, it doesn't feel like copying something. It feels more like sharing a memory that happens to belong to a lot of people at once.

What does U2 turning 50 mean to you personally?

It's not really about the band getting older. It's about how many of us built parts of our own lives around the soundtrack they were writing, and how, fifty years on, we're all still finding new meaning in the same old songs. That's the thing worth marking.

Last one. When the lights go down at the Button Factory and you walk out in front of six hundred people — what do you want to feel?

I want to forget myself completely. Not perform — disappear. Let go of everything and just try to hand back a little of what those songs gave me at fifteen. If it works, nobody in the room is thinking about who's on stage. They're just back in whatever moment converted them in the first place. That's the whole point of doing this.

U2Baby play the Button Factory, Dublin, on 26 September — sold out. Part of the #WelcomeToTheNorthside fan gatherings marking U2's 50th anniversary.