For the past half century, U2 has experimented with sounds, looks, approaches and personas. But the one immutable fact about the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame legends is that they are a unit, an unbreakable quartet who share songwriting credit and a burning desire to stay together through thick and thin.
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But in a new Rolling Stone digital cover story, drummer Larry Mullen Jr. reveals that his yearslong struggle with neck pain led to him considering stepping down from the crucial spot he’d held in the band since he pinned a message to a noticeboard at Dublin’s Mount Temple High School that read “drummer seeks musicians” half a century ago this week.
Mullen Jr., 64, tells the magazine that he was so laid low by a neck injury on the 2019 leg of the band’s Joshua Tree anniversary tour that doctors suggested he might consider retiring due to the chronic congenital fusion in a facet joint in his neck that was irritated by his drumming. “If you don’t do my job, you wouldn’t really notice,” Mullen Jr. said of the pain caused by the injury, “and I got away with it for years.”
But, by the end of the tour, Mullen Jr. was in such agony — despite nightly treatments after each gig — that he knew he had to take serious action to address the pain. “There’s a certain amount of humiliation when you get injured and you can’t get over it, and I felt humiliated,” he said in the first interview he’s done about finding his way back to the band after several years on the bench.
The group hired a fill-in drummer, Dutch musician Bram van den Berg, for their residency at Las Vegas’ Sphere in 2023 and 2024. Mullen attended his first U2 show as an audience member in March 2024 at a point where it was unclear if he’d be able to return to his day job. As you might imagine, he had mixed feelings about all of it.
“The band were doing what the band needed to do. Those drum parts are mine, those parts that I played when I was a kid, a lot of them not really knowing what I was doing,” he said of watching van den Berg fill-in. “And I was hearing those parts played very well by Bram, and I was grateful for that. It’s an odd thing to say, but I was. ‘Cause I had no sense of having been left behind. All those feelings were my own — they were personal feelings of humiliation. But they weren’t to do with the band. They were directed at myself.”
Mullen Jr. said by the time he came off the road after the 2019 tour he was “really in a bad way,” and exhausted after decades of touring, but confident he would “bounce back,” just like he always did. “I always make it back…. I did need time away. I just would’ve preferred to have booked a flight somewhere as opposed to booking the trolley in the hospital,” he said. Then, during the global COVID-19 shutdown he stopped playing drums entirely because of the soreness, realizing that his physical damage was “beyond repair … I shut down, everybody had, and my body just went, ‘You’ve had enough.’”
Despite the pain, he agreed to be a part of the Sphere residency when the opportunity came up for the group to be the innovative venue’s first residents. But a couple of weeks later, his physiotherapist gave him some sobering advice. “‘You won’t make it through rehearsals. So you need to undo that,’” he said he was told. “Which was very difficult, very complicated to undo it, ’cause I’d made a commitment.”
He was fine with his bandmates going on without him, understanding that “business is business,” while admitting, “I’m not gonna lie that it wasn’t difficult.”
Mullen Jr.’s musical foil, bassist Adam Clayton — who said he sees their musical relationship as “almost a marriage” — told the magazine that playing with another drummer felt “very promiscuous.” But more importantly, Mullen Jr.’s absence threw the band’s future in doubt. “We didn’t know if Larry was gonna come back,” Clayton said. “Could we keep going? Would we wanna keep going? That’s still an open question.”
After sitting out the Sphere shows, Mullen Jr. was focused on getting neck surgery, but doctors were reluctant to even discuss it with him and there was no guarantee it would work. At worst, they warned, it could leave him paralyzed. “People don’t want to take a risk,” he said. “Most people were, ‘You know what? You’ve done incredibly well. Just retire. Sail off into the sunset. Why would you do this to yourself?’”
Mullen Jr. said his family was also against it, but he said there “wasn’t a moment” when he questioned whether surgery was the right answer. “If you’ve got the head and the heart, I’m a head guy. I’ll do the calculation, the logic,” he told RS. “But my desire to play again overwrote that … It’s only when you are faced with the possibility that you may not be able to do the thing that you love, that you’ve done for most of your life … It’s funny what your brain will do, and your body. It goes into a different mode.”
He found a young neurosurgeon in Dublin willing to do the surgery and after several months he sat down at his drum kit again and realized he was now playing differently. “Everything was different. My body didn’t work the same way as it used to,” he said, revealing that instead of taking lessons to try and relearn how he used to play, he returned to the “most efficient” method of drumming. “All you need is a neck injury to bring you back to that place. Because now you don’t have all those things you learned, all those little flicky-dee-dos, all the little skills. You now can’t rely on those,” he said.
Now that they’ve announced their upcoming 16h studio album, Carnaval De Luz (Nov. 13), guitarist The Edge can confirm that the LP only came together because Mullen Jr. was able to get back into his seat. “I don’t think we would’ve made an album if Larry hadn’t been able to play,” he said of the group who have only ever recorded as a four-piece. “We would’ve just gone, ‘Why? Why make an album without Larry Mullen on it? Doesn’t feel right.’”
Glad to be back where he belongs, Mullen Jr. is going into the band’s next phase — which will include an as-yet-unannounced stadium tour for which they’ve begun rehearsals — with clear eyes and practical expectations. “Even if I can’t play for two and a half hours, if I can play for an hour, that’s enough,” he said. “I’ve had it so good that I’ll accept that.”