Irish rock is best treated as the total output of rock musicians from the island of Ireland — both the Republic and Northern Ireland — spanning Van Morrison's R&B, Thin Lizzy's hard rock, The Boomtown Rats' punk-new wave, U2's anthemic stadium rock, and Rory Gallagher's blues. What ties this heterogeneous body together, if anything, is a Celtic-inflected melodic sense, the residual influence of oral ballad tradition on lyric writing, and the specific self-consciousness of coming from a small country and having to reach outward. Songs tend to run long (five or six minutes) and their choruses are engineered for arena-scale singalong.

Van Morrison, born in Belfast in 1945, formed Them in 1964 and wrote 'Gloria' — then in 1968 released Astral Weeks, which erased the boundary between rock, jazz, and Gaelic incantation. Phil Lynott's Dublin-formed Thin Lizzy took 'Whiskey in the Jar' to number six in the UK in 1972 and in 1976 codified the twin-lead-guitar template of hard rock with 'The Boys Are Back in Town.' Bob Geldof's Boomtown Rats scored the first UK number-one single by an Irish rock band with 'Rat Trap' in 1978. U2 formed in Dublin in 1976 and by 1987 had sold twenty-five million copies of The Joshua Tree, permanently establishing Ireland as a small country with an outsized musical export sector.

Listen to 'Madame George' from Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. Rock, jazz, and something structurally close to sean-nós chant coexist in one piece — you are hearing the hidden root system of the whole tradition. In Thin Lizzy's 'The Boys Are Back in Town' the twin lead guitars harmonise in thirds; this is trad fiddle-duet writing translated to electric guitar. U2's 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' (1983) treats the Bloody Sunday shootings of 1972 directly, and the Edge's delay-pedal guitar with Larry Mullen Jr.'s military snare turns that political content into a specific sonic weight. Hozier's low-register vocal preserves the phrase-ending inflection of sean-nós.

U2's 'With or Without You' (1987) is the archetype: the Edge's delay-guitar and the restrained vocal crescendo are the anthem-form fully realised. Van Morrison: 'Moondance' (1970). Thin Lizzy: 'The Boys Are Back in Town' (1976). Rory Gallagher: 'Shadow Play' (1978). Contemporary: Hozier's 'Take Me to Church' (2013) and Fontaines D.C.'s 'Starburster' (2024). Late-night driving music, or headphones with the lyrics up in another window.

Bono was born Paul Hewson and picked up his stage name from a hearing-aid shop, Bono Vox, near his teenage haunts in Dublin. The Edge, born David Evans, was actually born in London to Welsh parents and only moved to Dublin as a child. Phil Lynott was Afro-Irish — his mother was Irish, his father a Guyanese sailor named Cecil Parris (from what was then British Guiana) — making him one of very few Black rock stars in 1970s Europe; he died in 1986 aged 36, and his statue on Harry Street just off Grafton Street in Dublin remains a public meeting point. Rory Gallagher's trademark battered 1961 Fender Stratocaster was, by his account, the second Strat ever sold in Ireland; the paint wore off, he said, from playing it in the rain.