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Recording a Pub Singalong with Bono and the Edge

Studio and live sound engineer Alastair McMillan was on hand to record Bono and the Edge when the U2 musicians staged an impromptu singalong performance at McDaid’s Pub.

Alastair McMillan was on hand to record Bono and the Edge. Photo courtesy of Disney.
Alastair McMillan was on hand to record Bono and the Edge. Photo courtesy of Disney.

Dublin, Ireland (October 17, 2023)—Studio and live sound engineer Alastair McMillan was on hand to record Bono and the Edge when the U2 musicians staged an impromptu singalong performance at McDaid’s Pub in Dublin for David Letterman.

The pub singalong, which included appearances from several other high-profile Irish talents, is a notable scene in Bono and the Edge: A Sort of Homecoming with Dave Letterman, a recent music documentary for Disney+. The challenge presented to McMillan along with sound recordists Karl Merren, Conor O’Toole and Enda Callen was to preserve the intimacy of the moment without a lot of obvious microphone placements.

Photos from "Bono and the Edge: A Sort of Homecoming with Dave Letterman" courtesy of Disney.
The pub singalong. Photo courtesy of Disney.

Alongside a collection of 18 microphones hidden throughout the pub, the sound team utilized a trio of Sound Devices Scorpio mixer-recorders underneath the tables to get multi-track audio of the musicians. “I had started using Sound Devices from some local film jobs I’d done more recently—Derry Girls, most notably—with a MixPre-10 which has become my go-to external mic preamp ever since,” McMillan says. A former studio manager at Dublin’s Windmill Lane studios, he has worked with Van Morrison, the Rolling Stones, Paul Brady and Ronan Keating, and, as U2’s recording engineer for touring, has been Bono’s live monitor mixer since 2009.

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“The Scorpios are similarly plug-and-play which is exactly what we needed for a shoot like this where the plan was to just hit record and make it happen. Once we had the setup secure, we could ensure that the show went on. We were able to capture that incredible atmosphere without getting in the way.”

Despite still being one of the biggest bands in the world, U2 thrive on a sense of spontaneity. “They don’t do anything ordinary and much of the time, the magic can come from this seat-of-the-pants stuff,” McMillan explains. “The fact that they allow an element of the unplanned helps them keep that energy and passion in what they do.”

Last-minute equipment issues aside, what McMillan ultimately remembers about that evening is how the music brought people together, and how something honest was captured for posterity. “They have a joke within the band—‘Let’s not over-rehearse’—and I think that’s a big part of what makes these magical moments happen,” he says. “When it came time to mix the audio down, we were mixing to suit that, to keep it feeling real and in-the-moment. We had to be resourceful to get that pub shoot together, but it went off brilliantly. It was one of the best nights of my life as a music fan.”

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