'Bono was really mad': The man who stopped a U2 gig with a sign

Bono on stage at Páirc Uí Chaoimh, Cork, in the same year U2 played in San Francisco. 

On a quiet Wednesday morning in San Francisco in 1987, Robert Quinn was at home listening to a local radio station.

The young graphic designer was eager to catch a glimpse of the hottest rock band in town that week as U2 were due to play two sold-out shows in the coming days — the Joshua Tree tour was not to be missed.

Around 11am, on this day 35 years ago, the radio station announced something special. U2 were to play a surprise gig in San Francisco’s financial district in just one hour.

The ‘Save the Yuppies’ concert was billed as a gig for workers who “needed cheering up” amid a downturn in the economy at the time, the band’s manager told the San Francisco Chronicle at the time.

“The radio station was giving away a pair of tickets to the [main U2 concert] in San Francisco that week,” Mr Quinn recalled. 

“And it [was] gonna be awarded to the best sign at the free gig… So I grabbed an old roll-up window shade in my house that was about three-feet by six-feet tall and grabbed the only cans of spray paint I could find — which just happened to be Sinn Féin colours.” 

Robert Quinn in 2003.

The 27-year-old hastily painted in large letters ‘SF + U2’ and attached it to a 10-foot extension pole he had lying around.

Once he was confident in the sign, he rolled it up, hopped on the underground and made his way to the free concert.

Mr Quinn, whose great-grandparents are originally from Cork, settled towards the back of the crowd for fear of blocking the view of fellow fans with his sign.

“Then all of a sudden Bono just starts going off,” Mr Quinn explained.

“What’s this I see over here?” the frontman asked the crowd, pointing to the sign. The IRA had exploded a bomb in Enniskillen just days earlier and Bono questioned if Mr Quinn’s sign stood for Sinn Féin.

“If it does, I don’t know how you can stand or stomach waving that sign this week. You bastards left 11 dead, 55 wounded in the name of freedom. F**k freedom!” 

Mr Quinn said: “I was so far back that I couldn’t understand what he was saying”. 

“I just heard him being really angry and shouting curse words. And a bunch of people around me were like: ‘Dude, you gotta take that sign down! He’s yelling at you!’ 

I didn’t have any idea what they were talking about, why would he be mad at my sign? 

After some spectators nearby explained what was going on, Mr Quinn thought: “‘Oh great, okay.’ So, I took my sign down and the show went on… I never would have such a crude sign into public if I had time to fuss over it.” 

To ensure there’s no ambiguity, what did his sign stand for? “I knew what Sinn Féin was, but it was completely ‘San Francisco’.” 

U2's frontman has recently published a memoir.

U2’s frontman published a memoir recently, which inevitably surfaced some Bono-related content to the fore of social media. In fact, when a clip of the classic error was shared on Twitter last week, it was Mr Quinn’s first time actually hearing what Bono was saying.

The only photograph he has of the sign was printed on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle the next day. Among the 20,000 strong crowd, if you look close enough, you can see Quinn’s giant sign poking above the crowd.

“We all have a good story or two from our past, and one of my claims to fame is that I stopped a U2 show — and I did it without violence, just a couple of cans of spray paint and a window shade.”