"Saturday Matinee" (1980)
Demo Song
Background Information
“Saturday Night” was a song that U2 developed for the album Boy with producer Steve Lillywhite.
The song didn’t make the cut for the album and Edge discussed the song in the 2008 remastered edition of Boy, saying “Saturday Night” was “a very new song that we were still working on. It was later reworked and became the song ‘Fire.’ Listening back now I can’t help feeling that we lost some of the power and directness of the original. It was a mix of the strange three-part guitar solo from ‘Saturday Night’ that we used as a teaser at the very end of the ‘Boy’ album, oddly quiet in this rough mix.”
The song was eventually developed into “Fire” as the Edge mentioned, and released as a single in the summer of 1981 ahead of the album October. A very short instrumental version of the song appeared at the end of early vinyl pressings of Boy, and remained unnamed until recently when it was discovered that the snippet of the song was called “Saturday Matinee” on the 2008 release. Both the snippet and a full length version of the song were available on the 2008 release.