At age 18, we in U2 had our first proper go at activism at an anti-apartheid concert at Trinity College Dublin. Later we answered the call of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu to take up the cause of freedom again—in this case, freedom from economic slavery—and help cancel the old Cold War debts of the least developed countries. Statistics don't rhyme very well, so I couldn't sing my way through this campaign. I needed what one of our friends, Bill Gates, would later refer to as a software update, which is to say, a bigger brain.
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