I am Harm, 20 years old, Dutch and ofcourse a big U2 fan. My mate Jochem who recently introduced himself here noticed this forum quite a time ago and he would always enlighten me about torrents of (rare) live performances and stuff on this site. Now that I've been using your facilities for a while it seems appropriate to introduce myself aswell.
So here we go! My history with U2 dates back to the time when I first began to listen to music consciously. I really need to thank my father for his taste in music and especially his love for U2 (although it was not his favourite group per se). We had 3 cd's at home which where Best of 80-90, Best of 90-00 and All that you can't leave behind and one copied dvd of the Elevation tour in Boston. My dad also had Boy and War on vinyl but our turntable had gone for a while by then so they never got out of their sleeves. When on holiday with my folks U2 would always be brought with us and thats when I first felt that I liked this music, especially the rock songs like Elevation and Even better than the real thing. Those songs and the image of Edge playing guitar on the Elevation tour are actually the reason why I wanted my mom to take me to guitar lessons.
The first album that my dad bought and where I was conscious about was How to dismantle an atomic bomb. I think I was 9 by then and it blew me away. Sometimes you can't make it on your own is still one of my favourite songs. I still have this feeling about HTDAAB that it's the 'new' album although its more than 10 years old now. But this one was very special to me. Basicly the ATYCLB and HTDAAB albums are a big part of my childhood soundtrack. I loved to take out the booklets from the cd's and to look at these godlike men and having that childhood dream to be a rockstar sometime.
So later on as a teenager I wished to differentiate from my parents taste and went on to a whole other musical journey: Greenday, Metallica etc. and anything else with raw distorted guitars. But after a while I started falling back on U2. This time with more depth and research of all the albums they made and the history of the band. This time I fell in love with U2 again and the love was even stronger than before. Finally I went on to see the band in Cologne with Jochem last october which was a dream come true, after loads of drama with trying to be at the Amsterdam shows last september.
So hereby I told you a bit about my history with the band. I hope you liked the read! I'm glad to be among you fellow U2 fans now and to be more active on this forum.
Welcome Harm! I love when fans go over musical journey ("it's a musical journey!") and return to U2. It's as if there is a timeless quality with U2 that you appreciate after you know other bands and lets you appreciate their music more.
(Water) 
