40th birthday cake

On this Wikipedia the 40th birthday cake links are at the top of the page across from the article title. It is the tenth and final track on their 1983 album, War.

The song was released as a commercial single only in Germany, simply to promote U2’s appearance at the Loreley Festival in 1983. The single was released on a 7-inch gramophone record with a B-side of the album version of “Two Hearts Beat as One”. When we were making our third record, the War LP, we were being thrown out of the studio by the studio manager because we had overrun or something and we had one more song to do. We wrote this song in about ten minutes, we recorded it in about ten minutes, we mixed it in about ten minutes and we played it, then, for another ten minutes and that’s nothing to do with why it’s called ’40’. The song was completed within the last few hours of the recording sessions for War. After working all night on the album in Windmill Lane Studios, the band found themselves at 6 a. Another band, Minor Detail, were scheduled to start their recording session at 8 a.

U2 performing “40” in Sydney in September 1984. Bassist Adam Clayton can be seen playing guitar on the left. 40″ debuted live on 26 February 1983 in Dundee as the final song of the show, and closed every single concert on 1983’s War Tour. It became very popular as a concert closer, and between its debut and 10 January 1990, there were roughly only 24 concerts that did not feature “40” as the closing song.