The Joshua Tree remains U2’s biggest selling album with 26 million copies sold around the globe. The Joshua Tree topped the charts in 20 countries and fixed U2’s place in the history of American rock music, a country where so many bands and artists had failed to make it. This would prove a hilarious idea (more on that later). We were entranced by The Joshua Tree to the point we wanted to form a band. Even if memory discards of precious things the older we get, its legacy survives. This album filled the summer of ’87 for me and a select few friends. When something less than an hour can last 35 years, it’s really saying something. The Joshua Tree is precisely 50mins and 5secs in duration. We glance at each other, unsure if we’re buying it when Adam Clayton’s base guitar suddenly kicks open the door of Where the Streets Have No Name. The Edge – playing what I later discovered is a repeating guitar arpeggio – brings the song on. We pass a tantalising few seconds in crackling expectancy before an organ sound builds momentum. In the background, a Joshua tree, feels like the only hint of life. The band members face opposing directions into the vast desert of indecision. The album cover of The Joshua Tree is desolate by design but devilishly marketable. My best friend - who owned a ghetto blaster the size of an SUV that needed 20 batteries the size of coke cans - loaded the cassette and pressed ‘play’ using two fingers, the folded-out album sleeve before us on the table. In the kitchen of a friend’s house one chilly March evening is where the album first found us.

Now obsolete, cassettes were the coinage that enabled us to buy our way out of the self-doubt and anxiety of teenage years, a rite of passage to adulthood in the guise of music.

Emotions were held together by cassette tapes in the 1980s.

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