U2. Finally.

After 11 months, two opening band announcements, one postponement and a whole lot of ink spilled regarding all minutiae of its Aloha Stadium show, U2 and its multimillion-grossing Vertigo Tour are finally in town.

If you're going, you probably know the basic U2 facts: A quartet of teenage boys from working-class families in Dublin, Ireland, get together in a kitchen and form a rock band that slowly but steadily becomes one of the biggest the world has ever known.

Of the band's 16 albums released since 1980, six climb to No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200 album chart, spawning more than 26 Billboard Hot 100 hits. The band collects 22 Grammys, including two for album of the year (1987's "The Joshua Tree," 2004's "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb").

And somehow, U2 still manages to pass on a second Hawai'i concert stop for 23 years before deciding to end its nearly two-year-old Vertigo trek here Saturday with what's certain to be a concert for the local history books. (Really, guys, were the Blaisdell Arena dressing rooms that bad in 1983?)

Now here's some stuff about U2 you may not know: An A to Z listing of (until recently, anyway) mostly little-known facts about the band.

We compiled our guide after perusing the just-released coffee-table-ready tome "U2 By U2" (Harper Collins, $39.95). The photo-filled, 350-page oral history of the band — told by Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen Jr. and longtime U2 manager Paul McGuinness — wasn't always focused enough to dish on all U2 has left behind. But it was an interesting enough read with or without some of the little details.

So before you hit the show (or find a spot in the sure-to-be-obscenely-lengthy general-admission ticket holder line launching at 6 p.m. today at Aloha Stadium), here's some reading material.

Unos, dos, tres, catorce!

A

Antichrist, The. Bono's first nickname, given by his family as a child in recognition of his being a holy terror.

B

Birthplaces & birthdays. Bassist Adam Clayton: Chinnor, Oxfordshire, England, on March 13, 1960. Drummer Larry Mullen Jr.: Dublin, on Oct. 31, 1961. Guitarist David Evans (later nicknamed "The Edge"): London, on Aug. 8, 1961. And vocalist Paul Hewson (later nicknamed "Bono"): Dublin, on May 10, 1960. Bono chronicled the momentous occasion in U2's first single "Out of Control." ("One dull morning woke the world with bawling / They were so glad / I was so sad.")

C

Coming to Hawai'i in 1983. Bono's impressions about his brief time here, and books he was reading: "I had never been in a place so exotic. ... At the Kahala Hilton there were bottles of wine on the menu for $10,000. Ronald Reagan had just stayed there. I remember thinking, 'Why are dolphins jumping past my window?' ... As an unreconstructed Calvinist, to me it was the end of the world. ... 'Pride (In the Name of Love)' came out of a soundcheck in Hawai'i, the melody and the chords. ... (A journalist) had given me a book called 'Let the Trumpet Sound,' a biography of Dr. (Martin Luther) King; and another on Malcolm X. They were covering different sides of the civil rights discussion, the violent and the nonviolent. They were important books to me. The next album (1984's 'The Unforgettable Fire') started there in Hawai'i with thoughts of man's inhumanity to his fellow-man on my mind, and dolphins swimming past my window."

D

Dylan, Bob. About his longtime friend, Bono says, "I love Bob above anyone else in what you could call pop music. He is the guy whose suitcase I'd carry, whose taxi I'd call, whose drinks' bill I'd swallow and whose grave I'd dig. He is the Picasso of pop music to me. He's Dickens, he's Shakespeare, he's Thackeray ... with a smidgin of Charlie Chaplin thrown in."

E

Eighties, The. Apathy toward the decade's early years fueled the title of U2's second album, 1981's "October." "It was the idea that we were born in the '60s, a time when materialism was in full bloom. We had fridges and cars, we sent people to the moon and everybody thought how great mankind was," Bono says. "But the '80s was a colder time, materialism without any idealism, the sun without any heat, winter. It was the fall, after the harvest."

F

Feedback. The band's first name, dreamed up by Bono. The band's second, before deciding on U2? The Hype, also dreamed up by Bono. "Feedback made a lot more sense because there was a lot of it," Mullen says.

G

Gymnasium. Where Feedback made its debut in a school talent show. The set list? Peter Frampton's "Show Me the Way" and the Bay City Rollers' "Bye Bye Baby" — the only two songs they knew how to play.

H

Head. The Edge insists he had an unusually large one starting at age 5 that he eventually grew into. "I started to look unnervingly like the kid on the cover of Mad magazine. ... By age 7 the full (Alfred E. Neuman) look was complete," he says.

I

Invaders, Space. The video game U2 got hooked on during its first tour of the British Isles in 1980. "We would call into motorway service stations to have something to eat, spend 10 minutes eating some dodgy sandwich, then spend the rest of the time in the arcade playing Space Invaders. We were really kids," Edge says.

J

J33.3. The number on the digital clock behind the band on the cover of 2000's "All That You Can't Leave Behind" album. It refers to the Bible passage Jeremiah 33:3. "The Scripture is 'Call unto Me and I will answer you,' " Bono says of the passage he calls God's phone number. The photo was taken in the Roissy terminal of France's Charles de Gaulle airport. U2 also filmed a video for "Beautiful Day," a track from the album, on the airport's runway.

K

Killer Sinatra quote. "Wow, you may be number one, but you haven't spent a dime on your clothes," Frank Sinatra said after graciously introducing U2 to the audience at one of his Las Vegas shows, shortly after the release of 1987's "The Joshua Tree." Bono admits, "He could not believe the state of us. Frank was such a natty dresser. We looked like a bunch of gypsies."

L

Loo. More specifically, a women's loo in London's Lyceum club — where U2 signed its first major label contract with Island Records in 1980. "We needed somewhere where we could see what we were doing, and the ladies' was a little bit nicer than the gents,' " McGuinness says.

M

Monikers. He adopted the names Steinhegvanhuysenolegbangbangbang and Hausman, but Paul Hewson became Bono while out walking one day with Mullen. "As we pass a sign over a hearing-aid shop, Bono points to it and says, 'That's me.' It said Bono Vox," says Mullen. Edge almost took the stage name Inchicore, a Dublin burg.

N

New York. The first American city U2 played. Bono wrote "Angel of Harlem" about the band's 1980 experience of arriving at John F. Kennedy airport, embarking on its first limo ride and hearing Billie Holiday on WBLS-FM on the way into the city over the Triborough Bridge. U2 debuted at The Ritz.

O

"One." According to Bono, an often misunderstood U2 composition that really shouldn't be all that confusing. "'One' is not about oneness, it's about difference. ... It's anti-romantic: 'We are one, but we're not the same. We get to carry each other.' It's a reminder that we have no choice. ... The song is a bit twisted. ... I have certainly met a hundred people who've had it at their weddings. I tell them, 'Are you mad? It's about splitting up!' "

P

Publishing rights. Still unsigned with a label and in desperate need of money to finance a tour in 1980, U2 almost took a $1,500 advance from an independent publisher for them. The publisher originally offered $3,000. "We were going to sell our publishing rights for a pittance for the next 20 years or something and at the last minute, knowing that we had (a) tour booked, he made it worse," Edge says. "So we basically told him to stuff it up his arse."

Q

Questionable horsemen. The four figures riding off in the distance through a snowstorm on horseback in the 1981 video for "New Year's Day" — a heavily-rotated clip that introduced many Americans to U2 during MTV's first year — are actually women, dressed like the band members.

R

Red Rocks Amphitheatre. U2's visually stunning (and now famous) mist-filled and wind-chilled 1983 filmed concert at the picturesque 7,000-seat Denver mountaintop outdoor venue was actually played to a third-full house. Heavy rains, which stopped hours before showtime, kept most fans away from what was supposed to be U2's largest audience to date. The band couldn't cancel because it had invested nearly all of its tour earnings in filming the show. "You might notice if you watch the Red Rocks video, there are very few crowd shots," Edge says. "But those who were there were real diehard fans, and they were just so relieved that we were going to play." A live video of "Sunday Bloody Sunday" got heavy rotation on MTV.

S

Sept. 25, 1976. The quartet that would become U2 convenes in the Mullen family kitchen for a first rehearsal when Bono, Edge and Clayton answer an ad seeking to form a band.

T

"Tonight, thank God, it's them instead of you." Though he admired its power, the only line in the classic 1984 Band-Aid multi-artist charity single "Do They Know It's Christmas" Bono hoped organizer Bob Geldof would not make him sing. Of course, Geldof did ask him to sing it. When he refused, Bono says Geldof replied, "This is not about what you want, OK? This is about what these people need." Bono sang the now famous lyric, he says, channeling Bruce Springsteen.

U

U2 vs. U2. Bono says "a full-on rumble with all members of the band" erupted at a 1980 club gig on the band's first U.S. tour when he chucked Mullen's drum kit into the audience after the drummer didn't come in when a song was counted in. "He chased me around the drum kit, wanting to kill me with a mike stand," Mullen says of Bono. Says Edge, "I was hanging on to the back of Bono's shirt trying to restrain him from hitting Larry, and he hit me instead. So I wound up in a fight with Bono." The lesson Bono learned about Edge's punch? "Never pick a fight with a man who earns his living from hand-to-eye coordination."

V

Vocalist. Lacking any musical equipment or transportation, what Bono was destined to do in U2. "He had delusions that maybe he was a guitarist," Mullen says. "He could strum a guitar, but he was no guitar player and it could be argued that he's still no guitar player."

W

Wide awake. Bono considers one of U2's most beloved songs, "Bad," unfinished and "just a huge promise of a song." The composition about a friend Bono says "squandered his intelligence and his gifts to heroin" attempts to describe the rush of the drug's high, the sleep that accompanies its low "and then scream: 'I'm wide awake, I'm wide awake, I'm not sleeping!' I can see what's going on. That is potentially a truly great song ... if I had finished it. And in a way I do finish it every night, live. I change the lyric. ... Songs should not be set in stone. If they are any good, they are living, breathing organisms."

X

"Xanax and Red Wine." A U2 electronica track that originally included the lyric "how to dismantle an atomic bomb." Unable to finish the song but fond of the lyric, Bono lifted it and included it in the song "Fast Cars." "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" became the title of U2's 10th studio album in 2004. "Fast Cars" is on the disc.

Y

Yakuza house. Where Bono ended up after sneaking out into the Tokyo night with a couple of friends during U2's ZOO TV tour. Falling asleep in the house, he was woken by a six-foot boa constrictor climbing his leg; it later urinated on one of his friends. "It turns out snakes pee if they're disturbed," Bono says. "One of the girls (in the house) performed in some kind of burlesque revue and the snake was part of her act."

Z

Zero activism. Bono says his longtime association with political activism may end soon, at least temporarily. "I am most excited about getting lost in music again," he says. "In the near future, I am going to close the door on activism and commerce and other ideas that engage me, and I am going to shut it quite tight, for a little while at least, and focus on writing and making music. ... If we get our songs right, I think we could really be very popular."

Reach Derek Paiva at dpaiva@honoluluadvertiser.com.