Windmill Lane: a brief history

Windmill Lane Studios has been the setting for some of the seminal recordings in Irish music over the past 25 years.

Windmill Lane Studios has been the setting for some of the seminal recordings in Irish music over the past 25 years.

Since it opened in 1978, the studio - whose original art deco building in previous incarnations housed a generating system for Dublin's first tram system, a Bovril factory and an amusement club - has played host to luminaries from near and far: Elvis Costello, REM, Van Morrison, Sinéad O'Connor, Nanci Griffith, Tom Jones, David Bowie, Christy Moore and Art Garfunkel have all produced albums in the Dublin studios.

But Windmill Lane is synonymous with one band more than any other. The first three U2 albums were recorded there in their entirety, and the band continued to use the studios throughout the 1980s.

It was U2 fans who gave Windmill Lane its most striking visual image, too. They were the first to inscribe their unintelligible homage on "The Wall", Dublin's most famous piece of graffiti, and for years visiting acolytes continued to take their pens, markers, chalk and paint to the outer wall of the old building. "Windmill Studios" relocated to their present site in Ringsend in the mid-1990s.