What would our lives be like without U2? We nearly found out back in the eighties when Bono, The Edge, Larry Mullen Jr., and Adam Clayton were just starting out.

Bono was a guest on Hozier’s new podcast called “Cry Power” that he recently launched with the Global Citizen group. The U2 frontman revealed that the band nearly went kaput after they released their second album, October because they didn’t feel as if their music could be a force for good.

“There was a moment when our band nearly ended after our second album. We had a crisis of faith in our band and its usefulness. We looked around us and said, ‘This world is completely up its arse and so are we.’ It’s broken,” Bono told his fellow Irish rock star.

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“How can a rock band play any role in the fixing of it. It’s such, in one sense, a vainglorious thing to go about. We just wanted to stop. We couldn’t figure it out. Edge figured it out.

“He started writing a song, ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday.’ He said we could write about sectarianism in our country. Then I had this idea of contrasting the absurdity of the Easter Rising and the rah-rah-rah and Jesus on the cross.

“The stark contrast between people who take lives to support what they believe in and those who give their life. That’s the dialectic at the heart of ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday.’”

Read more: Is U2’s Bono writing his autobiography?

U2, of course, went on to have a massive career that’s still going strong – they’ll be spending the next two months in Australia, New Zealand and a number of Far East countries, and will play their first-ever show in India on December 15.

Bono told Hozier they’ve got some new music in the hopper too, though a release date isn’t imminent.

“We have this beautiful ecstatic album called Songs of Ascent. I don’t know if we’ll finish it soon or if it will take forever. It’s about the 15 Psalms, named after the 15 steps, from the Women’s Chamber up to the Temple of Jerusalem,” he said.

“But I’d also love to just do a straightforward f***off rock-and-roll album with this band because, on this last tour, they got to a place -- they’ve been there before -- I think they’ve always had greatness in them. I felt like I just caught up with them on this last tour.”

Listen to the whole Bono episode of Hozier's Cry Power here:

LISTEN: Hozier picks his favorite songs for an epic playlist