I debated with myself when titling this article as to whether or not I should use the song’s full name – “Trash,  Trampoline and the Party Girl”, as it was labeled when it first appeared thirty-three years ago as a B-side on the single for “A Celebration” – but I chose to go with the shorter form of the song’s title as it seems that that’s the name by which it is more popularly known these days. Still, I think it’s worth mentioning the song’s original designation as the fuller title gives more information on what the song is about. The song isn’t just about the titular party girl, after all, but is just as much about the people she people she interacts with (Trash Can and Trampoline). At first listen, “Party Girl” almost seems like a throwaway pop song, like many B-sides are, but this is U2 we’re talking about, after all, and they always deliver more than the surface reveals. In a lot of ways, “Party Girl” shares themes with “Discotheque”, a song that came fourteen years later and signaled the start of U2’s love affair with “trash”, otherwise known as throw-away culture, that we now remember as the Pop era. Both songs deal with a main figure who is looking for something more than a good time, but who will settle for what they  can get. In “Party Girl”, the protagonist settles for sex with random strangers, all the while hoping to find transcendence. It’s an easy trap to fall into, and one that enforms many adolescences. I know it propelled me into lots of stupid situations when I was younger.

We all know, I think, that there’s more to life than parties and fun,. For most of us, that “more” can easily be defined as love. It often happens when we’re young that we’re easily led off the straight and narrow and into temptations that actually take us further from the goal that we started out headed towards. As with the party girl, that trap might be sex. For others it might be drugs or any other one of a whole slew of things. The trick that we hopefully learn as we get older, is that none of those substitutes are as good as the real thing. Most of us, those of us who are fortunate, get better at the search and eventually find what we were looking for from the start.

“Party Girl” is, far and away, U2’s most played B-side, with close to two hundred performances over the last thirty plus years, with airings on almost every tour that the band have gone on since the War Tour. Oddly enough, the one tour that the song didn’t appear on was the one that it might have fit the most – the Pop*Mart Tour. For most of the song’s life, it’s been performed solely at celebratory, special gigs, such as on the night of a band member’s birthday, or as with its most recent performance, on the final night of a leg of a tour. I think that it’s a safe bet that we haven’t seen the last of “Party Girl”, and although it will never be played on a nightly basis, it’s a fun tradition that I expect the band to continue.