Bono Read online

  At the second floor of the restaurant, which had been reserved for our crowd, media people kept queuing, thirsting for the great man’s words of wisdom. All of a sudden I was sitting next to Gandhi: not a bad promotion, I thought, for a guy who used to climb on piles of speakers at his own concerts. After an amazing round of desserts and grappa, we went down the stairs again. We passed in front of the resident band. They were performing “Unchain My Heart.” Grappa-inspired, Bono picked up the mike. I’m not sure he knew the song. The diners cheered. When we left, grown-ups still seemed to chase after us. And it was not over. When the motorcade stopped in front of Bono’s hotel in Bologna, he was greeted by a crowd of a hundred youths who cheered ecstatically. One of them brandished an acoustic guitar; another one waved the cover ofWar.Bono seemed more to be sucked into the hotel lobby than to actually enter it. Then I was left to walk to my own hotel. The sudden quietness and solitude felt weird, on the brink of being eerie. I felt I had been thrown out of an interstellar spaceship, let loose in an arbitrary spot.

  The next day was a different story. I was meeting Bono in the lobby of the Grand Hotel Baglioni at midday, whence we were scheduled to leave by car and have lunch together. A crowd was still hanging around, kept away by crowd barriers and the usual guy in a black suit. In five minutes Bono was down in the lobby with Sheila Roche and his tour manager Dennis Sheehan, who said we had to use the other exit, as there was no way we could break through that crowd. On the double again. Then, as we went down the stairs, Bono muttered something to himself and said it was not OK, that this behavior was too much of “a pop star thing.” So up we went again. We tried for the main door. Bad idea. The cheering crowd massed ever more tightly, traffic was blocked, and we could not take the smallest step forward. So Bono had to settle for the pop star thing and use the back entrance.

  We quickly arrived in a quiet and narrow street in Bologna’s Centro Storico. The empty restaurant that had been booked was so dark I first thought they were out of business for the day. Bono decided to settle for the café next door instead, a nondescript place, equally empty, where he chose to sit at a table outside. We ordered some pasta and a plate of local ham and salami. It was a brave choice of venue on Bono’s part, and one that eventually got on my nerves (though I didn’t show it), since we were interrupted every two minutes. A girl on a bike approached us and took Bono’s arm, glowing, crying“Che fortuna!”(“What luck!”). Then two policewomen asked for autographs. At one point a local resident thought it was a good idea to put on “Pride (In the Name of Love)” at the highest possible volume. I must admit I was the nervous one. Throughout, Bono was as quiet as if he were sitting in his own garden. I think that reflects on the conversation, where the mood got more and more—dare I say it—“spiritual.”

  Remember what you told me back in Killiney? “You should ask me to draw a tree at some point.” [Bono laughs out loud] Maybe you should have thought twice before saying that, because I want you to draw a map of the route you took to get from home to school.

  It’s a long one, though, because I went into the center of the city, and back out. [proceeds to draw a map on the back of a scribbled sheet] This is all the North Side, OK? I was at a place called Ballymun, a mile from the Tower Blocks. Actually, the Seven Towers. I’ll put them in. [draws with unconcealed pleasure] It was an incredibly long journey: five miles into Dublin city center. And then I’d take another bus all the way, because you couldn’t get to Mount Temple [his school]. That’s very important, because most kids are not in the city. They’re out there in the suburbs. At twelve or thirteen, I WAS A TOWNIE [writes the phrase in capital letters]. So I used to hang out in record shops.

  Do you remember the names of the stores?

  Yeah, Golden Discs. And that’s a great one: Pat Egan’s, in a basement. UV light. Punk rock lived there later. [scribbles them on the sheet]

  Lots of things seemed to happen there.

  Lots of things. Gambling. [keeps on drawing] Very important thing in here. One of the biggest institutions in my life: “Lost and Found.” CIE, bus company. They knew me by name in there, because I lost something every week. I lost all my books. I lost everything I had, all the time. And I still do. Like, I lose my phone every week now. I don’t seem to have a very good short-term memory. For instance, especially now, from traveling around the globe and having people driving you in taxis, chauffeurs, and so forth, I know not to store this information, because it’s not my hometown. So I have no idea of directions. Even now, in my own city that I grew up in, I’m starting to forget where I’m going. [resumes drawing] Now, along the road—Glasnevin—was the Ink Bottle primary school. First kiss. And botanic gardens, beautiful botanic gardens. River Tolka. I used to lie along the banks of the river Tolka, among the flowers—poppies, they were—and just dream. It was a Protestant school. There weren’t many Protestants in the area, so I had to go out of the area to visit the place. It was a tiny little thing with a tiny little yard. The headmaster was very good to me, to all of us. We used to kick the soccer ball over the railings into the river, and then we’d have to call school off and we’d all climb over the railings and chase the ball all the way along the river to get it back, so we’d spend miles going. On a sunny day, he kind of turned his back and waited for us to kick the ball over the railings and into the river, because I think he liked it too. It was very good memories for me, that school. Though, my first day at school, somebody bit my friend. So I banged his head off the railings. So I remember very quickly getting to a place where people wouldn’t want to bite me. [laughs]

  The first thing you drew on this map was these Tower Blocks.

  I had very strong feelings about it at the time, because I remember when they pulled down the trees and fields, and started to develop the housing estate. This was to be the first high-rise experiment in Ireland. We used to play in the foundations. Then we heard they had lifts in them. We thought: Oh, this is gonna be great, this is like being modern, and Dublin’s going like everyone else. Just as everywhere else in Europe was discovering that high-rise doesn’t work, in Ireland we were just starting. They moved inner city communities away from their own self-managing, and policing, and real community spirit, put them in high-rise buildings. It started very quickly to descend into a dangerous place. Lifts would break down. People’d get very upset that you’d have to walk up the stairs. I remember walking up the stairs to see my friends, it was piss coming down the stairs, and stink. These were really nice families, good families, living next to people who were sociophobes, who were feeling freaked out about their new address. So when we used to go for a walk in the fields, we could come across the gangs from the Seven Towers, and that was the jungle. Violence, as I told you, is the thing I remember the most from my teenage years and earlier. This was like a working-class area that we lived in, fairly—maybe working-class, lower middle-class—but, you know, the difference between the incomes of people who lived here and people who lived there might be very little. It might be like a car. My old man had a car, so we were rich. And that was a reason to be tortured.

  So the other kids who lived there resented you?

  Oh yeah. Dublin was very violent. Then, the drugs came in, round 1978. There was very cheap heroin. The people who were smoking dope ended up smoking heroin, as they gave it to them for nothing. And then when people were really strung out, that became an unbelievably violent place.

  Teenagers at that time seemed to feel like the old world was being destroyed. Don’t you feel as well that punk rock was a way of responding to that?

  I think what punk rock gave to us was that you could knock everything down and start again, either decide who you wanted to be: a new name, a new pair of shoes, a new way to see the world. Everything was possible, and the only limit was your imagination. That became further true with DJ culture. You didn’t even have to play an instrument—you just had to have the imagination.

  Maybe punk rock happened in reaction to the ugly new architectural landscape that
was springing up, which was close to a nihilistic statement in and of itself.

  Oh yeah. The violence of suburbia starts with its ugliness. The inner city communities, those redbrick houses, they actually had something attractive in texture and tone, those tiny houses my grandparents grew up in. There was more to them than this new suburbia. You know, in Ireland, in the seventies, a lot of these places were built by corrupt builders. They didn’t put in plans for shops and amenities. It was just cookie-cutter housing schemes. In a way they defaced Dublin, these property developers. And the violence that returned to them, a generation later, we all had to live with it. Because in housing schemes like Tallaght, I think it’s 27,000 young people between the ages of twelve and eighteen walking the streets every night. It’s like an army. There was nowhere for people to go, nothing. Women used to push their prams for miles. This is a violence done to them. It’s a great place now in comparison.

  I once read an interview with Mick Jagger, where he said: “When I was twelve, I loved to play the fool in front of my friends.” I figured you weren’t like that, I presume your mood would have been more somber. Is that so?

  Well, no. I was full of mischief and fun. Probably until I was fourteen. And I think everything changed when my mother died, and our home became an empty house, with all the aggression between my father, my brother, and myself. But up to that, I was full of fun and mischief.

  Yeah, you mentioned that.

  I mean, I had all of that. Then, later, I found that fun and mischief again with my friends and the Village, as we used to call ourselves. We invented a Village, which was an alternative community, called Lypton Village, and we used to put on arts installations, when we were sixteen, seventeen, with manic drills and stepladders. See, the alcohol level in our neighborhood was so high, people going to the pubs a lot, and we were young, arrogant, and probably very annoying kids, but we didn’t wanna go that route. The pub looked like a trapdoor to somewhere very predictable, so we wouldn’t drink. We used to watch Monty Python. We invented our own language, gave each other names, and we’d dress differently. We would put on these performance-art things, and in the end we formed two bands, the Virgin Prunes and U2. But I did have what you French would call joie de vivre, I was fun. You know what Ali said to me ten years ago? She said: “You know, I fell in love with you because there was mischief in your eyes. You were bold as brass, and you were fearless, but you made me laugh. You’ve gotten very serious.” That was true towards the end of the eighties. I started at this point to dismantle my earnestness, and set fire to my . . . [pause] self!

  Were there people you admired in Dublin back then? Colorful characters who influenced you?

  Who’s Maeve O’Regan?

  No, I didn’t have the sense. The people that were really big influences on me were my friend Guggi. He was a kind of a genius. He was not put into the same school as I. He went to technical school, because he could draw, right? And he had a very unique point of view, from very early on. And Gavin Friday—Fionan Hanvey—he was very aesthetic. He made decisions on your character based on your record collection. He was into Brian Eno and Roxy Music. These were the people that I felt normal around. And I had no other people I looked up to. On a level of pure friendship, Reggie Manuel, who was the nattiest dresser, and Maeve O’Regan, who brought me a love of books. I’ve always had girls who are friends, as opposed to girlfriends. Even when I started going out with Ali. Maeve O’Regan and I were very close. She too had a boyfriend, a smart lanky long-haired American basketball-playing Neil Young fan who made me feel very inadequate. I felt so square next to my bra-burning brown rice hippie pal. She was ahead of me. Girls of the same age are always much more advanced.

  Your friends Gavin and Guggi went on to become serious artists: one is a painter, the other an avant-garde conceptual artist. Whereas you chose to do something much more popular. It seems like you took two different paths.

  It seemed to them at the same time that it was two different paths. But I don’t agree. I just think it’s all about communication. And it’s just a freak that the thing that I do, a lot of people are in. It is the currency. To sing and write and be in a rock band is the route to pop culture, whereas to paint and to do performance art has a very limited audience.

  Come on, you must have known even then . . . These things don’t happen by chance.

  Yes. Nothing happens by chance. You don’t end up in front of twenty thousand people on a stage by accident.

  So how did you end up making a fool out of yourself in front of twenty thousand people?

  I had a bigger hole to fill.

  What do you mean?

  A rock star is someone with a hole in his heart almost the size of his ego.

  Yesterday, for an hour and a half after rehearsal, clusters of people surrounded you. When we had dinner at Pavarotti’s restaurant, people kept approaching you. And it felt almost like harassment. And I thought: when is this guy ever left alone? Your life is certainly different from the life of a solitary artist like your friend Guggi.

  He spends so much time on his own. I’m envious.

  That ego must sometimes be a very heavy load to carry. Weren’t you ever tempted to get rid of it?

  Oh, I think I can just about bear it. Just about . . . [laughs]

  You have always been in a band, you have always relied on others. Maybe you’re missing out on the kind of truth you can only find in solitude.

  But maybe I know it. Maybe I’m looking for the other half of the story. Maybe I have the first half instinctively, so therefore I don’t need to spend hours. And maybe I had a glimpse of that when I was younger. I think, when I spend time on my own, a few things happen. After some hours, I start to laugh out loud. I do. After a few days, I’m having a great time. I go for a walk, and I read, because it’s so fresh for me. Then, I’m brought back not to any new insight on the world, but to what I already knew. The noise separates me from my instincts. See, I always believed in instinct over intellect. The instinct is what you always knew; intellect is what you figure out. So for me it’s not really a question of sitting and figuring it out. You know what I mean? That’s not really gonna help me. What I need is silence in order to find my own voice again. I kind of know what I want to say, I just need the time. Not that I know what I want to say in terms of “I know what I’ve got to say, now I’m gonna write it,” but I know that when I start writing, it’s going to come out anyway, so my intellectual life is simply as editor, sorting through the debris. It’s not that I’m trying to figure anything out. That’s the difference. A novelist is just trying to figure things out.

  I don’t think so . . . I think a novelist has no clue about what he’s grasping. There is that fantastic phrase that I always quote, by the Franco-American writer Julian Green: “I write my books because I need to know what’s inside of them.” It’s not that you draw out a map, make a big plan, and then fill in the gaps. That’s what I would say bad writers would do.

  Yeah. But you’re talking about the discovery there, you’re talking of trying to discover what is the truth. Whereas I’m not really looking for that. If I’m considering anything, all I’m on is the obstacles to truth.

  I think that’s the reason why you are a “community artist.” Why did you choose this path, the one where you are never alone? I mean, you never even considered becoming a solo singer.

  Here’s what happens to me: pretty much everything. You know, the way people who are searching for water, they have one of these forked sticks, wooden branches from a tree, that are called diviners? They hold the two branches and they walk to find water. When they’re near the water, the branch starts to tremble. Have you heard about this? Divining. Well, for me, I just go where the thing’s going off. I choose that pretty much in anything I’m doing. So wherever I feel more myself, wherever I feel the inspiration is, I want to be. So, in my case, being in a band, I feel completely freed. That’s where I dig the well. But it’s the same on anything. It’s like that game that kids
play, hide-and-seek. When they find it “warm,” “very warm,” “cold,” there you go, and then you put your finger in your brother’s eye! [laughs] But it’s blind man’s bluff. That’s what it’s like for me. I just kind of go “there.” It’s the same when I’m writing, it’s like a very strong instinct. That’s the answer to why I end up there. I didn’t figure it out, I just did better work there. Why didn’t I go on my own? I spent a lot of time on my own as a kid. Maybe that’s another reason for wanting to be in a band. I didn’t like being on my own as a kid, because I would have liked a bigger family. I was always envious of the families on the street. Like, Guggi had a big family. And Gavin, all my friends had a big family. I’d be kind of sitting there, and I’m sure it’s the same for you. Did you have a very busy life as a kid?

  Well, not really. I was raised by an old Hungarian nanny in the countryside near Paris. I had glasses, I was clumsy, I was quiet. My older brother was better-looking. He was very popular, artistic, had lots of friends, and I worshipped him. So I thought I really had to find a trick of my own.

  [laughing] I like that phrase, “trick of my own.”

  What I always admired in people like you, who are in bands and do community work, constantly relying on other people, is their patience. Whereas I would rather spend moments looking through the window, or rather the modern equivalent: spending time on the Internet, doing nothing, really . . . Getting bored is what fires me with the spark, eventually. I always wonder: what does it take to deal with bureaucracy as much as you do?

  Well, you certainly need a lot of humility to depend on others. You need to put yourself second a lot of the time, or third, or fourth. The way we function as a band is a real phenomenon, in some ways more than the music. It’s not an organization; it is, as they say, an organism. But that’s family. Family makes people very strong. I didn’t feel like I had one. I mean I’ve always envied people with a strong sense of family and community. They’re always very strong.