Bono Read online

  Well, actually, that’s something people tend to say about their youth: “I wish I had been braver back then.” Is that the case with you?

  Well, I was. We were brave, but we didn’t know how brave at the time. Because here’s a band who couldn’t really play, who forged their own music, because they couldn’t play very well other people’s, with the audacity to say: “We can be a big success without having to sell out. And we don’t have to be embarrassed by our ambition.” It’s worth remembering that wanting to make big music in a big band was a hanging offense in the music press at that time. “Selling out” was a popular pejorative. Ideas like “street credibility” dominated discussion. We knew a lot of this stuff was nonsense. What street were they talking about and who did you want to be credible with? “Do you have anything original to say?” was our point. “Are the tunes any good?” So we were right about so many things. That naiveté is very, very powerful.

  But after growing out of that naiveté, and maybe getting disillusioned, weren’t you tempted to become cynical?

  Well, I think cynicism often disguises itself as humor.

  Irony.

  Yes. But finally, Zoo TV was not cynical. It was fun and it was a strategy.

  The strategy was judo: to use the force of the attacker to defend yourself.

  And we were being attacked from all corners, because we were very open.

  That face that I talked about earlier was an open face. It was wide open. It was ready for a slap, and to be mocked. So we could feel the media about to close in on us. That was an amazing thing that happened. I realized the force of the media at the end of The Joshua Tree. We had a big record, and the natural thing to do would be to just make a live album at that point of the tour, cash in and go on holidays. But we decided: “Oh no, we can’t do that.” So we wrote songs to put on this. We’d have new songs. We’d make a film about our journey through America. We’d make it much more interesting: we’d make a double album, put it out at half price, and rather than being a band who thought they were the center of the world, we would put these musicians that we were fans of at the center of our world, and in the artwork, with pictures of Johnny Cash. We wrote songs—not all great songs—but we would sort of declare ourselves as the fans that we are. And this Rattle and Hum thing came out. But the opposite came back at us. It was like: “Oh, this is egomania, they think they are now one of the Pantheon of these great artists, and they feel they can quote our music.” I remember thinking, “This is exactly the opposite of what we are trying to do!” But we actually couldn’t undo that. It was just a given that these so-called fans had now lost the run of themselves. “Egomaniac,” “messianic.” These were the kind of words that were being thrown at us. So I just thought: “Right. If people want megalomania, let’s give them megalomania! Let’s really have some fun with this!” [laughs] Let’s try to communicate with the people who don’t like U2 because we’re not real rock stars. I don’t think it was cynical, it was more fun. And by the way, there’s a part of me that kind of would like to be that rock star.

  Do you sometimes think about what would have become of you if you had followed your bad or lazy instincts? I’ll give you an example. As I reminded you, Adam once said that if he hadn’t been the bass player in U2, he would have become an average landscape gardener [see Chapter 3]. [Bono bursts out laughing] So have you ever pictured yourself doing an ordinary job, or even following your more base instincts?

  [Pondering] The life of crime? You have to have a better memory for the life of crime. So I’d probably be [confidently] a property developer. Beach front, a specialty. “Location, location . . .”

  It’s funny that you should mention that. It’s actually one of the questions I wanted to ask at some point. I don’t know much about rock stars, aside from you. What do rock stars usually do? They buy cars, they indulge in drugs. And while we’re at it, what are you willing to reveal about drugs? Paul McCartney recently came clean about cocaine and heroin. What about you? Maybe we’ll have to wait until you’re sixty to find out.

  If I ever had so much as a spliff, I would not talk about it, because it’s too easy a headline: “Bono Denies Smoking Joint,” “Bono Admits Smoking Joint.” It’s an invitation to a debate that I’m not interested in.

  Right. But you don’t shy away from revealing drunken episodes, do you?

  No, but that doesn’t make headlines for an Irish person. Bottom line: I think drugs are dumb. Bottom line: I think abuse of alcohol is dumb. Bottom line: I think that cigarette smoking is dumb. And that’s it, really. My point about alcohol is that if you abuse something, it abuses you back. That’s really it. Whether it’s a spliff, whether it’s anything, there’s a boomerang to it.

  OK. And what about a rock star abusing real estate?

  [laughing] There’s a couple of people that’d surprise you. I remember RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan telling me that his whole thing was buying land. He didn’t want any buildings on the land. Just land. Because money was losing its value. And I love that. Bob Dylan, I know he loves land. People who live their life off the abstract tend to holiday in the concrete. [laughs] I do love buildings. I just like places.

  I don’t want to sound like a part-time psychoanalyst here, but I once read that as a child, you spent your family vacations in a trailer on a wasteland by the sea. Then the property was developed, and you weren’t allowed to stay there anymore. Is there a link somewhere?

  That was a railway carriage that belonged to my grandfather, in the sand dunes, on a beach in the north of Dublin. There was an extraordinary moment in my childhood when we arrived. The farmer who had sold the land to my grandfather had died. When his son was looking for the contract that my grandfather didn’t have—it was just a cash transaction—he had told him he had to get off. My grandfather wouldn’t get off, and he bulldozed this train carriage, just smashed it. It was an extraordinary moment I remember as a child. I remember throwing rocks at his glass houses. I was very angry about it.

  What was the first house you bought? I’m assuming it was in Dublin.

  I bought a tower, a Martello tower, which I think was a French design. The French used the Martello towers to defend themselves against the English. Then the English took it, used to defend themselves against the French. That was a great military idea. There are seven-foot-thick granite walls, and it was like a lighthouse, this one. It had a glass top, a bedroom for myself and Ali, and then a living room in the middle, and at the bottom it had a dining area, with the kitchen in the wall.* We loved it! I have a few nice houses now; I must admit that one of my deepest fears is that I’d become that awful person who would just buy property and leave it there, not even use it, appreciate it, when there’s people sleeping in the street. That would be the sort of person I would hate as a teenager. That would have been my nemesis. I know I’m a little self-indulgent now, but I will say I enjoy them. As I perhaps said to you before, decadence is when you don’t notice what you have around you.

  So you’ve been investing in real estate, mainly.

  I was never the sort to put money under the mattress, rather make something out of it. I love art, some of my friends are artists, so I buy a little bit here and there. I love places to build an environment, admitting that I’ve made money buying and selling such places. I have a much harder time selling than buying, though.

  You mean you do this as speculation?

  Most of the time it’s not speculation, but I wouldn’t rule that out.

  You bought a place in Paris. Are you going to buy a place in every big city in the world?

  When I fall in love with a place, a city, I’m curious about how people live and where people live. I’m anxious to get out of the hotel, experience a little bit of the real life of that city or town. I might want an apartment, I might want not to feel such a tourist, the eye of a traveling rat, you could call it.

  Just before we hung up, Bono invited me to come to London for the next week, so we could resume our talk there. He told m
e that U2 had booked Air Studios to do some work on their next album.

  8. THE OCCASIONAL MISSING LEG

  I arrived at Air Studios in London. When I got there, the mood was very tense. On that day, the band was busy rehearsing a former version of “Crumbs from Your Table,” with Bono strumming the guitar as well as singing and giving directions to the band. A couple of cameramen were lurking around. When operations stopped for a while, Bono took me to the cafeteria, where he promptly briefed me. A couple of days before, an array of about forty of the best classical musicians in Britain had to be dismissed from the recording. Why? Well, said Bono, it was a typical U2 situation: “We only found out the songs weren’t working when we played them in front of an audience. The orchestra looked bored. The band could feel it: they were bored too. Conclusion: finish the songs before you bring a fucking orchestra to play them.” He added that Chris Thomas had concluded the day by saying it had been the worst he’d ever spent in a studio in his whole career (he started out as an assistant to George Martin on the Beatles’White Album,and worked with, among many others, Roxy Music, the Sex Pistols, and the Pretenders). Then another sort of trouble set in. A camera crew had been given access to film the band, and they were starting to get on a few people’s nerves. It reminded me of what I had read about the Beatles makingLet It Bewhile being filmed. Bono saw it as well: “It is the kind of situation,” he said in a deadpan voice, “that may force a band to split up. That’ll be the only thing that’ll make this film interesting. It’s like watching paint dry. They must be dying of boredom.”

  So he called me to his hotel room at noon. He seemed in great spirits. Just before we began to talk, I showed him an article from the satirical newspaperThe Onion(“America’s Finest News Source”), which I had found the day before in a little bookshop. The cover of a recentTimemagazine that featured Bono with the American flag around his shoulders and the matching headline “Can Bono Save the World?” had been reproduced in this article with a different headline: “Bono to the Rescue.” It read:

  Called “rock’s conscience,” U2 frontman and political crusader Bono has met with everyone from Kofi Annan to Colin Powell. What has he been doing recently?

  Tirelessly dedicating self to ending Third World debt, no matter how many magazine covers he must appear on in process

  Restoring humanity’s faith in the power and the promise and the possibility of rock and roll

  Feeding starving Somalis by dividing loaf into many

  Defeating Bruce Springsteen in epic, five-hour earnest-off

  Vowing to lobby Congress for African aid on progressively larger Jumbotrons until demands are met

  Shouldering the burdens of a post Sept. 11 world/Buying another pair of blue-tinted wrap-around shades

  Revealing that The Edge will betray him three times before cock crows

  Thinking about writing songs about deliverance and redemption; also maybe one about transcendence

  Bono particularly enjoyed the one about Bruce Springsteen.

  Then he took me to the terrace of his suite, where he had arranged a photo session for the both of us. There he improvised a kind of drunken speech, celebrating my coming to London, haranguing an elusive crowd at the top of his voice. Then he went back to his room and lay on the couch.

  Maybe this is a little abrupt, but I think after reading that strip I showed you from The Onion, you will see that it is perfectly coherent. Last time, when we talked, you mentioned that you gave a speech at the preview of that Anton Corbijn exhibition, where in a “room full of Bonos” you were confronted with a huge portrait of yourself from twenty years ago, alighting from a helicopter for the sake of a video. You described it as your “first face.” Some journalist there asked you: “What would you say to this person now?” And you said you would have told your younger self: “You’re right!” But how about the other way around? Picture yourself today as that young man from 1981 in the long coat, with the intense and innocent glare. He is now looking at the cover of Time magazine in 2003, which shows the face of this multimillionaire crusader with blue-tinted glasses. Now what does he say to him?

  “You’re wrong. [laughs] For a start, the glasses are wrong. Blue’s not your color. Green. Go with the green!” Well. In a way, for me, getting back to taking custard pies in the face for taking a stance on issues was exactly what that younger version of myself was all about. So I think he would approve of that. But if you had said to this twenty-one-year-old one, that one day he’s gonna be on the cover of Time magazine he [pauses for dramatic effect] probably would have believed you. [laughs] That’s puberty for you. It was late in my case. But the other things in my life. [pause] Family, I’d say, he would have approved of. But the complications, the hesitations, the drinking, the well-to-do lifestyle—he would have been a bit hard on me on that one. Because he was a bit of a zealot.

  If you were Madonna, I wouldn’t have asked you that. Obviously, she’d have answered something like “I’ve always looked forward to being this person, since the very beginning.” But I knew you wouldn’t.

  I can’t answer for Madonna, but in my case that’s probably true. At the time that early innocent picture was being taken, I was very strict on myself. I was reading people like Watchman Nee. He was a Chinese Christian philosopher, very concerned about communal responsibility, the death of the self and surface, and no possessions. At that time I lived that way. I lived with no possessions. We were part of a community. Everyone helped each other out sharing what little money we had. I wasn’t earning very much. What I had, I’d pass it on. It was like a church that was really committed to changing the world, really. Not in a gigantic way, en masse, but in small ways: individual by individual. I was very influenced by a man called Chris Rowe and his beautiful wife, Lilian. I think he had spent a lot of time in China, the child of a mission there before the Communists threw his family out. He was an older man. He relied on the Lord to provide them with everything they needed. They were living hand-to-mouth, this community. I guess he would have been what you would call the pastor of the church, but he’d be much too radical to wear a collar or anything like that. This was the real deal: a radical group. And I said: “Look, you shouldn’t have to worry about money. We’re gonna earn plenty of money. I’m in a band, and I know we’ll be able to help. We’re gonna make it.” He just looked at me and laughed. I remember he said to me: “I wouldn’t want money earned that way.” And I said: “What do you mean by that?” He revealed to me that, even though he had known we were serious about being musicians, and being in a rock group, that he was only really tolerating it. He didn’t really believe that our music was an integral part of who we were as religious people unless we used the music to evangelize. I knew then that he didn’t really get it, and that indeed he was missing out on our blessing. Such a zealot was he, and such a fundamentalist, he didn’t want a part of this rock ’n’ roll thing. Maybe it’s a compliment to him: we could have been a cash cow.

  So he was not the Maharishi.

  You just mentioned the Christian zealot background that people associated with U2 in the early eighties. I feel like that’s precisely why some people question your activism. I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but people who witness your crusade on behalf of the Third World might say: his heart is certainly in the right place, but he is a far cry from the role models he’s patterned himself after, from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King. His heroes were ordinary people living with no material possessions. After all, he is just an outsider, from the showbiz world. What does he know? He does not live with these people. This contradiction that you just pointed out, which you sorted out in your own way, is an important issue in the Christian mentality. It’s a contradiction that you faced, and that you still face.

  He was certainly not the Maharishi. He was a great teacher of the Scriptures. For a couple of years, every few days, I would get to listen to him. I learnt a lot. These are ancient great texts, and you can learn a lot from them if you have somebody who c
an open them up, who has the intellectual capacity, but also the spiritual capacity. Because in the end, they’re more than just books. It was hard to leave, but he didn’t understand we were kind of shunned. There was a moment where myself and Edge sat around and we thought: “Well, maybe we should knock this group on the head. Maybe it is frivolous, maybe these people are right, maybe this is just bollocks, this being in a band, and maybe it’s just ego, and maybe we should put it behind us and just get to the real work of trying to change our own lives, and just get out into the world. There’s much to do there.” For a couple of weeks, we were at that place. Then we came to a realization: “Hold on a second. Where are these gifts coming from? This is how we worship God, even though we don’t write religious songs, because we didn’t feel God needs the advertising.” [laughs] In fact, we ended up at a place where we thought: “The music isn’t bollocks. This kind of fundamentalism is what’s bollocks.” Yeah.

  [Interrupting] If a prophet turns up in our time, it seems likely that he will emerge out of a faceless crowd and remain in touch with basic humanity. And that is not you. So, people say about you: just who does this rock star think he is? He’s not Mother Teresa! He doesn’t work there; he’s only giving lectures.

  Well, I’ll tell you who this rock star thinks he is not. He is sure that he’s not Mother Teresa. [laughs]

  I would have guessed that myself.

  . . . that he is not these kinds of role models you mentioned. I’m the person I’ve ended up, which is a long way from the kind of people who inspired me. But here I am, and I see the embarrassment, excruciating at times, of “Rich rock star works on behalf of the poorest and most vulnerable.” I mean, it’s a very embarrassing photograph. Yet, you can’t deny who you are. And if I gave all my money away, I’d just be a bigger star. [laughs] Right?