Bono Read online

  [ponders] Other rock stars.

  9. THOU SHALT NOT GO TO AMERICA

  Christmas and New Year’s Day passed. Progress on the new U2 album was a bit rough. Its release had been moved from spring to autumn 2004. The band had also changed producers: Steve Lillywhite, who had produced U2’s first three albums, and remained close to the band ever since, was summoned back. Given that context, I honestly did not expect Bono to have much time. So I was frankly surprised when I received a spontaneous call from him in late January. He was just back from America and planned to stay put for a few weeks, ready to engage in a series of regular phone calls.

  So the following conversation took place only a week after that surprising call. Bono was supposed to call at noon on a Saturday. I just sat on my couch, waiting for the phone to ring, slowly sinking into lethargy. By 12:30 P.M., still no sign of life. Then it rang, and a kind of underwater voice came out, apologizing . . .

  I was up earlier, and I was reading. There was silence in the house, and I was just reading and reading, then I just fell asleep at that very time. I’m awake again.

  You sound tired.

  No, no, no. Not at all. That was amazing, that was a deep sleep. Strange, ’cause I don’t know when the middle of the night is anymore. I guess it’s the middle of the night. [laughs]

  You must be working late nights with the recording under way. Each time I read a story about a U2 song, it seemed to happen in the middle of the night, or in the wee hours of dawn.

  I generally don’t like working late at night. [yawns] I like the early morning, and when I wake up, I feel excited about the day and the possibilities of it. And it’s downhill from there. [laughs] I mean, I’m full of energy. I wake up, and so I do my reading and my writing in the morning. Then, in the afternoon, I do the kind of solid work in the studio. Then we break at eight o’clock for something to eat. When we come back, it’s either the fun time, there can be some spontaneity in the late sessions. But Edge is much more the spirit in the room the later it gets. There’s a phrase after midnight that puts the fear of God into producers and engineers. It’s when he says: “I have a little idea I’d like to try.” [laughs] Because that might mean that they’re up through six A.M.

  I don’t know how it is for you, but my best ideas come when I’m about to go to sleep, or when I feel like I have spent my entire day wasting time, or working without thinking, which may amount to the same thing. I go down to buy a paper, and all of a sudden the idea that I was looking for just happens.

  Yeah, the unconscious. Whether it’s a collective unconscious or not, whatever pool you draw out from. That’s why songwriting by accident is so important, and the getting to the place where that can happen or, as we say, getting to the place where God can walk through the room. Because, if you know what great is, you know you’re a long way from it. [laughs]

  That is definitely my experience.

  If you know what great is, you know you’re not it. So you have to set up the opportunity to bump into it. And it’s a strange thing, because it really might come down to osmosis. It’s not the most romantic explanation, but it might be the truest one. The way I could back up this argument is by pointing to artists who have blown both our minds, Michka, as we grew up, people who suddenly just completely lost their gift and started making rubbish music. We don’t have to name names here, but you know the kind I’m talking about. You think: How did that happen? How did this person who set fire to my imagination end up with no new ideas, and actually, even incapable of their old ones? Here’s my theory: When people are absorbed in the culture, and they’re going out, they’re listening to music, they’re in the clubs, music is just part of their every waking moment, and as a result part of their sleeping times, in their dreams. The life is empty of other lovers. Unless you’re in love with the music, or you stop struggling with it in your unconscious when you’re asleep, you’ve other dreams. You’re dreaming about moving houses, about whatever other ventures you’re involved in. But that’s where you did all your great work: you did it when you were . . . [suspends sentence, searching for the right word]

  . . . missing . . .

  Yes. Unconscious.

  Is that something you worry about? I mean, you have so much on your plate now. Don’t you have the feeling that your dreams are eroding dreams somehow?

  A strange thing about all the other work I’m doing is that it’s turned music back to pleasure. It’s my escape from work. It’s where I have the luxury to dream.

  Actually, you’re getting quite close to a place where I want to start this conversation. Last time we talked, you mentioned your “journey through America.” And I think that phrase conjures up much more than it seems to in your case. I’m sure that you know the expression your friend Wim Wenders coined.

  “Colonization of the unconscious.”

  That’s right. “The Americans have colonized our unconscious.” Let’s see how I can get around to this. I am borrowing an idea from the American writer Paul Theroux. This is how he analyzed the Beatles’ success in the U.S. In early 1964, he wrote something about how the Americans were deeply questioning their country and the way its ideals had been lost somehow. JFK had just been shot, the civil rights movement, championed by Martin Luther King, divided the country, and it also was the beginning of the military involvement in Vietnam. It was a period of self-doubt, of confusion. So Theroux says that is why young people in America embraced the Beatles and the other British Invasion bands with such enthusiasm. They loved the image of America these groups from the Old World reflected. The Beatles were saying: your music is the greatest, your movie stars are the best, American girls are the greatest-looking, your cars are the ones we want. And in the process, they helped Americans restore their faith in their own country and what it could achieve. About twenty years later, with The Joshua Tree, U2 became the number-one band in the U.S. It was a record that reflected your fascination with America. Don’t you think that young Americans, at that time, saw you as saviors because you restored their faith in their own country, a faith that was not available anymore elsewhere in the late eighties, when materialism seemed the only option? Don’t you think that U2 somehow sold back the dream of America to the Americans at that particular moment in their history?

  In the early eighties, America was very uncool in Europe. American fashion seemed at a low point. It was shoulder pads and big hair. There was punk rock, which had given us hope in the seventies that was faded, and it was a very dull moment indeed for American music, with the exception of Bruce Springsteen. Dylan had seemed like he was asleep. Rap was just about to kick off. It had started, but they weren’t letting it on MTV. Madonna was singing “Material Girl.” Greed was good, from that movie Wall Street. The stock market was flying, but it seemed, outside of making money, there didn’t seem to be many other ideas around on the music map. Now Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring were happening in art. There was the suggestion that something might be under way.

  But that was New York . . .

  That was New York, exactly. There was an incredible mood in the U.K., of almost like the cultural revolution. Just awful. The U.K. music press had broken up the Clash, and there were these bogus ideas left over from punk rock, stuff we were talking about before, like “street credibility.” One of these sort of handed-down, Little Red Bookish thoughts was: “Thou Shalt Not Go to America.” And kneel at that. But we were Irish. Ireland had a completely different relationship with America, because America was a Promised Land for Irish people. It was the alternative to getting the mail boat to Liverpool or Holyhead, and taking that journey to London on and around the country. But it was much more of a Romantic journey, and in America, Ireland meant something completely different too. Memories of poverty and famine and desperate struggles had been replaced in the sixties and seventies by the Kennedys.

  Irish and Catholic.

  Irish and Catholic, yes. So Irish people had a completely different attitude. Plus the ballad tradition which was
still alive in Ireland was one of the streams that had led into the reservoir of folk music that begat Bob Dylan and so much of American music, country music. These were second cousins of Irish traditional music. So there was a sense that we Irish had more ownership of America. In a way, though Ireland had lost to the British crown its self-esteem and a lot of its land, in America, Irish people were actually in some odd way reversing that. You see, America had been an English colony and, even after Independence, a bastion of Protestantism. The founding fathers of America were as suspicious of Roman Catholicism as the English monarchy. Protestants seemed more able at controlling desires, fleshly, worldly concerns than the Catholics, who were uncouth Irish who had just got off their famine ships and were causing trouble. America was intended to be an outpost of the strictest moralism.

  That seems quite at odds with the image that we, as young Europeans, had of America. To me, it looked like the country where everything was possible, where a sixteen-year-old could drive a convertible car.

  [laughing] Yeah! But you’re talking about the fifties, sixties on. I’m talking about the 1850s, 1860s.

  I don’t know about that. Actually I was talking about my years as a teenager: the 1970s. Life in America seemed easy and glamorous in that period. So the contrast is very hard to accept.

  Yeah. But even in the nineteenth century, some people were not having such strict rules. Some people wanted to drink ale and chase women down dirty streets. That’s the Irish for you! After surviving starvation in the hands of the Brits, they weren’t going to have a load of Prods tell them what they could or could not do.

  What was your idea of America when you were growing up? Did you hear tales about people who went off to America in your family?

  Of course, through television, we came across America: the sort of gritty glamour of cop shows, the noise of it, and the fact that it looked like a sexier place. There were so many different people. Everyone in Ireland looked the same. What I’m trying to say is there was no way that we as a band were going to buy this thing of not going to go to America. We loved the U.K. music scene, but we knew we didn’t quite fit in with the strict rules of the U.K. music press. As I mentioned, we didn’t want to be cool, we wanted to be hot, you see. The music scene in the eighties in London had a lot to do with fashion.

  When I first met you, you were banging on about this.

  Fashion, really, is what had driven punk rock, not philosophy. People weren’t talking about real revolution. It was Situationism that you can wear on your T-shirt. We just wanted to take our music wherever people wanted to listen. In America, we found people to be much less cynical. Paul McGuinness had an instinct that this would be a good place for us, that we would have to play to what he called “the real America,” not just coastal America. That began my love affair with the Midwest. But all the other groups in competition, they would never do that. They would play one date in Chicago, one date in Texas, and that was that.

  Do you remember the very first time you set foot on American soil? You took a plane, went through customs, and left the airport. What did you see? Whom did you talk to? Do you remember the smell of it?

  Yeah, I do. In fact, we wrote a song about it. It’s called “Angel of Harlem.” It was December, and we arrived at JFK. I remember from the very first just being in customs, and that Americans spoke louder than anyone else. They were all kind of shouting at each other. But these were just people who loaded the suitcases on the carousel. It was street talk, and it was exciting. Then I noticed that the colors of the paint at the airport, they were not colors you would ever see painted in Europe. They were strange mauves and sort of odd greens and yellows, and there was just a hint of what I now realize was a sort of black influence, and Chinese influence. It was very different. Paul McGuinness had, for a treat, organized a limousine. So here we were, with no money, and he got the record company to do a limousine! Now, we’d never been in a limousine, we’d never been in New York, we’d never been in America. It was mind-blowing. So we all climb into this ridiculous-looking car with Christmas lights around the windows, and we’re sitting there, laughing and giggling. And we’re on a freeway, tuning in to the radio, listening to different stations, and we came across this station called BLS. That’s the very famous soul station in New York, and Billie Holiday was singing. And then we came over the 59th Street Bridge, and see that view of Manhattan. I mean, for us, for kids just turning nineteen, twenty, it was Oz! [laughs] And Paul McGuinness who had organized the limo, he was the Wizard. [laughs] And the tour went so well. I remember we stayed at the Gramercy Park Hotel. The Clash were staying there, the Slits. It was like an American bohemia. I remember the Slits hadn’t got guitar straps. They were so punk. Their guitars, they were around their necks by strings. I think Edge put out his hand to shake one of their hands, and the singer, Ari Up, slapped it. She said: “We don’t do that.”

  It’s funny you’d mention the Slits, because they were practically the first band I ever interviewed, even before you. The photographer who was there with me was preparing for a shot as Viv, the guitar player, blew her nose into a handkerchief. So when he snapped, she just showed the snot dripping from the handkerchief to the camera. That was the picture.

  We saw the Clash in the lobby. They were just so cool, and we knew we weren’t. I had a fur coat, which was funny. I remember I walked out to the street. It was snowing in America. I just wanted to take it all in, standing at the corner in my fur coat and my crap haircut. And this unusual-looking man just stops on a bicycle beside me and says: “Hey, honey, where are you going? How are you, sweetheart?” And I was like: Urrgggh! [laughs] Not so bohemian after all. I want my mother! Hold on, I don’t have a mother. So Irish boy scuttles back into the lobby. It was funny.

  Funny, I was thinking about the Virgin Prunes, the group that your friends Gavin and Guggi were in. They were very much into theatrics, bringing out the feminine side, cross-dressing.

  . . . which was probably why I was wearing a fur coat . . .

  You worked with Brian Eno, who was part of the early seventies glam-rock scene. I don’t know if you remember that gatefold sleeve from the second Roxy Music album.

  Yes, I remember he wore the ostrich feathers.

  That’s the one. And you didn’t look like him or Guggi, but you didn’t look like Bruce Springsteen either . . .

  Artiness, arty-fartiness is around the corner from sissy, isn’t it? But in a way we were an art group, even if we didn’t look like one. Our joke was: we didn’t go to art school, we went to Brian Eno. Because every other rock band in the British invasion, they were all “art school.” Brian Jones, Keith Richards, John Lennon, Pete Townshend, the Clash were art school. Sex Pistols weren’t art school, but their manager was. You see, before we went to Brian, we had our own sort of avant-garde teenage years, our own surrealist performance art and humor: the giving of names, the arguments about Andy Warhol’s art and films—one major spat about his film Bad. The Virgin Prunes had actually taken over an exhibition space in Trinity College, where Guggi had sculpted vaginas out of fresh meat, flies and all. Gavin had one corner called “Sheep,” where a mate of ours crawled around on all fours in a traditional Aran sweater to take the piss out of the folkies. They were running amok. But if you look at those early pictures, the way the Virgin Prunes carried on was extraordinary. I mean this is twenty years before Marilyn Manson. There was a very strong glam cross-dressing aspect. I mean, it is a strange thing. Myself and Guggi, when we were kids, one of the albums we both obsessed on was Lou Reed’s Transformer.

  What a title! Now I’m coming to think of it.

  [laughs] Little did we know what the title was about when we were thirteen: transexuals! We were very heterosexual, but that’s a different point, isn’t it? So were most of the glam-rock bands. It’s funny Guggi later found himself in a frock as part of the Prunes. I see I’m macho enough to know that creativity is from the feminine side, and . . . there you go.

  Let’s go back to your co
ming to America for the first time. So you arrived when the Reagan era was just beginning.

  That’s right. But to go back to what we were talking about earlier, U2 would appeal to the ports in that Catholic sense, but we’d also appeal to the Midwest in that Protestant sense.

  You were Protestant and Catholic. A country obsessed with religion must have got you going.

  Yes, it’s true. The Bible-bashing televangelists that you would turn on in a hotel—these knock-off salesmen for God—whereas most reasonable sensible people would just change the channel, I was fascinated.

  Who was the first televangelist you saw on TV?

  It was a preacher who was asking his audience in TV land to put their hand against the screen to be healed. So there were people, old ladies with bronchitis, old ladies with broken hips, and probably people with cancer, all over America, getting out of their armchairs and putting their hands on the TV. It broke my heart. But remember I was a believer. Though I understood the power of the Scriptures they were quoting from, and I did believe in the healing powers of faith, I was seeing it debased and demeaned. But unlike a lot of people, I understood the language. What’s always bothered me about the fundamentalists is that they seem preoccupied with the most obvious sins. If those sins, sexual immorality and drug addiction, come out of unhappiness, then I’m sure God wants to set people free of that unhappiness. But I couldn’t figure out why the same people were never questioning the deeper, slyer problems of the human spirit like self-righteousness, judg-mentalism, institutional greed, corporate greed. You only have to look to unfair trade agreements that keep the developing world in the Dark Ages to see the hypocrisy I’m talking about. These people talk about the debasing of culture. What about the debasing of hundreds of thousands of real lives?

  Right. These people go to church on Sunday. I guess they’re very generous when the plate comes around. So were you angry with those fundamentalists?