Bono Read online

  What is it that feels threatening?

  Well, just because I don’t know what’s around the corner or where we’re going. I don’t know. Will there be people at the airport to meet us? Will it work out? It’s not unlike New York, actually. It’s that same kind of high-pitched chatter, and people shouting across each other. There is a certain molecular excitement in Africa, which you do pick up. It feels like the molecules are vibrating a little faster. So then, we go out onto the streets, and it’s the chaos of Addis Ababa.

  I’ve never been there. How big a city is it?

  It’s a big city. I’ve been there a few times now. I can’t remember where we stayed, that’s kind of gone. But before we went off, someone asked us if we wanted to see around Addis Ababa. They said the best way to do was by horse. So I said: “Horses?” And they said: “Yeah.”

  Can you ride?

  No, I didn’t tell them I couldn’t ride. You should know that about me now.

  It’s true. [laughs]

  Mengistu.

  No, I didn’t say anything about not riding. Ali can ride. So, they said: “We can take Haile Selassie’s horses.” I said: “You’re joking!” They said: “Yeah. Now Haile Selassie’s gone, the palace has been taken by the Communists.” That’s right. But he’s not interested, as it turns out, in Haile Selassie’s horses. So somebody has them, and you can take them out for the day. They’re giant stallions.

  What color? Black?

  Black. And I had to get up on this horse. When I was a kid in Northside Dublin, the gypsy horses, they used to let them out in the winters. They’d come into our neighborhood, and we used to ride them bareback. But this is a very different thing. They’re about twice as tall.

  It’s a double-decker.

  [laughs] It’s a double-decker. You got it. I’m trying my very best not to show our hosts that I can’t ride. I’ve told them I can. So we go through the back streets, and I remember one vivid picture of the people who are with World Vision, which is an American aid agency. One of the women was breast-feeding a child on the horse. [laughs] She was so comfortable. She didn’t mean to be insensitive. But the Muslim women did not like this and came out and started throwing stones at her because she was showing her breasts. I love it when other people make such a faux pas. It’s usually me. But it was incredible to go through the back streets of this ancient capital by horse.

  And when the people in the streets saw this white man looking a little funny riding that huge horse, [Bono laughs] how did they react? Did they wave at you or did they stone you?

  They waved and laughed. Boys with big pearly grins just laughing their head off at the Irish people.

  You toured the city, but I remember a couple of years ago you mentioned a story about visiting the countryside, where you saw a treasure in some holy place. Do you remember that?

  Yes. The area of Ethiopia where we were working was in the north: a place called Ajibar, near Wollo. The local Communist commander took an interest in myself and Ali, I think just out of boredom. And he befriended us, would ask us questions about where we lived, and even our address. I got the impression he was going to bolt to get the hell out of Dodge, as the Americans say. We were in the hills, where you could see other hills way in the distance. At the top of one of those hills on a large flat mesa, you could just about make out a monastery. We asked “Comrade Gorma” about it and one day he took us there.

  On horseback?

  No, we went on jeep. Then we got out of the jeep, and then we took, I think, some donkeys. Maybe it was horses. I can’t exactly remember how we got up there. But when we got to the monastery, an extraordinary thing happened. All the monks started to panic and got down on their knees in front of this military man, and kind of begged him.

  . . . not to harm them.

  . . . not to harm them. And it was so shocking to see this. Then they all started bringing him in, and showing him around. He was not that scary a man, but it will show you the memory of the revolution had left these monks terrorized. The monks brought him and those following behind to this silo—I guess that would have been for grain, or something like that. There was a ladder. We climbed up the ladder, and then climbed down another ladder into the middle of the silo where, wrapped in sacks, was a treasure that they’d been hiding. There were crowns, gold crowns, and religious artifacts. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I photographed them. I still have the photographs. But the monk offered up the crown to “Comrade Gorma.” He put it on Ali’s head, and I have pictures of them. I really don’t know how priceless they were. I’m not qualified enough to figure out whether they were nineteenth- or eleventh-century. But as we left, we were so sad because we had the feeling these beautiful treasures wouldn’t be there the next day. I don’t know where this man went. Maybe now he’s an antiques dealer. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he handed it over and they’re in a museum somewhere. But it was Emperor Menelik’s retreat. Menelik was in direct line from King David. Ethiopia . . . it’s a mystic country. People are so royal looking. You read about Solomon coming to meet and indeed fall in love with the Queen of Sheba. It’s like Bob Marley on every corner. They say it’s where the Garden of Eden was. They say it’s where the Ark of the Covenant is. It’s a remarkable, beautiful country. It is bewildering to see the kind of poverty that lives there now.

  There is something unexpected in your amazement at the beauty of the place. The experience you have just described is not particularly sad. There is an element of drama, but you are conveying a real sense of beauty. But each time I have heard you talk about Africa before today, it was only to remind people of how tragic and dreadful a place it is.

  Whenever I visit developing countries, the thing that strikes me the most is the happiness in the midst of misery. I mean, you read about war and dismal poverty, but when you’re there, you see smiles, you hear laughter, you feel kindness, even joy.

  I can’t agree with that. I always try to talk about the potential of the people and the place. As I say, it’s a place of rare beauty. In fact, my book of photographs, A String of Pearls, taken when I was working there, was not of the sick and the hungry. They were of the recovering and the well. Because I wanted to convey how beautiful and how noble these people were. Yes, I think it’s very important to describe Africa in terms other than tragedy. You have to find a way of describing its myriad of possibilities, its thick jungle and rocky terrains. The Serengeti, the shining temples and calls to prayer . . . Their holy cities, where they play their car horns like musical instruments. Big bloody suns, that’s another one. When you see the sun setting, you duck. Oh yeah, the absence of self-pity, which is a quality I wish I possessed. It’s a quality I admire in people the most: lack of self-pity. It’s one of the marks of some of my favorite people. But, oh yeah, the giddiness and the laughter. You know, I used to have earrings, when the two of us were in charge of this orphanage for a short while. I was called “The Girl with the Beard,” because I couldn’t shave.

  I think that just by accident, you’ve come up with the title of this chapter.

  That’s what it was, I was called “The Girl with the Beard.” Myself and Ali worked on a program where you could teach children through songs or one-act plays. It is still operating, I’m told. We would teach them the things they needed to know in order to not be sick. So I wrote songs and they were translated into Amharic. Somewhere, these songs exist, and one of the plays was about giving birth. We worked with the local nurse. Stuff like how to cut the umbilical cord. There were some bad practices. They would use cow dung, and things like that, which would cause infection. These people are a captive audience. The children would then go around, singing these songs and so teach their parents. It was a three-week program: a song, a play, and a story, and then repeated. That’s all we did there.

  So your work was about the spirit of the people. It was not just distributing food.

  The camp was about feeding, but myself and Ali were in charge of the orphanage. We slept in a tent. In the morning, as
the mist would lift, we would see thousands of people walking in lines toward the camp, people who had been walking for great distances through the night—men, women, children, families who’d lost everything, taking few possessions on a voyage to meet mercy. Some, as they got to the camp, would collapse. Some would leave their children at the gates, and some would leave dead children at the fences to be buried. There was barbed wire all around the camp. I always thought this was so upsetting that we should have barbed wire. I thought the place looked like a concentration camp.

  But why did they put up the barbed wire?

  Unlike the concentration camps, it was to keep people out. It really brought home the problem. There was not enough to go around. Wouldn’t you steal food for your family? I would. And again, these people are so royal, they’re so elegant, so upright, these women and men. To have their dignity robbed from them, to arrive at a feeding station where it’s Auschwitz in reverse . . .

  Were people from the outside threatening to loot the camp?

  No, I don’t remember any feeling of aggression. The barbed wire was precautionary. I do remember a man coming to me with his child—his son. He was so clearly proud of his son. Giving me his son, and saying to me: “Please, take my boy, because if he stays with me, he will surely die. If he goes with you, he will live.” Having to say no, and having to turn away, is a very . . . very, very, very, very hard thing to do. One part of me did and, you know, one part of me didn’t. That’s the part of me that still goes back there. It’s a more than uneasy feeling. If you just put it into your own world, and think about your own child, and what it took for that man to say that, it’s . . . bewildering.

  You did that right after Live Aid, right?

  Yes. Having got caught up in Live Aid, I said to Ali: “I just can’t get these people I’m seeing on television out of my head. We have to try and do something. In a quiet way.” We didn’t tell anyone we were going. We just went out, as it were, under the radar.

  These experiences have clearly altered the course of your life. Everything you’ve been talking with me about, all the presidents, all the Popes, all the arguments, I finally realize that it all comes down to this.

  I don’t think I can talk about this anymore. Let’s change the subject.

  OK, OK. Coming back to music, has your perception of African music changed after that?

  I had a kind of epiphany, but it was a couple of years later, just sitting outside the Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles, when we were working on Rattle and Hum. The studio was way down east on Sunset Strip. And on a Saturday night, I would watch the parade of Mexican hot wheels, jumping trucks, muscle cars, and people cruising by, listening to rap breaking in America. Nineteen eighty-eight was incredible: incredible sound systems, deep sub-low bass, a cacophony of rhythm, chanting, disconnected voices, hip-hop coming from all directions. Amazingly sophisticated pop music. [suddenly imitates human beat box and syncopated rhythms] And I’m thinking: “I know this music. It’s African music.” The epiphany was realizing that technology had brought African music to the descendants of Africa in America. People who had no memory of their continent of origin, and no direct experience of the call-and-response music that is Africa. Yet through technology, through digital samplers, scratching old vinyl, their music was swimming back up the river through swing, rock ’n’ roll, soul, electronica, to its birthplace, which sounds to my ears so like hip-hop. How did that happen? Pure African music arriving through the DNA, through the genes of those people. That blew my mind. It still blows my mind because of what it suggests of a kind of folk memory, of what we all might carry with us from our ancestors. And not just music, gifts, maybe even prejudices.

  What about your ancestors?

  Oddly enough, Irish music has more than a little in common with African music or Middle Eastern music. It comes from a completely different place than the rest of Europe, well, Northern Europe. Its musical scale is pentatonic, not chromatic, i.e., quarter notes, bent notes. The Shanos singers, for example, their melodies they sing unaccompanied can be traced to Northwest Africa. I visited a musicologist in Cairo once who backed up the theory of professor Bob Quinn of University College Galway, who said the sea routes from Africa had brought much more connection even in the pre-Christian era between the west of Ireland, west of France, west of Spain and West Africa. If you look at Ireland’s most famous religious manuscript, the Book of Kells, it’s like Coptic manuscripts of the same era. Now you’d tell that to my old man, Bob Hewson, and you’d get more than a hairy eyeball. You’d get a clip on the ear. Blackfellows, the Book of Kells. Feck off! You see, a sneaky racism plays a part in everything. The Irish, and I’m guilty of this, think they invented everything.

  13. I WOULDN’T MOVE TO A SMALLER HOUSE

  “All the presidents, all the Popes . . . I finally realize it all comes down to this,” I had just said to Bono when he told me about his experience in a refugee camp in Ethiopia in 1985. Since he started to work for DATA in the late nineties, he’d banged on many doors and met quite a few heads of state. Hence these mental snapshots of a few Elvises of the late twentieth, early twenty-first century—Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin, Gerhard Shröder, John Paul II, Jacques Chirac. Did all of those world leaders have an ear for the melody Bono sang to them? “Annoying question,” as he would put it.

  It seems to me that you and Tony Blair are jealous of each other’s job.

  In one of our cases, maybe. [laughs] He’s a pretty good guitar player—plays every day, his missus told me. I checked his guitar case to see if it was in tune. It was, perfectly. He had a band in college—Ugly Rumours, I believe it was called. Little did he know that might be his nemesis. But seriously, he and Gordon Brown could really change the world if they keep up their work in Africa. They can be the Lennon-McCartney of global development.

  You mean continual arguing?

  I mean their best work is when they work together.

  And what about your arguing with Blair?

  Well, there are very few things I would disagree with Tony Blair about. Going to war, when he did, with Iraq would be one of them. But I believe he was sincere—sincerely wrong, in my point of view. But I think the extraordinary thing about Tony Blair was: it was clear, when he went to war, that he was doing the unpopular thing in his own country and with his own party. It wasn’t a move to make himself popular. Fairly unusual behavior for a politician. We need more of this. Mind you, less of that.

  You didn’t answer the second part of my question. When does Bono want his seat in government? Does Bono want to be president?

  [laughs] I wouldn’t move to a smaller house.

  OK, so now, you’ve visited smaller houses. I mean, you’ve gone backstage.

  Having gone backstage, yes, and seeing the laundry room and how a few live wires are sticking out of the odd wall. It’s what politics has in common with sausage-making: if you knew what they threw in there, you wouldn’t eat the end product.

  What is the most surprising thing that you have discovered about politics?

  [pondering] How immense shifts in position begin instinctively rather than intellectually. And how great alliances are made because of a shared sense of humor or a spontaneous comment.

  That reminds me of a funny thing I heard once. Someone told me he had spoken to an ex–Cabinet officer who said to him: when you’re in school, there tends to be approximately three groups of people. Some are just obnoxious; some are clever and quite able; but most are just dull and wait till it’s over. He said that when he joined the Cabinet, the distribution was exactly the same.

  [laughs] That’s right. This is the thing: they start in the most unbelievable way to resemble people you know, in every good way and in every bad way.

  Power is often very petty stuff. Have you read that book by the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Emperor? I know you’ve read the one about his years as a war correspondent in Africa, The Shadow of the Sun, but The Emperor is about the last y
ears in power of Ethiopia’s last emperor, Haile Selassie. It is an extraordinary account of how power was organized there: an incredibly refined structure totally centered on itself, blind to the devastation happening in the country. Now that’s quite an extreme example, but I’m pretty sure that half of President Chirac’s day—or any president’s—is the same: they deal with who is going to be invited to such and such ceremony, or how to prepare for the next election. Power is often more about itself than about actually doing useful things for the country or the rest of the world.

  Yes, I have read The Emperor, and it’s true. Red tape, whether they’re cutting it to open hospitals on the same day as they are cutting the health budget, or the red tape of bureaucracy tying their hands behind their back, the machine of politics makes it hard for change. A good leader needs big scissors to get things moving. Actually, I think a great leader has to have a great ear for melody. By this, I mean clarity of ideas. What I think they might all have in common, the ones that I’ve met—if they’re any good—is an ability to see through the din and clangor of ideas and conversations and points of view, and hear the melody line, and realize: this is the thing we’ve got to do; this is more important than the others. They’re like talent scouts in the music business. They’re A & R men for ideas. Bill Clinton was incredible at spotting an idea.

  Did you witness that talent of his in action?

  Oh yeah! Like, I had to pitch him one.

  You mean Clinton caught on to it immediately?

  Well, his administration was full of people our own age. I mean, they were people in their thirties. He didn’t just have an ear for a melody, he had his ear to the ground to pick up fresh insights, new ideas for the economy, for everything. He had a brain that could remember them all. I had met him a few times, but I remember, as I told you before, having to go to pitch him the Drop the Debt idea for the millennium, Jubilee 2000 stuff.