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  But had you seen it coming?

  Yeah, yeah, we had seen it coming. But what can you do? He’s so fun, he was so good at it. [laughs] He was very, very good at it. But it takes a long time to recover from that stuff. You can lose the spring in your step for a few years. I think separation from drink and drugs is probably very like separation from your wife. They say it takes about half the length of time that you’ve put in it to get over it. So if you’ve been married for ten years, it’ll take you five. If you’ve been married for twenty, it’ll take you ten for you to be really over it. I think if Adam was at it for ten hard years, it probably took him five years to get over it.

  What sort of impact did it have on the band?

  Whenever Adam got into trouble, we were always there for him. And no matter what scandal was happening, no one cared about the band in those moments. Everyone just cared about him.

  Were there moments when you thought it was putting the band in danger?

  Oh yeah, for sure, I was always concerned. Because, for us, it wasn’t a win until everybody had scored. Everybody had to make it through this alive, to misquote Jim Morrison. Our motto was: “Everybody gets out of here alive.”

  So Adam was dating Naomi Campbell and you had come face-to-face with the paparazzi and the celebrity business. It must have been traumatic for that zealot still breathing, from time to time, inside yourself.

  No, no, no. Because you remember celebrity was on the list. It was part of the subject matter. Sliding down the surface of things was the energy of that period. I was the one who agreed to do the cover of Vogue with Christy [Turlington], and I had had enough of these po-faced U2ers. We were travelling the same routes as these girls, staying in the same hotels, though we weren’t walking in the same shoes. [laughs]

  Who knows? Maybe in private.

  I’m sure Adam tried them on, occasionally, as a great connoisseur of the shoe that he is. But he certainly poured champagne into a few. There was a certain fascination with their power with the populace. It goes back to the silent movie stars. Because in the thirties, Hollywood was never as powerful as it was in the silent age, and there’s great power in not opening your mouth.

  It’s a power you haven’t relied very much on during your career.

  Which is why I so respected it in the likes of Christy Turlington, who, when she chooses to open her mouth, has a lot to say, thoughtful, considered, and intelligent as she is.

  People say there were no bigger stars than Rudolph Valentino and Greta Garbo.

  None bigger. And these super models [Christy, Naomi, and company] were the silent movie stars of our age. Blank faces and stares that on one level suggest a kind of erotic acquiescence, and on the other a kind of spitting at the cameras, a kind of annoyance seasoned with mischief. [laughs] There was something very powerful. When you got to meet those who were at the top of that particular tree, they turned out to be very clever, very smart managers of their own brand and, in the case of Christy, Helena [Christensen], Naomi, and Kate [Moss], people you’d want to hang out with.

  Really?

  Hmm . . . They were much more interesting than most musicians. We had a lot of fun, a lot of laughs. We spent summers together. It was great, but it was anathema for a lot of our fans.

  Some thought you had lost it completely, or betrayed some sort of sacred cause. You were living the rock-star life.

  The funny thing is, those girls, all of them, love and know music more than most musicians. Kate and Christy are brilliant DJs, and always know what’s coming round the corner musically. Helena the same, and one of the great conversationalists, hungry for ideas—what can we make happen that night, that year. They can see potential, where others might miss it. And Christy just doesn’t miss a thing. Our summers in the mid-nineties were a little heady, a little hedonistic, but Edge and myself fell back in love with music in a way that was largely inspired by those girls and some of our other friends, like Michael Hutchence: great house parties, dancing, swimming in the Mediterranean, night-swimming—there was a great REM song—Michael Stipe, a true poet. Frivolity, exactly the time when we needed some.

  There’s a word you’re not using, which is decadence.

  I’m not using it because it wasn’t decadent, it was just the opposite. Decadence is when you have it all in front of you and don’t notice. I noticed everything. And I appreciated it.

  What about the rest of your family?

  It was a great time for them also. We were all at home, Ali was now closer to the “big girls,” as they were known, than myself and Edge. There were young kids to look after, so we kept it somehow grounded.

  But living the rock star’s life was not what we expected from U2. Isn’t it a cliché: here you are now, with a villa in the south of France. Didn’t the Rolling Stones have a villa up the road where they recorded Exile On Main Street in 1971?

  They should have stayed there; that’s a great album. I’m one of the people who believes there’s more in them. The music has to come out of a life. If there’s no life, there’s no music. But I think, again, as much as we were playing with clichés, we were also trying to crack them open. You’ve gotta remember the context here, the context of grunge, the sort of Seattle sound that was dominant at the time. I loved Seattle and I loved the sound, in fact the sound in the sense of a river, as it comes into the delta, the mouth of the river. It’s industrial, it’s gray, there’s rainy skies, there’s a plaid shirt, there’s ripped jeans, there’s thrift-shop jumpers with holes in them, and this kind of umbilical roar from Kurt Cobain. And there arrive in the harbor, plastic pants on a giant cruise ship with a satellite dish at the top going the wrong way up the river. [laughs] On Zoo TV, I suppose we were against the obvious definitions of authenticity. Authenticity is about an honest discourse between heart and mind, body, soul. It’s nothing to do with the clothes you wear. These white rock stars, they think they’re authentic, and that Prince is just some sort of show business Christmas tree. But he has more soul in his little finger than a whole harbor full of those rock bands. Kraftwerk . . . There’s another example of cosmic soul.

  The grunge movement was very much anti-eighties. It was aimed against the pretension to glamour of the eighties.

  But the eighties weren’t glamorous. The eighties were ugly: big hair, shoulder pads. I see the eighties as very ugly and very unglamorous. I think U2 are one of the few things you can recommend from the eighties.

  The eighties were the reign of fun, fashion, style over substance, the love of money, all those things that people thought U2 were standing against.

  We were, and still were in the nineties, challenging them, we just took a different route. The nineties were much sexier.

  The nineties were sexier for you, because you had been a zealot during the eighties. Others hadn’t been. I mean, look at Madonna. I think the funniest thing about the nineties is that pop artists wanted to go dark and introspective, and acts like U2 wanted to go pop and fight for their right to party. They sort of changed sides and crossed each other’s paths. Would you agree?

  But Achtung, Baby and Zooropa are hardly pop. They are as intense and dense as it gets. In fact I remember telling this to a German journalist before the album came out. But he misunderstood “dense” for “dance.” The remixes put the confusion to work.

  That was in Europe. What about America?

  I loved Pearl Jam. Eddie Vedder had an authenticity in that voice of his. They had and they still have commitment as a band. There wasn’t much of that in the eighties. In fact, at the end of the nineties, when the PopMart show eventually got to Seattle, the city was really good to us. It was the best show of the tour, outside of Chicago. All the Seattle musicians came down to show support for what we were doing. You know, even Kurt Cobain, before he died, was dressing up in a silver shirt.

  Who says no the most often in the band? I’m guessing it’s Larry.

  [laughs] Well, I wouldn’t have thought that needed much private detective work. Yeah, he’s
by far the most cautious person in the band, and does not want to set out on the journey until he has a clear idea of where we’re going and how we might get there. How old-fashioned! [laughs] You know, he’s the most sensible man in the band in that sense.

  I remember, when The Joshua Tree was released, way before it turned out to be your biggest success, Larry was the one, in the interviews, who was supposed to have convinced you that the duty of U2 was to write and perform timeless pop songs.

  Yeah. He and Paul McGuinness are the two people around us who are the most intolerant of what we might call the artiste, which is to say they’re suspicious of art. [laughs] But that’s all about control. If I were an artist, I’d want to be in advertising, because I would find it very difficult—and Larry would find it impossible—to hand over judgment of the quality of your work to critics. That’s the problem with art: what is and what isn’t art is decided by very few people. So those people, because there’s less of them, become very powerful. Whereas with a song, it goes on the radio: people hear it, they like it, they put it at the top of the charts. It’s not mediated the same way. So I think Larry’s always had a suspicion of art, because, then, we’re depending on the critics. Any band that has ever depended on the critics is usually broken up by the critics.

  Because there’s too much pressure on them? Is that what you mean?

  Well, that’s just no way to live. So he was always looking for the clearer idea, the clearer melody line with the least pretension.

  But was he happy while you were recording Achtung, Baby?

  Well, no. That’s what I’m saying. So, therefore, the only way Larry was going to like Achtung, Baby is if the songs were great. He couldn’t care less about the fact that we were working with technology. And the art project, that was just Bono and Edge being self-indulgent. Whereas the songs—are they any good? If not, let’s go home, this place is freezing.

  What was his opinion of Brian Eno?

  Well, there again, there is a perfect example. Larry would have the least amount of time for process as an essential ingredient. Brian’s all about process. The first thing Brian does when he arrives at a session is he redecorates the room—I’m not kidding. He tidies up the place, gets rid of instruments, amplifiers and . . . people [laughs] who are not integral. Then he asks about our approach, what approach are we taking. So there’s a lot of time spent on the process. So Larry would have his eyes up to heaven. But then, when a great song arrives at the end of the day, Larry would walk up to Brian and go: “That was a great day.” But if the song didn’t arrive, Larry would try to stop him being paid. [laughs] He’d want Brian to be writing the check for the privilege of being in the room with the band. [laughs] It’s all about results. If the song arrives at the end of it, that must have been worth it; if the song didn’t, he’d rather be home playing with his kids.

  How was he showing his impatience?

  I think on Achtung, Baby, there were a couple of occasions he was nearly at the airport. There was one occasion when he was left behind at what we called “the Brown Hotel” in East Berlin, where everything was brown. At a very tense time, when we had been in Berlin for three weeks, and had produced not one note of any real worth, when things were really tense, Larry was left in the hotel lobby by mistake when everyone else was taken to the studio. I mean, I think the comedy in the situation was eventually spotted by him. But Larry wouldn’t mind being left behind if he later had to catch up to something great. He couldn’t handle being left behind if he would later catch up with something as brown as the hotel. And there was a lot of brown on that record, before it finally became Day-Glo.

  So it took Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois, and Flood to turn black and white into Day-Glo?

  And Steve Lillywhite to keep it in focus. I have to say I don’t know where we’d be as a band without these people. Daniel Lanois is the finest musician. If you’re making an album with him, it’s got to be a great album, or someone is gonna die—either you or him. He can’t be around average. He can’t be around anything that doesn’t ring true. He’s the definition of a line I used in “Vertigo”: A feeling is much stronger than a thought.

  With Brian Eno, wasn’t it the other way around?

  You would think he would be egghead over heart, but he’s not at all. He listens to a lot of gospel, doo-wop, vocal groups that would bring you to tears. That said, he is hard on old concepts, always looking for the new. But context, fashion are not as important to him as soul. He is—has been—the great catalyst for some of U2’s best work: “Bad,” “With or Without You,” “Grace,” “In a Little While.” These are very emotional songs that would not have existed were he not in the room.

  “In a Little While,” I love that. I recognize you in that song.

  Well, Brian kicked that one off. He was playing around with some gospel chords, and I just started singing.

  How does Flood fit into that picture?

  The only man in the world who is a fan of my guitar playing! A true innovator. The explosions at the start of “Zoo Station,” where you think the speakers are blowing up, that’s him. A dark lord.

  I’m remembering a word I meant to ask you more about. It’s the first one that you used when I started you on Edge, Adam, and Larry, and that’s the word frustrating . . . Let’s take the example of the recording of your new album. Were there moments when this feeling of frustration returned?

  [pause] Ermm . . . On How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, we got on pretty well, though. [pause] It’s very hard sometimes to work on something for a long period of time, prepare for it, present it to the band, and then receive deafening silence, or the sound of a jaw opening and a yawn coming out. But Adam and Larry have very high standards, and usually, if it’s really great, they will be very interested. But even then, they won’t be hugely excited.

  Don’t you ever have this feeling of: “God, I know these people by heart. I know the joke he’s going to make. Please, spare me . . .” How do you guard yourself against those feelings?

  You mean they keep you on your toes?

  Yes. They keep me on my toes.

  So, this is silly, but . . . Imagine I’m some sort of headhunter, and I’m making a phone call to you. Let’s say that Edge has become a doctor, like he’d intended to way back then. So I’m asking you: You’re one of his best friends, and I really want you to tell me frankly about the guy. I’m about to give him a job as a director in a clinic. So what’s your opinion? What are his best qualities, his shortcomings, and what would you warn me against the most?

  Well, first off, please don’t make him a director of your clinic. [laughs]

  Should we appoint him as a surgeon?

  The thing that the three of them have—in excessive amounts—is integrity. They are capable of, on a regular basis, walking away from huge sums of money for doing the simplest things. [laughs] And I’m always amused at that. They’re unbendable in that sense—flexible, but not bendable. The three of them have very sly senses of humor. So that keeps me interested. This is a surgeon. He will make the smallest incision possible, but you’ll need extra ether, anesthesia. But he’s gonna probably spend an hour walking around the patient before he finally cuts him open. The area he’ll be interested in will be brain surgery.

  I heard rumors about weird experiments he enjoys conducting. Should I be afraid of that?

  If it’s somebody else’s head, I think you’re safe. [laughs] He’ll be very responsible with it, and, as I say, he will do the least damage on the way to the problem and on the way out of the problem.

  So you’re warning me about his tendency toward self-mutilation?

  Yeah, I wouldn’t let him operate on his own head. [laughs] And I’d have a backup emergency power supply, because it could take a long time.

  OK, now on to Adam. I’m about to hire him as a landscape gardener. I know he loves nature. I’ve just bought a huge property, a wonderful place in the south of France. We have vineyards, we’re going to set up a golf course, I’m think
ing of waterfalls as well. We have heard about this man, Adam Clayton. We know you’ve worked with him a lot. So do you think he might fit the job?

  Well, the first thing I’d say to you is: you want a very, very big budget. And be prepared to spend as much on the garden as you have on the property and on the house. Because, for him, the four walls are not half as interesting as what’s outside of them. He sees the garden as God’s furniture, and tends to it in a very meticulous way. He will never be seen running in your garden. He will frustrate the rest of the staff by how long it takes him to trim the hedge. But when you stand back, you will see some great and unexpected shapes in the hedge. He moves very slowly, but he’ll build a bridge over the river that runs through it, even if he won’t use a regular stonemason and he’ll use a sculptor.

  Excuse me, sir, but that’s pretty worrying. You’re telling me he’s going to be very expensive and that he won’t finish on schedule. I’m afraid I’m not going to hire him.

  Very expensive, won’t finish on schedule. Every artisan will be an artist. And it’s only when you realize you have no money left in the bank and you have to sell the place that it will dawn on you that this property is now worth ten times what you put into it. Nothing that he does dates, except his hair.

  Last one, of course, is Larry. And, by the way, I have no idea of the sort of job he’d have done had he not turned out to be a drummer.

  Ermm . . . So what would I recommend him for? . . . An actor! Because in a way, he is the one in the band who has the most pretense for a person who is so unpretentious. He has created a character that’s, I think, very enduring, unknowable, fascinating by doing very little. And I think that the camera loves people who . . . loathe the camera.