“Pop: music of general appeal, especially among young people that originated as a distinct genre in the
1950s. It is generally characterised by a heavy rhythmic element and the use of electrical amplification.”
- Collins English Dictionary

By it’s very nature, pop should be a transient, ephemeral thing. Yet it is one of the undoubted paradoxes of life that often it is the most ephemeral things that stick in your mind the longest.

I can still vividly recall the first pop concert I ever attended. It was in the gymnasium of Mount Temple school, Dublin, in 1976, when I was 15 years old. It was the middle of the day, all the lights were on and the familiar smell of rotten sneakers and stale sweat filled the room. Most of the school was there, milling about with end-of-term excitement, paying little attention to official proceedings. Five friends strode out onto a rickety stage constructed from several tables shoved together for the first performance by their group, Feedback. Their leader, Paul Hewson (Bono), struck a chord on his guitar and, I swear, a jolt ran through the room.

Few of the kids there had seen a live electric band before and, as they launched into an enthusiastic version of Peter Frampton’s Show Me the Way, the place exploded. I was utterly awe-struck. I stood transfixed in front of the stage, feeling those electric guitars and pounding drums ripping right through me, watching Paul as he stopped playing his guitar, grabbed the mike stand and yelled: “I want you! Show me the way!”

Even the song title seems strangely pertinent. For, in that moment, was the beginning of something that brought me to where I am now, writing about popular music for The Telegraph having misspent my youth in pursuit of my own rock dreams. And it took four members of that teenage group to where they are now, standing at the very summit of the big rock candy mountain, about to release their eagerly-awaited 10th album.

For Paul Hewson is better known to the world by his teen nickname Bono. The musicians who shared table space with him were Dave Evans (the Edge), Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen and Dick Evans (Dave’s older brother). The group later began writing their own material and changed their name to the Hype. And then, after Dick left, they became U2. You may have heard of them.

Some years later, I told Bono that concert changed my life. He could only concur. It changed his life too.”There was, from the very start, the evidence of a spark,” he told me. “When I heard that D-chord, I got some kick . . . It was like starting up a motorbike . . . And the audience went wild! And I think we might as well forget the actual piece ’cause that wasn’t important . . . [cue embarrassed laughter] but it was the first thing I ever sang well. That was a very special concert, that was one of the best concerts of our lives . . . And we built ourselves around that spark.

“It was like four blind kids blustering away and there was the evidence of just a little light in the corner and we started to work towards that. Getting to grips with our instruments, getting to grips with performance.And the light was getting clearer. Right now it’s like standing in the daylight. Looking around me, I’ve grown up. I mean you’re talking about when we formed. You’re talking about 15-year-olds.” Looking around me, I’ve grown up. He made that remark in December, 1980, sitting up late one night in a London flat after an exhilarating concert at the Marquee. He was 20 years old. I was 19. As it turned out, much to our surprise, we all still had a lot more growing up to do. U2 have done theirs in public. I have often had the rather disconcerting experience of being in somebody’s house only to be confronted by a picture of my classmates, perhaps pinned to a bedroom wall. I have to stop myself asking, “How do you know them?” Everybody knows them.

Over the course of two decades, U2 have become the most popular rock band in the world. They have sold more than 70 million albums and gained a reputation as rock’s premiere live act, making the transition from Mount Temple gymnasium to Wembley Stadium seem almost effortless. And they have done so creating music of integrity, passion and creativity, crossing the two most essential but usually mutually exclusive schools of rock: street (they have the post-punk emotional credibility of Bruce Springsteen or Oasis) and art (their modernist meshing of influences from other genres demonstrates the adventurousness of Roxy Music or David Bowie).

From their shining 1981 debut album, Boy, an evocative portrait of spiritually troubled adolescence, through the rousing and anthemic War (1983), the rough-house American roots stylings of The Joshua Tree (1987) to the dark-spirited, post-modern European ironies of Achtung Baby! (1991), U2’s music has continually embraced change, never resting on a proven commercial formula. But one aspect of the group has remained reassuringly constant. The personnel.

In an ego-driven profession where splits and line-up changes are a routine hazard, U2 are a rare example of a group that have stuck together all their lives. Their intense loyalty to one another is reflected in their attitude to those around them, the members of their organisation (who are always treated as colleagues, not employees) and their many lifelong friends (Gavin Friday, who grew up on Bono’s street and forged his own art-pop career, remains Bono’s intellectual sparring-partner).

And, in a union remarkable by any standards, let alone those in the fickle world of show business, Bono is married to Alison Stuart, his childhood sweetheart, another former Mount Temple pupil. (Mind you, those of us who went to school with the gorgeous Mrs Hewson have no trouble comprehending the longevity of this particular relationship.) The couple have two daughters, and, as Bono comments on the laddish behaviour prevalent in so many contemporary British rock groups, “liking a drink and being able to take care of yourself doesn’t make you a hard man. To be a father - now that’s hard.”

It is these enduring relationships that Bono credits with keeping U2 in touch with the same core values that first inspired them. “The classic rock and roll star disease is being surrounded by people who agree with you,” he says. “It gets harder and harder to work with a bunch of people who are your equals and who don’t always agree with you, especially if you’ve known them a long time. I see people as they go through life getting rid of arguments, shedding friends, till they’re left with just one or two people who agree with them. But I think you’re as good as the arguments you get. I like to be around a row.”

So let me share with you a slightly esoteric argument that Bono and I have been having for years. I have always preferred the genre description “pop” to the rather more narrow “rock”, since it has an openness that allows it to embrace a multitude of elements from the world of popular culture. He would have none of it.

U2 were always a rock group. Until now. Under the influence of Bjork producer and ambient experimenter Howie B, U2’s new album embraces the hip-hop techniques of modern dance (drawing a hitherto unsuspected grooviness out of Adam and Larry’s rhythm section), crossed with the Edge’s searing guitar rock and all hung around songs of melodic width, emotional depth and intellectual wit. It is an extraordinary record of glittering surfaces and dark undercurrents. It is called, quite simply (and perhaps with a hint of irony) Pop.

“I thought ‘pop’ was a term of abuse,” Bono recently confessed to me. “It seemed sort of insulting and lightweight. I didn’t realise how cool it was. Because some of the best music does have a lightweight quality, it has a kind of oxygen in it, which is not to say it’s emotionally shallow. We’ve had to get the brightly coloured wrapping paper right, because what’s underneath is not so sweet.”

He has apparently been swayed by a multiplicitous dictionary definition of “pop” that he loves to drag out. “Let me see now . . . Pox,” he laughs, flicking through the pages of an enormous volume hauled from his bookshelves. “Practise. Pram. Prant. Prang. God, all my words are here! Pratfall. Preach. Prayer rug. Hold on, I’m past it. Here we go. ‘Pop: to make or cause to make a light, sharp explosive sound.’ Isn’t that great?” But it doesn’t stop there. He proceeds to rattle on through a dozen or more definitions, as varied as “taking a drug in pill form” to “a flavoured non-alcoholic beverage”.

His new-found enthusiasm for the notion of “pop” centres on his realisation that it is a word capable of reflecting his own voluminous excitement with life. Bono is a remarkably vibrant individual. Even as a schoolboy he had that most indefinable of qualities - charisma. And he has it in abundance now, as if he’s somehow expanded to fill the dimensions of his larger-than-life existence.

I can remember him in the earliest days, stomping around the rehearsal room, urging his fellow band members to play, almost trying to suck the music out of their instruments. He is still fuelled by that same energy and desire, driven by restless intellect and spirit.

His conversation shoots off down unexpected alleyways. Discussing one of the album’s stand-out tracks, Mofo, a wailing techno-blues for an absent mother, he’ll suddenly launch into an animated flight of fancy. “We should have called it ‘Oedipussy’,” he’ll declare, laughing. “Maybe I could sing it hanging from a giant umbilical cord.”

There is, however, darkness lurking behind the humour. Bono’s mother died when he was 14 and he has long recognised that this was a defining moment in his life, pushing him in two directions at once: towards his profound faith in God and towards rock and roll. The prevailing wisdom is that the devil has all the best tunes. Yet three members of U2 (Bono, Edge and Larry) have been devout Christians since their teens. Although they avoid preaching or crusading, their spiritual faith infuses their music.

It could even be argued that the tension between their Christian values and the very primal, sexual and usually hedonistic nature of their chosen art form lies at the very heart of U2’s creativity. As Bono sings on Mofo, he has been, “Lookin’ for to save my soul / Lookin’ for to fill that GOD shaped hole”. “Everyone’s got one,” he says. “Some are blacker and wider than others. It goes right back to the blues. It’s what first makes you want to shout at God, when you’ve been abandoned or someone’s been taken away from you.

And I don’t think you ever fill it, not completely. You can fill it up with time, by living a full life, but, if you’re silent enough, you can still hear the hissing.” Some might imagine that faith would be enough to fill that hole. Yet several tracks on Pop suggest Bono might be experiencing a crisis in this department. On songs such as If God Will Send His Angels, Please, a stunningly ironic paean to the values of quick-fix capitalism entitled The Playboy Mansion and the album’s emotionally raw closing track, Wake Up Dead Man, he seems to be searching in vain for evidence of the hand of God amid the chaos and injustice of worldly life (”Jesus, were you just around the corner? / Did You think to try and warn her? / Or are You working on something new? / If there’s an order in all of this disorder / Is it like a tape recorder? / Can we rewind it just once more?).

“Belief and confusion are not mutually exclusive,” Bono insists. “I think belief gives you a direction in the confusion. But you don’t see the full picture. That’s the point. That’s what faith is. You can’t see it. It comes back to instinct. Faith is just up the street. Faith and instinct: you can’t just rely on them. You have to beat them up. You have to pummel them to make sure that they can withstand it, to make sure they can be trusted.”

Pop demonstrates that U2’s instincts are very much intact. “It’s funny, because I really have grown to like the word ‘pop’,” Bono admits now. “I just didn’t realise how cool it was. It was the skinny boys who insisted it was all ‘rock and roll’. It’s the grown-ups who called it ‘pop music’. And now we’ve all grown up.” Ah, it’s that grown-up business again. But Bono has proof that pop is a grown-up word. “Look,” he laughs, hauling out his dictionary once more. “There’s another definition for ‘pop’ here: ‘an informal word for father’. That’s pretty grown up, you have to admit.”

? 1997 The Daily Telegraph. All rights reserved.

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