THE PROFESSIONALS
Move over, World. U2 have come back to sort things out. In New York, their latest LP, entitled Pop, pending, Bono gives a beggar $200, but doesn’t pay for his vodka; Edge gets nervous around Neil Diamond; Adam stays on the wagon and Larry holds the whole caper together. “Look,” they shout at Tom Doyle, “we’re not gonna suddenly turn into Bon Jovi.”

It’s 4.30 a.m. in Bono’s hotel suite on the 49th floor, and lights in the top-floor windows of Manhattan skyscrapers sparkle below. In the near distance, the traditionally green-hued peak of the Empire State Building is tonight bathed in cool blue to mark the suitably dramatic occasion of Frank Sinatra’s 81st birthday. Our khaki-capped host - despite an evening necking Stolichnaya vodka and the preceding afternoon downing cheap red wine, which he thinks may or may not be responsible for the nasty rash now itchily developing around his hairline - is in the suite kitchen, expertly jemmying the tops off bottles of lager. A mere seven days after finally completing U2’s ninth studio album, the wryly named Pop, Bono is clearly enjoying his renewed freedom after such a lengthy creative stretch. Earlier in the week, the New York gossip columns had reported U2’s arrival in town with a sighting of their garrulous leader vaulting the bar of a downtown drinking establishment to mix improvised cocktails for Evan Dando and Helena Christensen. Dimming the lights above the lounge table, a silhouetted Bono sparks up a Camel (now a confirmed smoker after he began inhaling the dang cheroots) and the conversation begins to steer bladderedly through a variety of topics that might reasonably appear unrelated to those not pleasantly lathered at this comfortably indecent hour: the hitherto unexamined similarity between Snoop Doggy Dogg and Steely Dan; the fact that Ash’s songwriting suggests to Bono that there’s something going on that’s “smarter than your average bear”; the sorry tale of The General, a Dublin gangster gunned down on his way back from the video shop with a tape of Scarface under his arm. Then there’s a lovingly delivered anecdote about a waster acquaintance of the bands in the early ’80s, who broke into Bono’s flat while U2 were on tour, cooked himself a meal, did the dishes, and then legged it with his TV and video. Months later, the petty burglar cheerfully admitted the crime to his
>famous victim in a Dublin pub.

“He said to me,” Bono deadpans, “I thought, Well, the band’s doing alright and that…” Suddenly he gets to his feet and gravitates - part-swagger, part-stagger - in the direction of the hi-fi to press the play button on the finished mix of a new track, Mofo. “Sorry,” he offers in mock apology, “this is like getting the baby pictures out.” A thundering bass intro bursts in at cardiac-arresting volume, to be closely followed by a full-throttle backbeat, over the top of which vintage synthesizer sounds do battle with a guitar that convincingly simulates the sound of a 747 taking off. It’s techno alright, but not, perhaps, as we know it. It’s also unmistakably U2. U2 with…there’s no other word for it…balls. All of this makes more sense of the fact that Bono has been going on all night about how he wants the group to make a “man’s record” this time around. He becomes animated at the memory of the time when the nascent, highly impressionable U2 supported The Stranglers. “They were just…men,” he booms enthusiastically. “They weren’t lads. They were much more scary and they made you want to pull back. Rock’n'Roll is obsessed with juvenilia and skinny boys, which is cool, and I understand the homoerotic implications of that. But with wasted young men, you smile rather than pull back, and with a lot of these older groups, you just want to wrestle them to the ground and cut their hair and stop this 16-year-old thing. Because there’s something about knowing who you are and where you are.”

He emits a smoky laugh.
“At one point we were gonna call it Pop- For Men. Pop Pour Homme,” he grins in the half-light, “See this is the record where the group really have the hips.”
>
Virtually day and night outside the Rhiga Royal Hotel on West 54th Street, there is a cluster of those fans who are eerily clued-in to U2’s every movement. Stepping out for a meal the night before, The Edge (now proudly hat-less) tactfully ducks requests for autographs with a promise that he will be back soon. Once he and his partner, Morleigh - whom he became entangled with when she took up the position of belly dancer on the latter half of the Zoo TV jaunt- have parked themselves in the back of a waiting minibus (note: even in this city of the smoked-glass luxury stretch vehicle, no limousine), he admits he’d spotted a few professional autograph hunters among the pack, individuals as recognisable to your sharp-eyed rock star as members of the paparazzi. Edge remembers once having had an electric guitar scratchplate thrust under his nose to sign, later to realize that it would doubtless be screwed back onto some tuneless lump of firewood and sold to the very highest bidder. This evening, however, there is another, more enthralling thought on his mind. U2 are sharing the hotel with Neil Diamond.

“Did you see The Diamond?” he enquires of Q, who as a matter of fact certainly did. “We got in the lift with him,” Edge coos. Any pleasant exchanges occur? “Nah,” he laughs. “Far too nervous.” You or him? “Oh, me of course.”

Ten minutes of typically hairy New York driving later, The Edge arrives at a SoHo restauranty, E&O, an oriental diner with a bijou red-velvet basement lounge where earnest, sideburned DJs puff cooly on fags and play rare groove records. Half a drink later, the other members of U2 arrive: Larry and Adam with polite handshakes and nods; Bono by sauntering up to your corespondent to warn of “a great place where going on to after, where they sell this special vodka”. Twenty minutes later, as a result of a hard day’s photo shoot in Manhattan’s meat-packing district, he will have conked out in the minibus outside, giving the meal a very necessary miss. At the table, Clayton and Edge, perhaps the two most drily analytical members of the group (a trait both have inherited from Eno), talk about the unbridled joy they’re experiencing on having finished recording the new album. At the Q Awards in November, the guitarist had cheerfully admitted that there was “six weeks work to be done in a week” if the album was to be completed on schedule. He can now afford to be more reflective about the whole affair.

“With this record, there was a lot that we were trying to take on,” he explains, between mouthfuls of noodles and (almost) delicate sips of white wine. “We wanted it to be a record with some real songs, some discipline and some focus in the material. We also wanted to take in some new ideas from the world of dance music and hip hop, or whatever, because we felt strongly that that’s where music is at its most interesting at the moment. So, a lot of the time, it was really about finding our way into these worlds of trance and techno and hip hop, and learning how we could operate in those worlds, and then integrating it back into the songs we’d started to write. So there was an awful lot to pull off on this project.”

Both agree that it’s still too soon for them to be objective about Pop, they’re too close to it. For a start, there’s something nagging at Edge about the first chorus of a key track, Staring At The Sun, a strong Kinks-flavoured pop song. “I can’t even put my finger on what it is. Maybe it’s just that, when you’ve got an idea in your head about what something shoukd sound like, you go with the closest thing you can get to it. Y’know, I’ve probably still got to get to a place where I can listen to what it is as opposed to what I was imagining it would be.”

“The other disorienting thing, of course, is that there’s a bit of a sense of loss when you finish a record,” adds Clayton. “For a long time you have a purpose every day, going in there and working on it. It’s an intense, intimate environment, and now you’ve got to do the other side of the gig, which is to get out there and present it to the world.”
>
Having decided to re-present himself to the world after his kip in the van, Bono grabs Q, links arms and leads in a tandem march towards the door. “Let’s get that drink then,” he announces, “we’re getting a lift with Mo.” Mo turns out to be a hugely charming, expensively besuited friend of the group with a slightly skewed American accent who you might reasonably assume to be a music-business lawyer if you hadn’t already been informed that he is, in fact, Muhammed Sacirbey, Bosnia’s Foreign Minister. Still, it’s comforting to know that even international diplomats have huge mounds of paper and assorted crap cluttering up the back seat of their car, which, like most folk, they hastily and half-embarassedly shovel onto the floor before their unanticipated passengers clamber in.

There is an Elite model party being held at a downtown club called Chaos tonight, except someone’s got their dates mixed up. It’s practically deserted, the polar opposite of “rocking’. A fussing record company girl informs Bono she’ll “change the music to rawk” for him in a minute. “Don’t worry,” Bono replies reassuringly. “I prefer disco, to be honest.” Elbow on bar, Bono leans over and- none of that specialized vodka in sight-oders Stoli for himself and Q, although no cash, it seem, need change hands between himself and the visibly star-stricken barman, enforcing the ironic reality that fantastically wealthy rock stars are rarely called upon to stump up for their own drinks, even if they feel the urge. With only a handful of months before U2 begin touring Pop sometime in April, Bono is again contentedly wrestling with his twin personae of home-loving
>husband (and father to daughters Eve and Jordan) and booty-shaking, big-talking rock celebrity. It is, he admits, a division that he contrarily thrives upon. Now, after nearly two years based back in Ireland, he finds himself inexorably drawn back to the notion of life on the road. Unsurprising, really, since he has spent most of his adult life on tour.

“With this record,” he reckons, “because it’s so different, we’re gonna have to really push it. I think it needs that and it deserves that. It’s not like, ‘Oh, dear, we’re going out on the road.’ I can’t even begin to describe the feeling of what it is to be part of something like the U2 thing on the road, on every level. All the fun of the circus. Renting a couple of 747s and just, y’know (wide-eyed look, devilish twinkle in eye) crashing them.”

Retreating to a low-level seating area at the back of the club, Bono soon becomes involved in a heated discussion with Mullen and Sacirbey about whether the group - who are keen, this time, to tour countries they’ve never visited before, the sort of places most other groups don’t really want to visit - should play Tel Aviv in the light of its current political climate. Sacirbey and Bono are wavering, both arguing that it’s important to make a stance, while understanding that to deny the natives of something as peripheral as a rock concert may be a futile gesture. Mullen is having none of it. “It could be like Queen playing fucking Sun City,” he argues, heatedly. Always portrayed as the take-no-shitter of the band, you get the feeling that he’s the real dictator of the group’s activities, and barometer of what is, and what is not, U2. When he’s as riled as this, it has to be said, you wouldn’t fuck with him either.

Next morning, however, the irrepressibly good-looking Mullen is remarkably less up for it and admits to feeling like a pile of hungover shite. We’re in The Cosmic Cafe, a cholesterol-fuelled deli-diner and regular hangout of Mullen’s when he is in New York. The brusque Hispanic waiter has suddenly become flitty at the arrival of our celebrity drumming guest and hovers around. But, this morning, sir would really rather not see the menu. There is thunder in the valleys. “I’m gonna eat later,” he decides after a cursory glance, before queasily warning, “and I’ll have a bucket nearby.”

It soon becomes clear that the drummer is also still blinking into the sunlight when it comes to assessing Pop. “I’m just, like, trying to find clarity, y’know,” he says. “Some people have now heard the record and they want to talk about it and I just feel…(grimaces) I just need a week. Having said that, it’s very hard to find a place for this record. It doesn’t have the sort of grounding that maybe some of the other records have. So that’s my problem.”

People see you as being the traditionalist.
“Well, I have been accused of this,” he smirks.
Were you going with the techno thing?
“I dunno. It’s very hard because, y’know, a lot of people are saying, Have you become dance or trip-hop? You hear all these (screws up face) terms used. I’m not comfortable with any one particular genre of music, I just like the idea of taking whatever’s out there and fucking with it. It’s very easy to lose what’s special about a band through technology, and we’ve touched on that a couple of times. Zooropa was the start of it and we got away with it, but in Passengers, we were just about to cross over into an area that I wasn’t comfortable with. So this record was an opportunity for me to take it back to (pauses)…there’s no word to describe it as such. But I am concerned about these reference points. It’s a load of bollocks. We’re just messing with different things.”

Edge arrives. He too is feeling - let’s not beat about the bush - “crap”, although he will soon order pancakes and bacon, over which he either absent-mindedly or gastro-experimentally dollops generous amounts of maple syrup.

“Oh fucking hell look at that, isn’t that amazing?” he exclaims, almost proudly. There was a quote from Bono very early on in the album’s life saying that Pop was going to be very much a wild rock’n'roll album but, as Mullen silently assents, that was just talking too early. Some of Pop, like Mofo and first single Discotheque, are noticably techno-influenced; other tracks like Miami and The Playboy Mansion are unarguably fashioned from the slow-burning loop collage stylisms of trip-hop. There are more straightforward rock tracks - the incendiary Last Night on Earth, the near-transcendental journeying of Gone - but on the whole, it’s a modern, experimental record. What happened? Did they just take a left turn somewhere in the middle of this project?

“Well it might be that, in the end, it still is a rock’n'roll album,” he claims. “Don’t you think, Larry, it’s rock’n'roll in the sense that it probably more vital than any record we’ve released, probably since our third record? There’s more up-tempo material, it’s full-on. It depends on what you mean by rock’n'roll…”

“Exactly,” replies Mullen. “It’s to do with terminology. It’s not a guitar record. It’s much more than that.”

Edge: “It’s not a rock guitar record.”

“Yes, that’s what I mean,” grins Mullen.

Edge: “Rock’n'roll is a spirit, it’s not just about a style of playing guitar. When we talk about rock’n'roll, we’re not gonna suddenly turn into Bon Jovi. We never meant that. We meant that it is going to be vital and up.”

This is the first album in 13 years - Rattle And Hum aside- that they’ve recorded without Brian Eno. Did they feel it was time to move on?

“Well, there were two things,” Edge begins. “First of all, I don’t think he was really interested in getting into a full-on up-tempo record. We sensed a divergence of interest between Brian and ourselves. We also figured out that maybe this was the record to take a break from one another. In the end, Brian would have been a great asset to the sessions, but he genuinely was going in a different direction. I’m sure we’ll work with him in the future, if he’s into it. But it was the right decision.

“Also, we’d just done the Passengers record together. On that we’d allowed Brian to take the collaboration as far as he could.”

“For me at least,” Mullen sighs, “there’s a thin line between making interesting music and being self-indulgent. We crossed that several times on Passengers. In U2 we have opposing opinions on Passengers. Mine is that it’s a lot of very, very bad, self-indulgent music.”

“You’ve probably realized,”Edge butts in, eyebrow raised, “he doesn’t like it.”

“I’m not saying that the music is crap,” he adds, though not entirely back-pedalling. “I’m just saying that it can border on being self-indulgent. Not that the drums were ever self-indulgent, but all that other shit…”

Preliminary work on Pop (”The themes are love, desire and faith in crisis,” says Edge, “the usual stuff”) began in summer 1995, the band based in London working with Soul II Soul founder and Bjork/Madonna producer Nellee Hooper. Out of these sessions came two tracks: the spaghetti western dramatics of Wake Up Dead Man - a song that, as the guitarist puts it, existed in a more “gothic and bombastic” form during the recording of Zooropa - and the dark, lustful If You Wear That Velvet Dress. Then Mullen’s back packed in, a recurring problem. By this time, U2’s long-serving studio referee Flood had become involved, along with Scottish ambient hip hop artist Howie B, who encouraged the temporarily drummerless U2 to play while he provided break-beats on twin decks. Work resumed in earnest in February ‘96, although projected summer/autumn release dates were forced back again and again. Since Zooropa was done so quickly, people were quick to assume they were in a jam…

“It wasn’t that we were having trouble,” Mullen insists. “We set ourselves a task that was unattainable. There was no way that we were gonna be able to finish an album in eight months. We’ve never done an album in eight months, we’ve always taken a year.”

“Zooropa was different,” Edge explains. “A lot of those songs came out of being on the road and it was capitalizing on the momentum of that. This one was from a standstill.”

“Pop only came together in the last two months,” Mullen admits. “And that’s a good thing, because if we’d spent a year and a half on it, a lot of the material would be very old by now. There’s nothing set in stone with us, everything changes, everything’s up for grabs until the last minute. So it wasn’t like, oh we were having terrible trouble. It was just that we couldn’t make the record in eight months.”

There was a rumor floating around (Mullen: “I can’t wait to hear this!”) that you couldn’t stand the sight of each other any more and couldn’t bear to be in the same room during the recording of the album.

Edge: “That’s bollocks.”

Mullen: “That’s a good one.”

Edge: “We actually did most of the album in the control room which is a room about eight feet by twelve feet, and we were all crammed in there for a year, including Howie B and Flood. So if there were any major personality problems, it would’ve made working on the record an impossibility.”

Mullen: “We’ve never been in that situation, funnily enough. We disagree, but… (pauses). At the beginning of Achtung Baby I suppose we’d lost contact with each other, which was something we hadn’t done before. We went our separate ways and then when we came back, we were listening to different things and so there was a conflict about what direction people wanted to go with. So it was a struggle and an uncomfortable situation for the first couple of months. But not in the fact that people were rowing, but just trying to get where people’s heads were at.”

One very real crisis point in U2’s recent history was reached when Clayton missed a December 1993 Zooropa show in Sydney due to unspecified “over-indulgence”. It was the first time that another musician - on this occasion Clayton’s roadie Stuart Morgan - had performed live with them. The bassist has since quietly gone on the wagon. Did that put a strain on the rest of the band, or was it a question of just supporting him?

“Well, we’re mates first and foremost,” trills Edge, “so I would say the latter. It really was about giving him a bit of support. And basically just getting on with life afterwards. I would hope that if any of us had a big problem of one sort or another, we’re close enough that the other members of the band would weigh in there, and be supportive (pauses)… That was a bad moment, but that’s really all it was.”

“It’s not like it’s happened before or it’s been continued,” continues Mullen. “It was a moment. We just thought, OK, this guy’s having a problem, let’s see what we can do. That was first and foremost, and what we did afterwards is between us. It was uncomfortable, but it’s not something you can prepare for and if you think of the consequences further down the line, sure - whatever you want to think they might be. It was an unfortunate thing. But it doesn’t come up in conversation. It’s not something we talk about generally.”

Could U2 handle a line-up change?

“No. But no-one’s invincible, y’know,” declares Mullen, dangerously.

“I dunno,” muses Edge. “I somehow doubt it. It’s a difficult question because, apart from the band maybe splitting up due to some disaster, there is going to be the chance that someone is at some point going to say, Well, look lads, it’s been fantastic, but I’d rather spend the next ten years doing something else, and good luck. That’s a possibility.”

From spring, U2 will be back on the road for at least a year. After that, there’s every chance that - like R.E.M. in the period from Out Of Time to Monster - they may choose to shake up that old album/tour rigmarole. “There’s no doubt something happened when R.E.M. didn’t tour,” reckons Mullen, “and it was something very special.”

“Yeah, they did some great stuff,” admits Edge. “But that Automatic For The People record started out as a soundtrack, I believe. Then the film got cancelled or whatever.”

Mullen laughs drily: “So where did we go wrong, Edge?”

“I love the Passengers record,” Edge states, a touch firmly. “I think it’s a grower, Larry. Give it a few years.”

Two hours later, Bono is in the back booth of Jerry’s Diner across town. Although visibly crusty around the edges after the previous night’s shenanigans, he is on good form and presently charming, if not the pants, then the greasy apron, off our attentive, eyelash fluttering waitress. “Excuse me,” he asks as she takes the orders, “what’s your name?”

“Marie,” she replies with a mild blush.

“Tell me, Marie,” he continues, seductively, “is the no smoking policy strict in this diner?”

She brings an ashtray, warning, almost apologetically, that if anyone complains, they’ll have to be stubbed out, and oh, if you could hide your cigarettes under the table please, that would be just great. This instantly takes Bono back to his fly-puffing schoolyard days. Adopting a thick tinker brogue, he whispers conspiratorially, “Here, d’yer wanna see something dirty?” He wiggles a finger beckoningly. “D’yer wanna see something doirty? Look…” He forms a circular hole with the forefinger and thumb of his left hand, repeatedly thrusting his right forefinger in and out, in that old pubescent approximation of “nookie”, his tongue poking lasciviciously through his teeth. Clayton slides into the booth beside him, visibly savouring the daisy-fresh benefits of being an ex-drinker. Talk - for no particular reason - soon turns to The Beatles Anthology series and how the idea of a similiar assemblage of U2 roughs and outtakes isn’t a notion that particularly appeals to either of them.

“I wouldn’t like it,” Bono declares. “Not for our group. Maybe it’s because for us, the good stuff comes directly after crap. Don’t you feel that, Adam? When we’re in the studio - and I heard this about the Stones as well - right next to when we hit it, we’re really not hitting it, and then it happens.” A different waitress wanders over: “Is someone smoking back here?” Nope. Bono hides his fag and adopts an Elvis-like burr. “No mam.” “Actually,” he continues, picking up the thread, “we banned The Beatles in our studio on this album. But it’s a bit like prohibition, isn’t it? I could feel them sneaking in a little bit. We banned a few things - the word ‘gothic’, the term ‘progressive rock’. It’s funny, because I can hear it in Last Night On Earth.

Clayton(surprised): “The prog rock?”

Bono: “No, the Beatles thing. You’ve gotta give it away, that thing.”

The title Pop. To be taken at face value?

Bono: “Well, yeah, but it’s just a little bit… Ah, fuck off. Just a little bit. It’s a way of dodging the ‘O’ word, ie Oasis. Y’know, what is rock now? What is it? It’s become folk music because people, they know too much about it. People were expecting this rock’n'roll album and this is rock’n'roll - we just didn’t want to call it that.

“Because there once was a time when people hadn’t heard the sound of an electric guitar overloading through a little printed circuit going into an amp. When people heard Hendrix, that was fresh. We’re doing the same through sampling, just different little printed circuits. Using the technology, abusing the technology. It’s the William Burroughs thing, that you cut up the past to form the future. There’s a difference between liking something because it’s great and liking something because it reminds you of something that was great. That karaoke aspect of where rock’n'roll is now. In the hip hop community they have something that’s really fresh.”

The friction between you all during Achtung Baby has been well-documented, whereas Zooropa was a lot more easy-going. And now there have been dark mutterings that you were arguing a lot while making this record… “It’s bizarre,” Bono shrugs. “It’s a strange one because you have to be close to make a record. The arguments weren’t with each other, they were with some imagined enemy. It’s happened to us a few times. Even when we first started working with Brian on Unforgettable Fire, we found that we had to break up the band and start again. On this one, there were rough days, there are always rough days because we do kick the shit out of each other in there.”

“As regards the lines of communication, we were all a lot more focused on what type of music we wanted to make,” continues Clayton. “I think it’s the most focused, most committed record of all the records, apart from, obviously, the energy of Boy or whatever. This was much more of a knowing record - knowing what had to be done, knowing the value of working together and each person’s input, and it was a very equal contribution, very balanced.”

“But Achtung Baby,” Bono adds, “that’s the roughest we got with each other. Things can get to blows if you let them because everyone feels so strongly about everything.”

Have there ever been punches thrown between you?

“Edge thumped me a while back,” Bono admits, bluntly. “It was at a gig, though, not in the studio. If you wanna smack somebody about, when you’ve known each other as long as us, is very hard. You can hurt a lot more with a cruel, off-the-cuff remark (laughs with barely concealed guilt). That’ll do much more damage.

“Howie B lightened things up a lot,” he smiles. Earlier, Bono and Clayton had been laughing about how, in the studio, Howie B had been teaching Mullen to roll joints - which he wouldn’t smoke. Did any of them enjoy a lug on the herbals?

“Me?! No, I don’t … (cagily) I, I, I’ll… y’know .. but um, it’s not my thing,” splutters Bono. “In a way I find that the colours are already quite bright for me. So it’s not for me, but Howie is on it. By onit, I mean he’s very concentrated, it doesn’t blur him at all.”

Clayton is not saying much, having, of course, been the victim of U2’s one and only drugs bust - for marajuana in 1989. One bust in 16 years is pretty good going for a rock band.

“Well, it’s one of those personal experiences that you wish the rest of the world didn’t necessarily get involved in,” the bassist shrugs, “because it’s got nothing to do with the music. (Bono grunts in agreement). Nowadays the amount of people who quietly have a joint at the end of their day is a very large proportion of the population. So it’s a bit of a reality check - OK, ou may live a lifestyle that is reasonably relazed, but it’s still illegal and it’s illegal for an awful ot of people. You can’t fuck with that aspect of the society you live in …for better or for worse.”

On Pop, Bono’s prepared to admit that - as well as the more lyrically flippant tracks such as Miami and The Playboy Mansion - there’s some very deep, dark thoughts and emotions bubbling very close to the surface. In Mofo in particular, the words appear to be accutely personal. With the vodka charging through his body the night before, Bono had confessed that he felt “as if my whole life is in that song”: everything from the death of his mother when he was a teen, to his relationship with his own children. Is it that Lennon-esque exorcism thing?

“The reasons you are the way you are are very basic, very simple,” he begins cautiously. “I know very few singers whose mother is alive. The reason you’d want to expose yourself for a living is that there’s deep, deep things going on in there. Then to take the cliche, ‘motherfucker’, there’s all kind of things in that. ‘Lookin’ for to save my soul/ Lookin’ in the places where no flowers grow/ Lookin’ for to fill that God-shaped hole/ Mother, mothersucking rock and roll.’ It’s like, (fixes stare)[i] where else would you look? Y’know, ‘Looking for a sound that’s gonna drown out the world/ Looking for the father of my two little girls.’ It’s like (exasperated), what the fuck? As it was coming out, it was quite shocking to me.”

In other tracks - If God Will Send His Angels, Wake Up Dead Man, Gone - you seem to be reassessing your faith.

“Gone felt like… I know when I was singing it, I felt like it was the last song maybe that I’d ever sing,” continues Bono. “I kept thinking, and this sounds heavy, that someone I know was gonna die or something. I was feeling quite odd about that. And then I thought, No, it’s just the end of something. That’s how I felt that day. Next day, I didn’t feel like that.”

“The line that hits it home for me the most is, ‘And I’m already gone/ Felt that way all along,” adds Clayton.

“The faith thing in Wake Up Dead Man, is hard,” explains Bono. “It’s the end of the century where God is supposed to be dead. Seeing the world in two dimensions doesn’t have the appeal that it had for a lot of people. People want to believe, but they’re angry and I picked up on that anger. If God is not dead, there’s some questions we wanna ask him. I’m a believer but that doesn’t mean I don’t get angry about these things.”

U2 are sitting right on top of their forthcoming tour at the moment. Is it a case of, How the fuck do we top ZooTV?

“Mmm, yeah,” Bono mumbles. “That’s exactly how we felt right up until we cracked how we were gonna do it. Now we know roughly what we’re doing. What happened was the last time we were in Hong Kong we discovered these outside advertising Jumbotrons where they move the pixels a few inches apart, so they have these huge screens, but the images are not so sharp.”

“We’ve rethought the screen idea,” Clayton argues, “and we’ve come up with something pretty radical - the biggest, widest, highest, brightest screen you can come up with. We need to get the ideas together on what we’re gonna put on that screen. One of the ideas is to turn the TV station into a supermarket, and we’re going to be touring a shopping mall.”

“But it won’t be like a TV image,” Bono emphasizes. “It’ll be more…”

“…Like a canvas of light,” Clayton explains. “We’re not going for high definition, we’re going for a kind of lo-tech experience.”

And so, for the tour, are you going to grip firmly to that wagon?

“Hopefully it’s not a case of having to grip firmly.”

The misssed gig in Sydney. Worst hangover of your life?

“It kind of was, yeah. People miss gigs for many different reasons. The way I felt about it was particularly personal to me. The way everyone else felt about it was that they supported me…”

“Yeah, it’s funny,” frowns Bono, matter-of-factly. “Adam beat himself up about the band much more than we would. I don’t care about gigs, I care about, y’know, us. If there’s a choice, I’m not going to put the people, however much they’re paying, before me mates.

“But no regrets in that sense. I’m just going to enjoy this tour in a different way…” he smiles.

More shagging then?

“That,” offers Bono, eyebrows raised. “might be an impossible feat.”

It’s 3am the morning before, and the U2 minibus careers through deserted streets on the way back to Bono’s suite, ferrying its drunken cargo - Bono, Q and assorted female personnel from the group’s management company - from the Chaos club back to the hotel. Suddenly Bono yells, “Stop! Stop!” to the driver, having spotted an all-night convenience store. Leaping out and across the street with long-suffering bodyguard Eric Hausch in tow, a baseball-capped beggar approaches him. The two stooped figures, heads bowed as one hands the other money, are indistinguishable in the dim light. You would have one of them down as a vagrant. On no account would you wager a tenner on the other being a multi-millionaire.

Minutes later, Bono emerges bearing bunches of tulips for the ladies in the van. Q casually enquires how much he gave the tramp. He pretends not to have heard. After a few seconds, Hausch whispers, “About 200 bucks. Didn’t even count it. He does it all the time.”

It’s 4.30am in Bono’s suite, the point where we came in. He presses the play button on the Mofo tape, the thunderous groove kicks in and - as we will discover the following day - one floor below, The Edge sits bolt upright in bed, confused and disorientated.

The next morning, there is a complaint about the noise to the hotel manager, though not, of course, from U2’s guitarist.

Neil Diamond, it would seem, is no raver.

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