Bono is on the campaign trail again. This time it is Third World debt. But is it a crusade too far, asks Michael Rose in the Sunday Times.

How do you upstage Robbie Williams, England’s greatest show-off? Answer: you go on stage with Muhammad Ali. At the Brit awards in London on Tuesday night, Bono was one of the few stars with neither a new single nor an album to promote. He came to speak on behalf of the latest pop humanitarian cause, Jubilee 2000, which is campaigning to get Third World debt written off.

At a cost rumoured to be in excess of £20,000, and at Bono’s request, U2’s record label Polygram jetted in Ali. Who needs idols when you can have The Greatest? Once again Bono had proved that pop may be pop but - hey, the grand gesture rocks. Especially when the record company is footing the bill.

“Grand gesture is the performer’s twitch,” Bono wrote last week in a newspaper article about Jubilee 2000. After a decade of ostentatious irony, in which he mostly kept his political views to himself, popular music’s most powerful figure is twitching his political muscles again.

In the firmament of popular music’s poet-philosophers Bono occupies a place somewhere below Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, who impregnated pop with the notion of a spokesman for a generation. More lucid than Sinead O’Connor, more popular than Bob Geldof, even more attuned to the zeitgeist than Madonna and less strange than Michael Jackson or Prince, he comes closer than any contemporary except Michael Stipe of REM to being such a a spokesman.

Just as the singer cannot resist being centre-stage, the media can scarcely contain themselves at his displays. When he brought the Northern Ireland nationalist leader John Hume together with the Unionist leader David Trimble on a Belfast stage last year, as soon as the two politicians had their historic handshake Bono went between them and raised their arms aloft - creating the image that made the following day’s front pages.

With one newspaper column and some television interviews at the Brit awards, he turned publicity for the Jubilee 2000 campaign from a trickle to a deluge. According to the charity’s director, Ann Pettifor, Bono has brought unique qualities to the campaign: “He is extraordinarily humble, he is generous in his involvement and is not anxious for control.”

To those who have followed U2 from playing in a shed in the centre of Dublin to selling 70m albums and touring on a scale equalled only by the Rolling Stones, what is striking about Bono is not how much he has changed but how little. Twenty years ago in that shed stood a well-scrubbed, compact 19-year-old with little interest in politics, who had had little interest in music until his mid-teens. He had a passionate interest, however, in making U2 successful, born partly out of desperation and disillusionment.

But Bono might have picked the wrong cause this time. The record industry, which 15 years ago saw Band Aid, organised by Geldof, not only as an original solution to a genuine problem, but also as a great way to expose artists to a worldwide audience, seems to have serious misgivings about Jubilee 2000.

The consensus appears to be that it is a waste of time. Many music business bigwigs feel that John Kennedy, chairman and chief executive of Universal Music UK, the parent company that owns Polygram, has been railroaded into giving the scheme his support lest he risk offending U2, his biggest act.

A coalition of 90 organisations in Britain, including Oxfam, Friends of the Earth, Christian Aid, Comic Relief and the TUC, Jubilee 2000 has sister organisations in 50 other countries.

Through the kind of publicity Bono can provide they are aiming to celebrate the millennium by persuading world leaders to cancel the unpayable debts of some of the world’s poorest countries. According to the United Nations, if these debts were cancelled the lives of 7 million children could be saved each year in Africa alone.

Although the case for radical action against debt seems compelling, the reality of the situation is somewhat cloudier than the picture painted by Bono and Jubilee 2000. So many African countries have volatile or discredited leaderships that acts like this can only cause concern.

If countries such as Nigeria and Zimbabwe were suddenly relieved of their debt burdens, there is no guarantee that any more money would find its way into the hands of its citizens. A debt write-off for Sudan could actually help to fund its escalating civil war. Unless the deals were heavily encumbered by conditional guarantees, such generosity could be little more than meaningless.

“It isn’t going to do any good as there’s more political unrest in Africa than anywhere else in the world and most of the independent leaders are bandits,” said an industry executive.

“The campaign is good in one way because it will create awareness and governments might as well write the debt off, because they’re not going to get it back. But will it do any good if they do? I doubt it. Also, there are a million and one other charities that could have done with two minutes on the Brits. I’m not sure the pop arena is the right forum for cancelling Third World debt.”

Try telling that to Bono. For him music has always been secondary and the stage the perfect place to right the world’s wrongs. “As a pop star I have two instincts,” he wrote last week. “To have fun and change the world.” It hasn’t always been in that order.

Raised in the Protestantism of his mother Iris, rather than the Catholicism of his father Bobby, Bono felt comfortable in neither religious code. After his mother’s death, when he was 14, he joined the Christian Union in Mount Temple comprehensive school, also attended by Larry Mullen, Dave Evans and Adam Clayton.

The band they all formed in 1976 was a stabilising influence on Bono, along with his new commitment to Christianity and the relationship he began the following year with Ali Stewart, the classmate he married in 1982. U2 hired Paul McGuinness as their manager in 1978, completing a circle of people in Bono’s life which has remained intact.

Bono’s innate conservatism can be measured by the length of time it took him to go public on his faith. Although he, Evans and Mullen were members of the strict Shalom Christian group, U2’s first album contained no overt reference to their beliefs. Bono splurged his beliefs across their second album in 1981 in lyrics written at the last minute, an early sign of the creative process which has characterised his writing.

In the early 1980s, when U2 got around to writing an overtly political song for their third album, it was the work of their guitarist The Edge rather than Bono. Sunday Bloody Sunday made Bono’s name as a firebrand anti-republican, helped by his shredding of the tricolour several times while performing it live. But while Bono shared Sunday Bloody Sunday’s sentiments and helped polish its lines, he lacked Evans’s toughmindedness and could never have written it.

Bono’s centre-left instincts were expressed in U2’s early career through an association with Garret FitzGerald, leader of Fine Gael, the Christian Democrat party. At FitzGerald’s suggestion Bono joined a committee to develop a national youth policy, the first and last time he sat on a political grouping. His attendance was fitful but, according to another member, the Irish Tourist Board chairman Mark Mortell, Bono’s contributions were passionate and effective.

Bono’s political allegiances were a matter more of character than ideology, however, and when U2’s soft-focus politics were articulated on their Unforgettable Fire album they registered immediately with an audience jaded by the high-gloss rock of the early 1980s. By the time U2 stepped from the Live Aid stage in July 1985, Bono had ascended to the status of rock prophet.

If he was initially awkward in the role, it was not for want of intelligence or cunning but because at 25 he had spent all his adulthood cocooned in U2. He responded emotionally rather than intellectually to events, shouting “F*** the revolution” to an American audience on the night of the Enniskillen bombing in 1987.

However, according to U2’s biographer Eamon Dunphy, there is a coherence in his position. “It’s not random,” said Dunphy. “His support for Live Aid, his visit to Ethiopia with [his wife] Ali, his current work in relation to Third World debt, it all comes from his Christian concern for the most disadvantaged.”

When she took a politics degree at University College Dublin in the late 1980s, Ali Hewson became the biggest influence on his political development. He began to see politics more in ideological terms. Dunphy says: “The best thing about Bono is Ali. She is calm and rational and able to see beyond individuals to policies.”

Bono’s apocalyptic predictions about the end of ideology a decade ago came when he and his colleagues were sliding to a creative stop.

U2’s response to such impasses is to talk their way through them. At the start of the decade, after talking their way into becoming born-again ironists, Bono almost completely withdrew from interviews of any consequence, instead becoming diligently flippant.

This has largely been a defence mechanism. Bono has a thin skin, but irony has allowed him to glide over slights that would once have wounded him. His post-modern persona has also allowed him to cosy up to Bill Clinton and new Labour without sustaining collateral damage, each manifestly using the other for their own purposes.

Beyond irony, though, there lies only surrender or a fresh commitment to activism. With Bono putting himself about once again in support of causes from Third World debt to the free speech of his friend Salman Rushdie, the suspicion must be that he is ramping up to be a born-again rock prophet for the new millennium. U2 intend to release their 10th studio album later this year, but with sales of their last album standing at a disappointing 7 million copies, compared to 12 million for 1991’s Achtung Baby and 16 million for The Joshua Tree in 1987, Bono, who will be 40 in May, might even be looking towards a public role beyond the band. After U2, perhaps the UN?

But on a different stage, without the help of a grateful record company, Bono might find himself pitifully exposed. As another record industry insider observed of his involvement with Jubilee 2000: “It’s a bloody shambles. Bono’s done Live Aid, War Child, save the gay whale, the lot. You get the impression his record company have to go along with him.

“Because U2 saved Polygram’s bacon by allowing them to release their greatest-hits LP last year, they had the company over a barrel. Polygram couldn’t very well turn round and tell Bono they weren’t interested.”

© 1999 Sunday Times. All rights reserved.

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