(A cool ?300 million in the bank and friends like Helena Christensen - no wonder U2’s frontman is worried about the meaning of life. Andrew Meuller meets Bono…)
THERE cannot be many hotels so unsuited to thier surroundings as Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn. This cube of lurid yellows, purples and oranges can only have been the work of someone who was totally insensitive to the city’s architectural heritage, or a chronic glue sniffer, or both. By the time Sarajevo’s siege was lifted, in late 1995, this absurd building, stranded in the open boulevard known as `Sniper Alley,’ was shot to pieces. It looked like some spacecraft that had been brought down by crossfire.
The Holiday Inn has been repaired, though some stubborn shrapnel still pock-marks the walls. Ona grey September morning, in a room decorated entirely in brown, a singer, who also happens to be in need of restoration
work, explains what he’s doing here.
“There is a history,” croaks Bono, “of artists having a response - and they ought to have a response - to situations like this. Dada and surrealism were responses to facism.”
Last night, U2 brought their PopMart tour to Sarajevo’s Kosevo Stadium. Ever since a meeting with a Bosnian film crew during their 1993 Zoo TV tour, Sarajevo had been playing on U2’s collective mind. Initially this led to the controversial decision to incorporate satellite broadcasts from the beseiged city in some of the Zoo TV concerts.
“We thought,” Bono continues, “that this is what Zoo TV was supposed to be about. We’re in a channel-hopping culture where people go from Bugs Bunny cartoons to carnage in their living rooms, and we’d built these screens on stage to show that. We had thrown the gauntlet down to ourselves. But that was our response, we took the hit for it, and I’m very proud of it actually. When our kids are reading about the genocide that took place in our back garden in the Nineties, we can say we did something.”
He emphasises the last word of the sentence, suggesting that he realises that, in the scheme of things, what he did wasn’t really all that much.
“You do what you can,” he agrees. “I don’t, as a general rule, suffer from Catholic guilt, though I’m half Catholic, but I think for any person who finds success, the instinctive reaction is to try and level the pitch, with your friends, and your family, and the wider world…..which is when you become a real pain in the hole. The way it works with me, and the way it works with the group, is whatever you’re immersed in, you look under every stone of it. So Zoo TV brought us into that world of television, news, cartoons, Dada, and if you follow that through, you end up in Sarajevo one minute and hanging out with some of the most beautiful women in the world the next, and you get fully into it.”
(”The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday’s crash. The best and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life, who, with bleeding hand and hearts, hold fast to the intelligence of their time” - Dadist manifesto, Berlin 1918)
(”What’s Boner’s problem?” - Beavis & Butthead, USA, 1994)
TWO months later, by the pool in the garden behind the Delano Hotel on Miami’s South Beach, we are hanging out with some of the most beautiful women in the world, getting fully into it. I get introduced to Helena Christensen, and my interview with Bono is interrupted when he is distracted by Veronica Webb wandering over to say hello. I am inclined to forgive Bono for this, as Veronica Webb wandering over to say hello would distract a man performing an emergency tracheotomy on his brother.
Last night, U2 played at Miami’s ProPlayer stadium, bringing their current album, Pop, back to the city where some of its songs were recorded, and after which one of its songs was named. U2 clearly feel at home here. They’ve pitched camp in the Delano, flying back after shows in other cities in the Boeing 727 they’ve elased for the tour. Some of the band’s families have come to enjoy the sun - there are seven U2 children - and various friends have flown in, Elvis Costello among them. George Clooney is also staying here (”Hey,” says Bono, as we leave the hotel to find a bar showing the Ireland vs Belgium game, “there’s Batman playing basketball. Cool!’), and though he hasn’t come as a friend of the band, he leaves as one.
Rock tours are not normally relaxing things to visit. Most seethe with tensions and paranoias comparable with the Nixon administration, and most regard an itinerant journalist as little more than a handy outlet for those pressures. However, U2’s organisation has the feel of a large - there are 200 people on tour - and happy family. It may help that many of their closest staff have associations with the band going back most of the 20-odd years of U2’s existence. It may also help that many of their closest staff, whether by accident or design, are women.
The four members of U2 are themselves unfailingly courteous and pleasant, certainly more so than men regularly credited with a combined wealth of ?300 million really have to be. Edge, the permanently behatted guitarist, cheerfully puts the case for the defence when, on my first night in Miami, I subject the poor chap to a Marguerita-sodden rant about the Spice Girls (the argument is abandoned when Elvis Costello won’t take my side - he’s a barman in the Spice movie). Larry Mullen Jr, the ageless drummer whose high-school noticeboard advertisement brought U2 together, introduces himself and apologises for not speaking on the record on the grounds that, “I only feel comfortable sitting at my kit hitting stuff.” Adam Clayton, the bass player who comes nearer than any of them to mustering the hauteur of the rock n’roll aristocrat, talks after the concert for far longer than scheduled. He agrees that U2 are not like other groups.
“We still live within 20 minutes of each other in Dublin,” he marvels. “We spend a lot of time together. Other bands, when they get to our age, there’s a couple of jealousies, there are management problems. We’ve been lucky, or wise, and we can devote our energy to being in U2. We keep a full-time staff, which a lot of people don’t. We take risks, and we look like fools sometimes, and other times people say….`Yes!’ And that’s the kind of band I want to be in. We’re very lucky, and I tell you, it’s only on this tour I’ve started to realise that ona daily basis.”
Bono certainly seems to be enjoying himself. He flits between tables in the Delano’s garden, dressed in black with silver sunglasses and the leopard-print loafers Gucci made to match the interior of his Mercedes, chatting to those he knows, singing things for those he doesn’t. He’s a prolific and entertaining talker, who, you can imagine, gave the Blarney Stone the one kiss it still talks about. Unusually, for someone as famous as he, little of what he says is about himself - he talks instead about things he’s read, poeple he’s met, placeshe’s been. He bangs away about Picasso, a radical church in San Francisco, the morning he woke up in a strange flat in Tokyo to find a snake crawling up his leg. He’s also a generous listener.
“I like that generosity in Americans,” he says later. “We haven’t the cultural baggage that other bands in the UK would have, because we’re Irish. We don’t see America as the devil like the English do, so we came here early on and spent a lot of time here. Being on the road feels like an American idea - you grow up on Kerouac, the poetry of the place names, and what it was like being 19 or 20 and looking out the window of a tour bus and thinking it was more like the movies, not less.”
U2’s love affair with America has been one of two boundlessly ambitious entities falling hopelessly for the endless possibilities of each other. Of the 77 million albums U2 have sold, 30 million have been bought in America.
SOUL SURVIVOR
(Part 2 of Andrew Meuller’s U2 article in the British broadsheet newspaper, the Independent)
“My opinion is much more in favour of prudent management than of force; considering force not an odious, but a feeble instrument for preserving people so numerous, so active, so growling, and so spirited as this, in a profitable and subordinate connexion with us.”
(Edmund Burke, `Speech On Conciliation With America,’ 1775)
“Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright; The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout; But there is no joy in Mudville - mighty Casey has struck out.”
(EL Thayer, San Francisco Chronicle, 1888)
THE POPMART tour started in Las Vegas in April. When the subject of the opening night is raised now, Edge can just laugh at the memory of searching hopelessly for his plectrum in a smoke-machine fog as the encore started without him. Vegas was a rare old shambles. U2 didn’t know the new songs, didn’t sound interested in the old ones, and the junk-culture concept holding it together looked, after the sensory overload of Zoo TV, rather trite. U2 were lost under a huge yellow, orange and green backdrop, which looked like it might have been made of parts of the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, and included the biggest television screen ever built. Rumours emerged of poor sales of tickets and also, worryingly, of the heavily dance-influenced Pop album.
Things have improved as PopMart has acquired momentum. The shows are a joy, a gleeful satire of consumer culture shrouding some of the most intimate and troubled songs U2 have recorded, and Pop has shifted 6.5 million copies. Perhaps some confusion was to be expected. The transformation in U2 over the last 10 years has been extraordinary. In 1987, they released The Joshua tree, their biggest selling album, which remains a benchmark for gazing-into-the-middle-distance ascetic seriousness. This was followed by Rattle & Hum, which saw U2 recording with Bob Dylan and BB King, effectively sneaking into the rock n’roll Hall of Fame and hanging their own portraits on the wall. It was a period which was regarded by critics,
and not altogether without reason, as the epitome of rock’s post-Live Aid pomposity. But buried somewhere on Rattle & Hum was the line: “I don’t believe in riches/But you should see where I live” - which might have been the first acknowledgement that U2 needed to resolve a few contradictions.
An astonishing process of auto-iconoclasm followed with the new decade. Achtung Baby, the 1991 album recorded in Berlin against the backdrop of post-communist Europe, was a revelation to those who had written off U2 as earnest dinosaurs with haircuts even an English professional soccer player would have baulked at. Dark, moody, suffused with a Leonard cohen-esque love hangover, Achtung Baby was cool, sexy and witty.
The revolution was completed with the last track of Zooropa, the weird and wired 1993 album recorded on and around the Zoo TV tour. The song was called The Wanderer and featured Johnny Cash on vocals. It wasn’t the first time that U2 had hooked up with one of their heroes, but it was the first time they’d made one a prop for their own vision, rather than merely
offering homage. Ten years earlier, U2 had dressed up like cowboys. Now, they were dressing a cowboy as a Kraftwerkian Europop mannequin. No wonder America was starting to have doubts (”In mainstream America,” acknowledges Clayton, “they don’t do camp”).
In Miami, just before U2 play I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, Bono makes a speech thanking the crowd for their patience. “If we keep it intersting for us,” he tells them, “it won’t be bullshit for you.”
“I have to accept,” he says the next afternoon, “that we have confused the punters a little. But we know what we’re doing. I can’t afford myself the luxury of an idea that if people don’t get it, they are somehow not smart enough. I feel that if the idea is realised enough, people will get it.”
Bono is a restless interviewee, physically and mentally, sitting up and lying down as ideas occur to him. He’s not keen on giving detailed explanations behind the songs on Pop (”They’re not necessarily my point of view”), which is a shame, as they appear to be some of the most personal he has written - Mofo, in particular, contains what must be references to the early loss of his mother, and the strange course that set him on (”Mother you left me and made me someone/Now I’m still a child but no one tells me no”), and does appear explicitly to identify Bono as the narrator (”Lookin’ for the sound that’s gonna drown out the world/Lookin’ for the father of my two little girls”). Nevertheless, he’s not having it.
There are not many other things he won’t discuss, and trying to keep him to one theme is like trying to cage water. When he’s asked something he’s not been asked before, he all but rubs his hands. When we approach the religious references on Pop - specifically the reproaches of an open letter to Jesus called Wake Up Dead Man - and I ask if his view of religion has
been at all moulded by the fact that he’s spent so long being worshipped himself, he actually applauds.
“Wow,” he laughs. “I’ll get out of bed for that. No, basically. But most musicians I know say that the great stuff is what they stumble upon, and the average stuff is what they can claim authorship of. I do feel that U2 write songs by accident. Maybe that’s why we keep shifting ground, to stay out of our depth.”
The hapless metaphor is left to try untangling itself. Bono’s off.
“It all started with the psalms of David,” he continues. “They were the first blues. There, you had man shouting at God. `Why have you left me? Where have you gone? Who do you think you are, anyway?’ In the absence of God, people have promoted a lot of lesser types to the position, which is confusing. Film stars, pop stars, royalty, are not heroes. Nurses are. Mothers are. I’m not up for discussing what I believe in detail because some subjects are just too precious for interviews. Also, I haven’t got it figured out, so I don’t want to make an arse of myself. But I feel there is love and logic behind the universe and…I have a great respect for atheists, though. I feel that God would have more time for them than most who are part of a religion, who seem so odd to me, or doped. I thik atheists have a certain rigour.”
While we talk, passers-by stop to ask for an autograph, or to mumble embarassed hellos. Watching him deal with this, his lack of condascension or annoyance is startling. U2 started young - though it seems they’ve been there forever, Bono is only 37 - and they’ve been U2 all their adult lives. It may be that because of this they don’t know any better, but they remain free of cynicism. They still get excited.
“Well,” muses Bono, “when you get what you want, what do you do? But we haven’t got cynical, you’re right. We’re still to make that record we hear in our heads, and can’t quite play. I guess when we were 23 or 24, we went through the phase where groups move into houses, and start putting paintings on the wall and they don’t want to look like rednecks, so they
read up on what paintings they should have, and what Chinese rugs…I guess we must have gone through a Hinese-rug phase, but we were over it coming out of our twenties. The weird thing is that you’re left with only the right motives. If the reason you joined a band was to get laid, get famous, get rich - they all want by the way fairly early so all we’re left with is…make that record.”
U2 in general and Bono in particular, have often been scoffed at, especially in Britain, where they have never quite managed to be fashionable (”The one things they can’t buy is credibility,” spat an NME review of Zoo TV). This is not unusual for a successful rock group. What is unusual is the equanimity with which they shrug it off - many are the millionaires who will, given the chance, bitterly recite every bad review they’ve ever had. Bono can think of critiques that have amused him, but none that he’s taken real offence at.
“Bands at our level deserve to be humbled,” he says. “But it was that very gauche nature of where we were at that allowed us entry into a world where much more careful and cooler acts couldn’t allow themselves or, depending on your point of view, were too smart to want to visit.”
The trouble is, I tell him, that for most artists their fear of looking like a idiot far outweighs the possibilities of attaining greatness. Hoping Bono will forgive the impudence, I suggest that has never appeared to be a problem for him.
“That’s right,” he says. “Obviously, it’s better to do it in private, but when you’re growing up in public, that’s hard. Poeple who jump off, like….like Jimi Hendrix trying to put Vietnam through his amplifier, or liek the way lester bangs wrote, you need to jump off, and that takes a certain courage. I think one of the things I found difficult in the Eighties was this din of voices telling me: `You can’t fly, arsehole.’ But that’s the kind of thinking that results in restrained, reasonable music. You must not find yourself tiptoeing.”
“To be a Dadaist means to let yourself be thrown by things, to oppose all sedimentation; to sit in a chair for a single moment is to risk one’s life.”
(Dadaist manifesto, Berlin 1918)
BACK in Sarajvo, Bono is grasping for some grand rationale.
“In the mid-Eighties,” he says, “we were involved in America, and the concept of the two Americas, and that brought us on the one hand to Nicaragua, and on the other to Sun Studios. That’s one of the reasons why our records….they’re caught in their time. When people look at the Eighties, they’ll pick one of our records, and they’ll say that if you want to know what was going on in music, and if you want to know what was going on….America was what was going on, and this was a respnse to it. Achtung Baby and Zooropa again, paint a picture of what was going on. I guess we should start just writing tunes, and shut the fuck up, but if you’re curious, and that’s certainly my strongest suit, the tunes get set into a context, and here we are.”
“Rock n’roll is an arena in which you recreate yourself, and all this blathering about authenticity, is just a bunch of crap.”
(Lester Bangs, New York, 1977)
BACK in Miami, as the sun sets, I wonder if Bono can picture a life beyond being the singer in U2, the only job he’s ever had.
“I’d like to be alive,” he smiles. “I’d like to chase little children across the street with a big stick. I am curious about…I love people like Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash, there’s something about their voices as they get old. Bob Dylan’s voice on his new album is amazing. But I love to write, and that’s what I’d do if I couldn’t sing or perform. The deadliens are something I’d have a problem with, but I like people who write. It’s something I’m getting more interested in, and you don’t get to do much of it when you’re in a band, ebcause the lyrics are your attempt to put the feeling of the music into words.”
As we ander down the beach to do the photos, I say that it can hardly have escaped his notice that back in Ireland, there might be more exciting career opportunities awaiting someone with his credentials. After all, if Dana can give the Irish Presidency a shake on the stength of one Eurovision Song Contest appearance….
“Nah,” Bono says, and rubs one eye under his shades. “I wouldn’t move to a smaller house.”
(U2’s new single, If God Will Send His Angels is released in Britain byIsland Records on December 8).
Recent Comments