Bono (15 page)

When was that?

1982.

Oh, that Shalom Christianity
*
thing?

I mean, it wasn't a “thing”! It was a very well-thought-out and finally flawed attempt to wrestle the world to the ground and try to deal with some of its ails and its evils. I nearly became a full-time
[laughs]
instead of part-time activist at that point. At that point, we were angry. We were agitated by the inequalities in the world and the lack of a spiritual life. It's not only me, Edge is like that.

Is Edge the same nature of believer as you?

Edge is a wiser man than I am, more meditative. I have total admiration for the way he's able to keep his feelings, ego, et cetera, under control, and yet, that's my biggest worry for him.

We say in French “eaten away from the inside.”

No. But I wouldn't underestimate the level of rage beneath those sweet notes that he plays. He can throw a dig. He nearly knocked me out one night.

Really? What happened?

It was back in the early eighties. Everything had gone horribly wrong onstage with the band fighting, rather than the audience. I threw the drum kit into the audience. I think it was in Newhaven, and Edge hit with a right hook.

What caused the argument?

It was the last in a long line of reasons. Too many miles on the same bus, sore throats, sorer hearts from missing home. When I introduced the song, counting it in, one-two-three-four, the band ignored me. Don't ask.

So, even way back then, you thought you had to deal with all the evils of the world. Do you think it stemmed from reading the Bible as a child?

You see, I had to find that at the very bottom of that lies the feeling of justice over charity. I mean, charity is OK, I'm interested in charity. Of course, we should all be, especially those of us who are privileged. But I'm much more interested in justice. The Drop the Debt campaign was a justice issue. Holding the children to ransom for the debts of their grandparents, that's a justice issue. Or not letting the poorest of the poor put their products on our shelves whilst advertising the free market, that's a justice issue to me. These things are rooted in my study of the Scriptures. I guess, like most people, the world just beats them down into not expecting that things can change or be any better. When you've sold a lot of records,
[laughs]
it's very easy to be megalomaniac enough to believe that you
can
change things. If you put your shoulder to the door, it might open. Especially if you're representing a greater authority than yourself. Call it love, call it justice, call it whatever you want. That's why I'm never nervous when I meet politicians. I think
they
should be nervous because I'm representing the poor and wretched in this world. And I promise, history will be hard on this moment. And whatever thoughts you have about God, who He is or
if He exists, most will agree that if there is a God, God has a special place for the poor. The poor are where God lives. So these politicians should be nervous, not me.

I'm surprised at how easily religion comes up in your answers, whatever the question is. How come you're always quoting the Bible? Was it because it was taught at school? Or because your father or mother wanted you to read it?

It's strange, I couldn't know. Whenever I hear people talking from the Scriptures, I always manage to be able to see past their sort of personality, to see past the difficulties of the environment I was in listening to them, and the hypocrisy. I always manage to get to the content.

When was the first time something happened when you thought about a line from the Scriptures? When you first said to yourself: yes, I can see beyond that and see how it applies to such and such situation?

Let me try to explain something to you, which I hope will make sense of the whole conversation. But maybe that's a little optimistic.
[laughs]
This was not the first time, but I remember coming back from a very long tour. I hadn't been at home. Got home for Christmas, very excited of being in Dublin. Dublin at Christmas is cold, but it's lit up, it's like Carnival in the cold. On Christmas Eve, I went to St. Patrick's Cathedral. I had done school there for a year. It's where Jonathan Swift was dean. Anyway, some of my Church of Ireland friends were going. It's a kind of a tradition on Christmas Eve to go, but I'd never been. I went to this place, sat. I was given a really bad seat, behind one of the huge pillars. I couldn't see anything. I was sitting there, having come back from Tokyo, or somewhere like that. I went for the singing, because I love choral singing. Community arts, a specialty! But I was falling asleep, being up for a few days, traveling, because it was a bit boring, the service, and I just started nodding off, I couldn't see a
thing. Then I started to try and keep myself awake studying what was on the page. It dawned on me for the first time, really. It had dawned on me before, but it really sank in: the Christmas story. The idea that God, if there is a force of Love and Logic in the universe, that it would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in straw poverty, in shit and straw . . . a child . . . I just thought: “Wow!” Just the poetry . . . Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable. There it was. I was sitting there, and it's not that it hadn't struck me before, but tears came down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this. Because that's exactly what we were talking about earlier: love needs to find form, intimacy needs to be whispered. To me, it makes sense. It's actually logical. It's pure logic. Essence has to manifest itself. It's inevitable. Love has to become an action or something concrete. It would have to happen. There must be an incarnation. Love must be made flesh. Wasn't that your point earlier?

Exactly. But you see, I sometimes think that I'm religious without knowing it.

[laughs]
But that's very interesting. You're like one of the Three Wise Men, the Magi who were studying the stars, with nothing religious on your mind! And you're looking at your maps, going:
[gets into a comedy routine]
“Here it is . . . OK, it should be over here . . . There's something funny going on over there . . . Is it the aurora borealis? No, it's a single star. My coordinates suggest: we must go this way. OK, something should be happening extraordinary round about
 . . . [pauses for dramatic effect]
there. Oh shit, what's this? A little baby! Oh, we stepped into the Christmas story, I thought I was reading astronomy.”

I'm going to ask you a very naive question. Why are so many people religious but don't own up to it? Do you think you have an explanation?

I don't know. But religious instinct comes out as gambling, as horoscope reading, as yoga, it's everywhere. It's supposed to be a secular society, but I look around: everybody's religious. They're superstitious, they pray when they think they've got cancer. It's not that far below the surface. We've gone two hundred years since the Enlightenment, but science is starting to bow again.

Yes, but some people won't use the word
God
.

Yeah. Well, because ever since, you had to prove something, or it didn't exist. Such thoughts were outlawed by thinking people, post-Enlightenment: “God is dead.” But as I told you once before, I saw a fantastic thing written on a wall, in Dublin. It said: “God is dead. Nietzsche.” And then written underneath, sprayed out, it was: “Nietzsche's dead. God.”
[laughs out loud]
It's so good! I mean, I do think, now, at the start of the twenty-first century, people are beginning that adventure again. We have the Eve gene, we have science talking about the big bang, we have so much in science that was, if you like, contradictory, that has become less and less so to the idea that there is God. Different disciplines work on different parts of the puzzle. I'm not a scientist, mind you, I'm in a band with one. I'm not a monk, that's obvious, I'm an artist. I'm looking for clues through my music. Am I going off again?

Yes. Actually I was about to wander off myself, but I don't think I'm straying that far. You said, “Intimacy needs to be whispered.” What about the whispering in “She's a Mystery to Me,” the song you wrote for Roy Orbison? What's the inspiration there? Are you whispering, or was someone whispering to you? To me, that song is some form of incarnation of God—one of the few I would believe in anyway. To me, it's a religious song, a mystical song. The melody is like the one you hear in your head when you're in a cathedral. You can't say that of many other U2 songs.

There's probably some mechanical reasons for this, you know. Like, we're very attracted to suspended chords to the fifth. Edge has that in his guitar playing. You hear it a lot in religious music: Bach. That happy-sad feeling. Agony and ecstasy. It's that duality that makes my favorite pop songs.

One of the reasons I'm sitting here today is because you and Edge wrote that song. It's the song I throw in the face of people who say they don't “get” U2. And their jaws drop when they listen to it. For me, it's way up there with the Beach Boys' “God Only Knows” in the pantheon of great songs. So I won't leave this place until you tell me how that song happened.

That's a funny one, that. Edge's wife, Aislinn, was the most extraordinary girl, who could surprise you with kindness when you least expected it. She gave me a copy of a soundtrack for David Lynch's film
Blue Velvet.
We were in London playing a concert. I left the record on “repeat” and fell asleep. When I woke up, I had a melody and words in my head. I presumed I was singing something from the soundtrack, but then realized I wasn't. I wrote it down. At sound check that day, I played the song to everybody and started going on and on about Roy Orbison, what a genius he was, et cetera. I told them that this could be a song for Roy Orbison, we should finish it for him. After sound check, I continued working on it. After the show, I was banging on and on about Roy Orbison in this song when a very strange thing happened. There was a knock at the door. John, our security man, was announcing the guests for that evening: Roy Orbison, he told me, is outside. He'd love to say a few words.

What? You mean you had no idea he would be coming over?

I had no idea he was there, I had no idea he was coming over, and neither had the band. They all looked at me like I had two heads. In fact, I was just getting a very large one,
[laughs]
feeling that somehow, God had agreed
with me about Roy Orbison! He walked in, this beautiful humble man. He said: “I really, really loved the show. I couldn't tell you now why exactly, but I was very moved by the show. I'm wondering: would you fellows have a song for me?”

That story's even better than the one I would have made up myself.

Later, I got to finish the song with him, got to know his wife, Barbara, his family, and the song became the title of his last album. It was an extraordinary thing to record with him. I was out standing beside him at the microphone, bringing him through the song. I couldn't hear him singing, because he hardly opened his mouth. We went back into the control room, and it was all there. He not only had an angelic voice, but a kind of way about him too.

But the lyrics are extraordinary as well.

[trying to remember, whispering in a low voice, fumbling his way through the words to a forgotten prayer]
I couldn't tell you what it was about. It was a disturbed sleep. The subject of the song was kind of haunting me, I suppose. I don't know why, I'm always attracted to subjects like you can't really get a grip on, like sex or God.
[muses for a while]
I think I sometimes confuse them both!

“She's a Mystery to Me” is not just a “very good song.” It seems to come from a different place.

That's a good question. What's the difference between a very good song and a great song? Answer: I think, very good songs, you can take the credit for. But great songs, you can't. They feel like you stumble upon them. Of course, then, there's the bad songs. I wish you didn't have to take the blame
for them. It's annoying, really, that you can only learn so much in the way of craft. You know, the muse is wayward. But I think you can put yourself in places where they might happen. For some people, that's chaos. And that, for some people, is falling in love. That, for some people, is rage. That, for some people, is railing against the world. Or for some people it's a surrendering to the world.

And what makes it for you?

All of the above.
[laughs]

Depends on the different stages of your life, I guess.

Yes. I don't know if I said that elsewhere, but one thing that it comes down to, I think, is a certain honesty with yourself. Did we mention that before?

No. I guess it's implicit.

That's what sets you free. You describe the situation that you're in. Even if you've nothing to say, let that be your first line.

I'm sure that when you heard Roy Orbison sing it, you felt some miracle happened.

I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe that he'd ask us for a song, because his songs are the most evolved in the book of pop. “In Dreams” is probably the greatest pop song ever written, in that it has a structure unlike any other. Most pop songs have a structure A-B-A-B-C-D—verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight, et cetera. If you listen to the structure of that
song, the sections don't repeat. It goes: A-B-C-D-E-F-G. It breaks all the rules. Try singing it someday.

God forbid! So what's your favorite lyric in a song?

Kris Kristofferson, “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”

How does it go?