Bono (4 page)

He was right, I would say.

He was right. He thought: “God must have a sense of humor; he has given my son who never had interest in cash far too much cash. Now let's all have a bit of a laugh watching him flitter it away, because this boy obviously is going to blow it on all the wrong things.”

What was he like with your kids?

He loved kids, loved his grandchildren. His big thing, of course, was, when I would have children, I would find out what it was like to be a father. The pain, the torture, et cetera. So when I went and told him that Ali was pregnant, he burst out laughing. He couldn't stop laughing. I said: “What are you laughing at?” He said
[very low voice]:
“Revenge.”

So was he right? Has your experience of fatherhood been as difficult as his?

No. There's rarely a raised voice in our house. Ali's mood prevails. It's kind of serene in comparison.

And how did your father get along with Ali?

Oh, very well. Women loved him. He was completely charming and he was great company. And as long as you didn't want to get too close, he was happy. I think he could reveal himself to women a lot easier than to men, which is something I probably have in common with him. I think he was a very great friend. He had a lot of woman friends. And I do too. So there must be something there.

Did he give you any advice on how to handle your money?

“Don't trust anyone.”

Did you follow him on that?

I absolutely didn't. Trust is very important to me. Let me digress. You know, in the supermarkets, they have a way of pricing. It's a digital read-out: price-coding. So now, when you bring your food, you put it up and they just read it. Edge was telling me about this guy who recently did a study in MIT: ten percent of all accounting through this system is erroneous. Except the ten percent works both ways, which is to say . . .

. . . that sometimes you win . . .

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. And it's completely even. So no one has really bothered about the system's problems. Therein, in a way, is a
lesson about trust. If you trust people, you are going to be burnt ten percent of the time. I'm quite a trusting person; however, ten percent of the time, you're going to find yourself in situations that you wouldn't have, had you been more cautious. I mean, you're gonna find yourself in very good situations that you wouldn't have, unless you took the risk. I think, that's the difference between myself and my father.

What are the things that you feel most guilty about now regarding your relationship with your father?

Mainly, I just think he was dealing with a precocious child. Can't have been easy, and especially when he found himself trying to do it all alone. I just feel . . . I'm angry about . . . there was a sort of father-son tension, that I probably just let go of in the last few weeks. Ali said to me that since his death, I haven't been myself, and that I have been a lot more aggressive, and quicker to anger, and showing some of my father's irascible side. The Italians take a long time to grieve. You see them wear black for a year. When my father died, I went on a short vacation, which turned into a euphemism for “drinks outing.” I don't like to abuse alcohol—anything you abuse will abuse you back. But it's fair to say I went to Bali for a drink. With my friend Simon [Carmody, screen-writer], we just headed off. I wanted to blow it out a bit, get the monkey off my back. But when I returned, funnily enough, it was still there. I think it's been around with me a lot. And so just on Easter, I went up to the church in a little village where we live in France, and I just felt this was the moment that I had to let it go. An emotional volcano had gone off during the week before Easter, and I just wanted to find out. I wanted to deal with the source of whatever it was. In this little church, on Easter morning, I just got down on my knees, and I let go of whatever anger I had against my father. And I thanked God for him being my father, and for the gifts that I have been given through him. And I let go of that. I wept, and I felt rid of it.

Once and for all?

I think
How to Dismantle . . .
also allowed me to vent all that stuff. The atomic bomb, it's obviously him in me. Yeah, “Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own” is my swan song for him. I sang it at his funeral
[recites, but does not sing]
:
Tough, you think you got the stuff / You're telling me and everyone you're hard enough/ Well, you don't have to put up a fight/ You don't have to always be right/Let me take some of the punches for you tonight/Listen to me now: I need to let you know you don't have to go it alone/Sometimes you can't make it on your own.
It's like a Phil Spector kind of a deal, very fifties. There's a verse I left out of the recording:
When I was a young boy in the suburbs of Cedarwood / I wanted to be great because good would not be good enough / Now that I'm older, I don't see things any clearer/ We're closer now but still a long way off/I need you to know you don't have to go it alone/Sometimes you can't make it on your own.
And then it goes into this middle eight which is amazing. I scream and it goes:
Sing, you're the reason I sing/ You're the reason the opera is in me/Still I need you to know a house don't make a home/Don't leave me here alone / Sometimes you can't make it on your own.
So it turns around at the end. It's a sort of simple song, but it's, I hope, the last song I will be writing about him.

So what did your father really see in your work, do you think?

I'll tell you what I think. The spiritual journey was interesting to him. Because he wasn't a believer; he didn't believe in God towards the end. He was a Catholic, but he lost his faith along the way.

Was there a specific event that led him to lose his faith?

I don't know what it was. I think the Church wore him down, all the scandals, and all that stuff. I would give him a Bible, or I would offer up, if he
was interested, any kind of insights I might have had to some of the Gospels, or the way they were written, or the context of a particular passage. But finally he didn't buy into it. Yet he seemed to think this was the most important thing I had to offer. In fact, it was what he liked best about the band: our faith. He didn't understand some of the work of the nineties, because he felt it was irreligious.

Some of your fans had a hard time with the records you made in the nineties as well.

That's right. They didn't see it. On
Pop,
I thought it was a tough relationship with God that was described there:
Looking for to save my, save my soul/Looking in the places where no flowers grow/Looking for to fill that God-shaped hole.
That's quite an interesting lyric, because that's the real blues—that comes from Robert Johnson, it happens through the machine age, through this techno din, but there it is: the same yearning. But he didn't see it. A lot of people didn't see it, because they wanted to feel it, not think it. That's the difference. That was a thing that he seemed to think was important. My father used to say to me: “Have you lost your way?” I said: “Who's asking? What about you? You didn't have a way to lose!” We used to go down to the pub on Sundays and we would drink together. We drank whiskey, Irish whiskey, of course. Occasionally, he would ask a real question, meaning I had to give him a real answer. It was always about my belief in God: “There's one thing I envy of you. I don't envy anything else,” he said to me one time. But think about it: I was singing, doing all the things he would have loved to have done, had a creative life. He said: “You do seem to have a relationship with God.” And I said: “Didn't you ever have one?” He said: “No.” And I said: “But you have been a Catholic for most of your life.”—“Yeah, lots of people are Catholic. It was a one-way conversation . . . You seem to hear something back from the silence!” I said: “That's true, I do.” And he said: “How do you feel it?” I said: “I hear it in some sort of instinctive way, I feel a response to a prayer, or I feel led in a direction.
Or if I'm studying the Scriptures, they become alive in an odd way, and they make sense to the moment I'm in, they're no longer a historical document.” He was mind-blown by this.

So . . . did he find you pious?

I wish I could live the life of someone you could describe as pious. I couldn't preach because I couldn't practice. It's plain to see I'm not a good advertisement for God. Artists are selfish people.

It's hard to say that we saw the sun setting on that day, for the light had remained unchanged since my arrival. The mood had become so peaceful we might as well have started working on a jigsaw puzzle by the fireplace. If there is an overused word in music writing and writing about art in general, it is “inspiration.” Since U2's music has spiritual overtones, it's often been called “inspired” or “inspirational.” It's a myth I've often bought into myself, and I wondered what Bono makes of it after all these years. Was he still buying into it himself or was he ready to debunk that notion? Regardless, he was eager to puncture the myth of celebrity.

I never believed in channeling spirits, but I have always had this very naive idea that some musicians are actually able to hear voices.

Yeah, but you want to be careful who you're listening to. That's all I'd say.
[laughs]
But, you know, you're right, the world demands to be described,
and so, painters, poets, journalists, pornographers, and sitcom writers, by accident or by design, are just following orders, whether from high or low, to describe the world they're in.

So you're suggesting that the ideas that come to you are often cheap ideas, not even thought out?

That's right. In fact, often, the music that's the most eloquent is the least serious. That's the thing that intellectuals don't like. Think of the music of the seventies. It's become a kind of folk music now. The music in the seventies that lasted was a lot of the pop and the dance and disco music. And the supposed serious music of the seventies, fusion, progressive rock, et cetera, played by so-called great musicians, has dated so badly. You are right, Michka. The soul will be described, but God might not use the people that you expect.

Where does it come from? Do you start hearing a melody?

Yeah, I would hear some melodies in my head. I have no idea where they come from.

With the words?

Sometimes melodies, and sometimes words . . .
[gets up and comes back with a tiny sheet of yellow paper from a Post-it pad on his desk]

What's this? Is it something that you've just written down?

I'm trying to find a recent example. This is the middle of last night. Apropos of nothing.
[reads] If your heart was hard, that would be better/ You could only break it once or twice/After that it would be rid of
blood and you could let it turn to ice . . .
I don't know.
[makes a dubious face]

Not bad . . .

Yes . . . Whether they're dreams or overheard conversations, I don't know.

[laughs]

I know what you're saying.

You've had that.

Yes, I've had that experience, in a way. Sometimes I see pictures that are greater than any pictures I have ever seen.

But you can't get them out.

No, because I'm not a painter, and that makes me very frustrated.

That's how I feel with melodies.

But, melodies, you do hear them, and you do have the ability to reproduce them.

Yes, it's just that I can't get them out, you see? Words, you can write down, but melodies are difficult because you compromise them with chords.

Yes, but you have Edge, you have the band.

Yes, but by the time I get to the band, they might have gone.
[stirs his spoon inside his cup of tea]
Strange . . . I haven't done that for years.

What?

I've put sugar in my tea. I don't take sugar. We keep on talking about the past, next thing I'm back there. Where were we? Oh yeah . . . melodies, I do have an ear for them. It's like spotting a good idea, because a great idea has a lot in common with a great melody: certain inevitability, certain clarity, a kind of instant memorability. It can be philosophical or commercial, or a political idea, like Drop the Debt. As I told you before, I do think of myself as a salesman of melodies and ideas. I come from a long line of salespeople on my mother's side.

That's what my relatives did, going back a long way on my father's side. They sold clothes.

Funny. That's the rag trade, right? That's the Jewish side. Great salespeople, the Jews . . . Someone suggested to me that my mother's side of the family may have been Jewish. Rankin is a Jewish name. A member of the family came up with some interesting stuff researching the name.

I have to tell you this. I saw this one picture of you from when you were younger, and I was completely flabbergasted because you looked like my father.

All my mother's side of the family have that taxi-driver-from-Tel-Aviv look.

Yes, the dark hair, or something. The first time I saw you, there was something familiar about you, like: “I've met this person before . . .”

You must have taken one of our cabs.

Yeah, and someone in my family sold you a pair of boots. Do you believe there's such a thing as folk memory?

Maybe there is sort of a DNA pool. You inherit a cough or a bad back from your father or grandfather, maybe other cultural preferences, interests. Though I haven't found myself studying the Kabbalah just yet. That said, I can lose myself in the Scriptures . . . and have well-known messianic tendencies.
[laughs]
It's true I have an interest in most things Jewish. I would take it as a great compliment if I turned out to be Jewish. I'd be very flattered.

So that's a possibility.

I don't know, but romantically I hope it's true.

How far back can you trace your mother's ancestors?

They just sort of turned up at one point.

How did your parents meet?

Well, they grew up on the same street.

In the northern part of Dublin?

Yeah. A working-class area, a district called Cowtown. Cowper Street. That's where the cattle market was. The farmers would come up from the country and bring the cattle into the city. The Dubs, as they were known, the inner-city people, would sit there with their nose turned up at the smell of cow dung, slagging off the muckers, the culchies, as the farmers were known, they'd think they were better.

What was your father's first job?

He was taken out of school at fourteen. The Christian brothers who taught him begged my grandmother not to take him out, because he was the best
student they had had in years, but he was put into civil service at fifteen, which was a safe, pensionable job. He stayed in that job until he retired. Fear was a big part of his life, fear of what might happen, what could go wrong, that was one of his dynamics. And fear, as you know, is the opposite to faith. And I'm sure he got that from his father, who had TB, or the Depression of the thirties, or whatever. TB was a source of shame years ago in Ireland. It was a poverty disease. And his father had it. Obviously a lot of people used to have it. They used to lose weight. And people wouldn't admit to TB. So they used to weigh them at work. And my father told me that his father used to put lead in his shoes, so that when he was weighed, he didn't give away the fact that he was dying of TB, so he could keep his job. It's just the most disgraceful picture of where I guess Dublin and a lot of other places around Europe were, back then. But I think his aversion to risk probably came from that sense of jeopardy he grew up in.

Was he from a big family?

He had an older brother, two younger brothers, and a sister. Tommy, Leslie, Charlie, and Evelyn: the greatest people you could ever meet. Played cricket, listened to the opera. Working-class people who all broke the mold.

Did he have to support his younger brothers and sister?

Yes. That's true, but he was a Catholic, my mother was a Protestant . . . or a Jew.
[laughs]
That was a big deal back in those days, because they weren't really allowed to be married.

So they had to hide?

No, they didn't have to hide, but their marriage was disputed in some quarters and not recognized in others.

But, obviously, the area was Catholic. Why did a Protestant family like your mother's live there?

I don't know. There was a small Protestant community in the middle of this Catholic area. Both my mother and my father didn't take religion seriously, they saw the absurdity of the fuss made over their union, though my mother used to bring us to chapel on Sundays and my father would wait outside. I have to accept that one of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God.

Do you still have aunts or uncles who are living on your mother's side?

Yes I do. All my mother's sisters and brothers are alive. And all three of my father's brothers.

Did they look after you when your mother died?

Yes. There were two in particular: my aunt Ruth was very close to my mother, and Barbara was very close with my father.

Did they give you the warmth and support of . . .

[interrupting]
No, I wasn't available to it; I wasn't really open to it. I was just an obnoxious teenager. Barbara was quite a romantic figure. She read books. She often interceded with my father on my behalf. And Ruth was a more practical character: the no-nonsense of the Rankins.

So they defended you if your father was too hard on you?

They all felt that my father was too hard on me: everyone agreed on that. I don't know if he was hard enough.
[laughs]
Because I do think people
should be hard on themselves, don't you think? We're in a climate of self-love, really. We're in a climate of self-love and self-loathing.

I think you're right. It's the two sides of the same coin. People are obsessed with themselves: everything comes out of themselves and returns to themselves. I guess that's the dead end of narcissism.

A degree of narcissism is necessary, I suppose, to look in the pool to see your reflection. And if you're gonna write, that's the excuse of writers for being selfish bastards. What about you? I mean, you don't seem narcissistic or self-obsessed.

Sometimes not enough!

But you write. Why do you write?

Well, because I'm unable to express things in another way. I often believe that the words that come out of my mouth are not the ones I should be using. I can't let things loose unless I'm really sure about them.

It's maybe good.

Yes, it's good, but sometimes it's an excuse . . .

Oh yeah.

. . . for not putting yourself on the job.

That's true. That's often an excuse. You have to dare to fail. I think that's the big one: fear of failure. I've never had fear of failure. Isn't that mad?

That's the maddest thing, but at the same time I think that's the secret. Because you've never been afraid of making a fool of yourself, you've
never been afraid of looking ridiculous. You've never doubted that you would make it. I was reading through this book that your friend Niall Stokes wrote,
Into the Heart: The Stories Behind Every U2 Song,
and he quoted this song that I had no remembrance of, I must confess, that went like:
A picture in gray, Dorian Gray.
*

Oh yeah, that's fantastic!

I felt like a star . . .

I felt the world would go far if they listened to what I said.
I mean, it's ironic, and it's got some wit, but it's the thought that you have something to say.

I wanted you to succeed, because it was a sort of bet I'd made, but I never thought you'd make it this big. I thought you'd remain a cult favorite, like these eighties bands that you used to read about in the
NME
who were so proud to have street credibility.

I never had much interest in that. The sound of getting out of a ghetto is very different to the sound of getting into one.
[laughs]
It's a very different sound, whether that ghetto is an intellectual one, or the place where you grew up.

But look, Bono, you came from Dublin, which was the most provincial of places. You had the English language, sure, but nobody had made it from Dublin.

Philip Lynott from Thin Lizzy. The only black man in Ireland . . . and he joins a rock band!
[laughs]
That's great.

He was a big figure in the seventies, that's true. But was he the only model you had?

Bob Geldof was an inspiration. He was from Dublin.

True, you had the Boomtown Rats. They were big. So was it because of these two figures that you thought it was possible?

You're right in the sense that they didn't live in Dublin, they moved. Both Phil Lynott and Bob Geldof moved to London and, in Bob's case, colonized it. And I learnt a lot from Bob. I learnt a lot of my lip from Bob; I had a sense that the impossible was possible from him. Oddly enough, I didn't learn about social activism from him. In fact we used to argue about it. He used to tell me that pop and rock 'n' roll should never stray from sex and fun. Leave revolution to politicians! Right up until he had his epiphany, it was like: “It's only rock 'n' roll and I like it.” No, we had to find our own way. It's true, in the end we stayed in Dublin, and it was us against the world. We weren't gonna be part of any scene.

I had this vision of you as innocents, which you obviously weren't. Young and coming from an innocent place and bringing your candor to a cynical place, and winning over the cynicism. Maybe it was a romantic French idea, that the beauty is to make an elegant gesture and then disappear.
[Bono laughs]
But what I underestimated was your hunger.

Yeah, hungry in a way that couldn't be fed: that's the thing. You know, I remember Adam saying to me somewhere around
Rattle and Hum
: “Look, we're here now; we don't have to try so hard,” and Ali and I were asking the same thing, actually: “Can we relax?” And I said: “Well, we can relax, but we're about to become irrelevant any second. To be relevant is a lot harder than to be successful.” If you're judging where we are by the fact that we can afford to buy this house, it's a dangerous measure. I judge where we
are by how close am I to the melody I'm hearing in my head, and how close are we to what we can do as a band to realizing our potential. That's a different thing. I was unhappy . . . because I felt we were far from where we could be. We're getting closer now. We always had the grasp, it was just the reach was the problem. It's like a boxer with about six inches missing off his right hook, that's what it felt like in U2 most of the time. Just occasionally, just because we were quick, our inner force would knock one of our goals out, but normally, the reach was less than the grasp.