Killing Bono (19 page)

“Oh, I don't see this as a Dylan song, at all,” said the publisher. “But Elvis, now, that's another matter.”

“Forget Elvis,” I said. “He wouldn't touch it with a barge-pole.”

“Well, who would you have in mind to record your songs?” he asked, warily.

“Actually, we plan to record them ourselves,” said Ivan.

“Ah now, lads, lads,” said the publisher, in the patronizing tones of someone addressing a couple of naïve children. “Forget about all of that. The money's in the writing. Trust me on this. If you want a hit record you need an established star. The bigger the star, the bigger the hit.”

“So who do you suggest?” said Ivan.

“And not Elvis Costello,” I insisted.

“Cliff Richard?” he said, hopefully.

Were these the kind of morons to whom we were supposed to entrust our careers?

Then, swimming like eager minnows into the lair of the shark, we were summoned to the offices of Ossie Kilkenny.

Ossie was an immensely charming, flamboyant and gregarious music-business accountant who had his fingers in every Irish pie. He represented U2, Bob Geldof, Chris De Burgh, Paul Brady and even
Hot Press
. I think Ossie was growing a little dissatisfied with his role. There was a lot of money flying about in the music business, and he was looking for a bigger slice of the action.

“You may think you have the best songs God ever wrote,” Ossie told us in a typically colorful turn of phrase, “but there is more to this business than talent. A lot more. I could show you great songwriters who are working in Burger King now. You need to get the business side right.” And Ossie, of course, was just the man to do it for us. Under his guidance, Ossie promised us, we wouldn't just be talking about getting a record deal. We would be talking about getting a quarter of a million pounds. Maybe more. The theory was that the more record companies paid out in advance the harder they would work to recoup—a win-win situation for us. Ossie urged us to make some more demos while he sorted out our tax-exemption status.

The trouble was, we had spent everything we had and couldn't keep tapping up our dad for money. So Ivan made the ultimate sacrifice, selling his Honda 250 Superdream motorbike for £1,000. The recording mobile was once again parked outside our house. Kids from the neighborhood would gather outside, listening to the drums reverberate through the trailer, climbing the steps to peak into the dark interior of this sci-fi lair of sound.

“Are youse famous?” they'd ask, wide-eyed.

We would just smile mysteriously. It would not be long now.

We recorded two more tracks. “Say Yeah!” was another frantic, uptempo dance tune but “Some Kind of Loving” was in a different league, as close to our new pop ideal as I felt we had come. We appropriated the propulsive beat to Michael Jackson's “Billie Jean,” underpinned with a deep, sinister keyboard motif and completed by an epic chorus with harmonies that put the Beach Boys to the sword. But if you listened close enough, the song itself was a very dark tale of rape and unwanted pregnancy, written in an angry burst when a girl I had briefly dated tearfully told me her own story.

Ossie did a double take when he played it back in his office. “Did I just hear you sing ‘throwing up'?” he asked. “I've never heard of somebody throwing up in a hit record. But we can worry about that later.”

Ossie had a partner in London, a high-powered music business solicitor called David Landsman, who represented Shakin' Stevens, the biggest star of the moment. While we busied ourselves in the studio with Peter, we would hear a flow of encouraging reports from the music capital. An A&R man from MCA flew over to meet us. We had recently received a stock rejection letter from MCA for one of our previous demos but acceptance is apparently quicker than rejection. Ossie and David, however, were not interested in MCA. Not enough money and not a very encouraging rate of success, apparently. Neither were they interested in Stiff, the next company to show their hand.

Stiff was the home of Elvis Costello and Ian Dury, both of whom were among our favorite artists. But our advisors remained unimpressed. “You could have a deal with Stiff tomorrow, be in the charts by the end of the year, but you'll never make any money,” they told us.

Money. That's what it was all about. I guess we had the fever now. Fuck art, put the cash up front.

(To be fair to Ossie and Dave, MCA signed fourteen acts that year and dropped thirteen of them after the failures of their first albums. Only Nik Kershaw enjoyed any success. And Stiff records went into terminal decline around the same time, with label boss Dave Robinson forced to relinquish control to ZTT records in 1987, a label set up by Trevor Horn.)

Big deals, we were assured, were imminent. Meetings were taking place every day. It was only a matter of time.

Ivan and I were getting itchy. We wanted to be where the action was. We decided to head to London. Three months, that was how long Ossie and Dave reckoned it could take to put the right deal together. I remember standing with Ivan on the deck of a ferry as it sailed out of Dublin Bay, watching the coastline slowly dwindle in the distance, thinking, “We'll be back in triumph very soon.” Flying back to a ticker-tape parade.

Then Dublin was gone. And there was just the sea.

L
ondon. The city drew us to it like a magnet. This was the metropolis of our dreams, the pulsing capital of pop, where the Beatles recorded at Abbey Road and the Sex Pistols started a riot in the 100 Club, where
NME
's critics pounded on typewriters above the swinging stalls of Carnaby Street, making and breaking careers in poison prose, and scheming A&R men peered through the windows of luxurious offices in gleaming high-rise record companies, wondering who among the teeming hordes below would facilitate their rise to the corporate boardroom. London, where the Bow Bells rang with jingles and the streets were paved with gold records. Dizzy with possibility, we stepped off the train to meet our destiny.

Ivan had an English girlfriend, Cassandra Duncan, with whom he had hooked up at Trinity College. We wound up bunking in her sister Athena's living room in a flat in Finsbury Park. On our first day, we decided to head into the city to see the sights. It was the summer of 1983, Britain was in the midst of a heat wave and London was ripe and succulent. We left the flat in T-shirts and shorts but when we arrived at the Tube station we were astonished to see a man emerge from the lift wearing a thick black overcoat, with a Homburg on his head, his long hair tied in tassels and sporting a long, stringy beard. I realize now that he was a Hasidic Jew but I had never seen such a thing before. Then another Hasidic Jew emerged. Then another, this one holding a big bass drum.

“That is the weirdest image for a band I have ever seen,” I said to Ivan.

This was going to be one freaky, funky city!

We went to meet Ossie's partner, David Landsman. He was a smooth, besuited Englishman who operated from a large house on Camden Road. Famous names were dropped casually into the conversation. We were buoyed with stories about how impressed the great and good were with our tapes. We wanted to meet them but were told that negotiations were delicate and best left to professionals.

Suddenly we just seemed to be in London with nothing to do. Ivan had his girlfriend with whom he could while away the hours. I felt cut off, a long way from home, swinging between overstimulation and ennui and suffering that suffocating isolation you can feel in a city of millions where everyone fights for their own little square of space and no one really cares who you are. I had been at the center of something in Ireland, a frantic social whirl that revolved around my band and my job and me, me, me. Now I was disconnected. There were gigs to go to, films to watch, art galleries to check out, but often, during those first weeks, I just walked the streets, tramping miles, all over London, looking at the endless parade of faces passing by, and cars full of strangers hurtling on journeys to other places, and all the lights in all the flats full of all the people to whom I meant less than zero, people with lives of their own, who would never know me or be known by me. I traveled on the Tube, scribbling in my notebooks, pondering the notion of insignificance. And it welled up like a fear inside me, an existential nausea. But (deep breath) I was going to be OK. Because I was going to be famous. It was just a matter of time before everyone would know my name.

Things began to improve when I was put in touch with Ross Fitzsimons, an alumni of
Hot Press
who had recently landed a job in the marketing department of MCA. Ross was some years older than me and moved in very different circles. At
Hot Press
, he had belonged to the mysterious advertising department, keeping nine-to-five hours, practically unseen by the hardcore staff knocking out pages by night. We would occasionally pass these other employees on the stairs, usually while they were arriving for work and we were leaving for home. We tended to think of them as part-timers. They thought of us as a bunch of incompetent amateurs who were forced to work the night shift because we just couldn't get our act together, which was probably fair enough. Ross, however, would sometimes climb the stairs after hours to help us out when the going got really tough, putting in stints at the rock 'n' roll front line with the Letraset and cow gum. He had a taste for reggae and all its vices, dabbled in journalism, managed the odd band and harbored vague ambitions as a music-business entrepreneur. I think he must have taken pity on me when he offered me the spare room in his rented flat in Belsize Crescent. He clearly had no idea what he was letting himself in for.

Belsize Park is a rather posh area adjacent to Hampstead but it could just as well have been Brixton to me, as I still didn't actually know one end of London from another. Twiggy, the sixties supermodel, owned a flat opposite. Later on, Richard Thompson, the cult guitarist and songwriter, moved in next door. And in the penthouse flat above lived Jeff Banks, one of Britain's leading clothes designers, founder of the fashion retail chain Warehouse. Jeff was a squat, bearded, very dapper man with a forcefully friendly air about him. He took Ivan and me under his wing, and thankfully plugged me into a new social network.

Jeff had been married to British pop queen Sandy Shaw in the sixties, which was to us immensely impressive. For his part, Jeff declared himself an unabashed fan of our recordings. He would introduce us to people with the deadpan recommendation that they get to know us before we became famous and wouldn't talk to them anymore. Soon we were out on the town with Jeff and his retinue of models, long-legged girls with perfect skin who seemed to have stepped directly from the pages of glossy magazines. Which, of course, they had. Sometimes you would catch them from a certain angle or in a certain light and an image of a perfume ad or a
Vogue
fashion shoot would flash into your mind.

For all their impossible beauty, I was quietly appalled by how dim they seemed to be. They were great fun on the dance floor, where they would smile and giggle and strike catwalk poses; but try to engage them in conversation about anything other than their beauty regime and they became pouting and vacuous, which had a terrible effect on my libido. I was intimidated enough by their appearance without having to make all the effort to sustain conversations while they blinked at me like goldfish. I began to wonder if there was some kind of universal law balancing physical attractiveness against mental development.

One night we had all been out painting the town various shades of red and ended up in Jeff's apartment, snorting cocaine off the balcony and watching the twinkling lights of London. A willowy blonde was telling me she had been named Face of the Year or somesuch honor I had never before contemplated the existence of. She was currently featured in a cinematic advertisement for deodorant which had made a big impression on me. Every time I saw it, I wanted to nudge the stranger in the cinema seat next to me and say, “I know her.” Such was her beauty, I was willing to overlook the fact that she believed Ireland to be overrun by terrorists and that I had fled to London to escape the ravages of war.

“Was there, like, a watchtower at your school?” she asked.

“A what?”

“A watchtower, like, for the army to watch over the playground and make sure the kids didn't get shot?”

“Sadly, no,” I said. “We just had to defend ourselves.” And then, because I was desperate to keep her talking, I asked her the same thing. “Was there a watchtower where you went to school?”

“Don't be silly,” she said. “Not in England! We don't need things like that at school.”

And the penny finally dropped. “Are you still at school?” I asked.

“Yeah, ‘course,” she said. “Mum and Dad want me to stay on for uni but I think I'm going to leave when I'm seventeen, give the modeling a chance.”

I had to make a swift readjustment in my damning IQ appraisal. With her poise, physical self-assurance and air of cosmopolitan sophistication, I had assumed she was older than me. It had never crossed my mind that all those impossibly slim, leggy ideals of femininity placed before us on the supermarket shelf of culture for our admiration and aspiration might have just been gamine kids fresh out of braces. I felt strangely cheated.

Did this realization bring an end to my dishonorable intentions? Did it fuck! Rather, it emboldened me, lending me a sense of advantage in the delicate area of amorous negotiation, until I finally succeeded in smarming my way into the bed of one of the teen catwalk queens, although I can't recall if it was Face of the Year or Rear of the Year or just Hand Model of the Week. What I do remember is walking into a bedroom to be confronted by a large color poster of Bono taped to the wall.

“How do you know Bono?” I asked, rather stupidly.

“U2 are great, aren't they?” she said.

It took me a moment to adjust to the notion that my school-friends had moved into this realm of iconography, where complete strangers might display their pictures as if they were part of the family. The whole experience was strangely off-putting. Every time I glanced up from the perfect form of the naked beauty writhing beneath me, I would catch sight of Bono looking down at us. Was that a faint hint of disapproval in his eyes? Did he know that I was only with this girl because she was a model and I could brag about it later?

“Do you mind if we turn the lights off?” I asked. My breathless little beauty seemed surprised by my bashfulness but nonetheless complied. Even in the dark, though, I could feel Bono's reproving gaze burning into my back.

U2 were out there now, dwelling in that hyperreality whose inhabitants have an existence quite separate to their real lives. They were off touring the world, waving white flags on stages erected from one corner of the earth to the other, but they were simultaneously here in this girl's bedroom and scaling scaffolding on
Top of the Pops
and singing their songs on a million hi-fis.
War
had done that. It was the album in which Bono had begun to fulfill all his latent promise, stamping his passionate personality on music that was rougher, funkier, grittier and more vibrantly contemporary. It was as if the Edge had stepped back, stripping down his wall of sound to allow his songwriting partner some sonic space. Bono's voice was filling out and the words were pouring forth. For the first time in his career as a lyricist, Bono risked being called verbose as he gave us his thoughts on love in a time of danger and spiritual survival in an era when the forces of chaos and disorder seemed to rule the world.

I listened to
War
with admiration, not envy. I was honestly amazed that they were progressing in such creative leaps and bounds, producing songs of the transcendent quality of “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” “You don't write songs,” I had once admonished Bono. “You make these fantastic records but if you took away all the layers of sound what's underneath? There's nothing you could just sing in the shower.”

“I don't have a shower,” he jokingly replied. “I have a bath. Maybe that's the problem!”

Now U2 had somehow reached the sacred ground of the singles hit parade with “Two Hearts Beat as One” and “New Year's Day.” We had some catching up to do. But Ossie and Dave were still whispering their million-dollar supplications in my ear. Be patient. It would only be a matter of time.

Hanging out with this model crowd, we were dining in places where we could barely afford a starter and being led into VIP rooms in exclusive nightclubs where you could take out a mortgage on a cocktail. Funds were running dangerously low. At the end of a night partying, when everyone was air-kissing their goodbyes and jumping into taxis, Ivan and I would hang back, making sure we were the last to leave, then we would walk back to Belsize Park from central London, traipsing miles under the lamplights, cutting across Regent's Park, all the while talking about songs and albums and hatching fanciful plans for what we were going to do in the future. The very near future. When we got the deal. Everything would be all right if we could just hang on a little bit longer.

Meanwhile, we were advised to sign on the dole. I was incredulous that I could come over from Ireland and receive money in England for not working but I was assured that this was the case. So I duly went along to an unpleasant building down the back streets of Camden, reeking of despair and hopelessness, and cheerfully filled in the requisite forms. I was summoned into a tiny, airless office, where a rather severe woman read my paperwork and, without once looking up to see who she was addressing, asked me what steps I was taking to find gainful employment.

“I'm sorting out a record deal,” I told her.

She sighed loudly and finally raised her eyes to meet mine. “You can't depend on that,” she said. “We need to see evidence that you are actively seeking work.”

I patiently explained that I really didn't need a job as a major record contract would be in my hands any day now.

“You don't know how many times I have heard that,” she said, with a disturbing mix of pity and condescension.

“Yeah, well, maybe,” I said. “But I'm different.”

Her long-suffering look suggested she may have heard that line before, too.

At last we were summoned to meet one of the movers and shakers apparently so enamored of our talent. Lucien Grainge ran a publishing company and was considered a real up-and-comer in the music business. Ossie and Dave were certainly most impressed with him. After all the buildup, Ivan and I were a bit nonplussed to find Lucien occupying a cramped and not particularly well-maintained suite of offices up a narrow staircase off Oxford Street. He was a small, stocky man whose chubby features were mostly hidden behind an enormous pair of bright-red, plastic-framed spectacles. He had the habit of interrupting our conversations to apparently take calls from major rock stars. “David…David,” he'd say, “love the new tracks,” then he'd cover the mouthpiece and whisper to us, conspiratorially, “Bowie.” Then the line from his secretary would buzz again. “Gotta take this call,” he'd say. “Mick, Mick…”