Rock and Hard Places (52 page)

“I thought the song would have a different resonance in Sarajevo,” he says, “but not as a band version. I thought if I showcased the lyric and the melody, it might fly. What I discovered was that the song had a completely other side. That’s what I find with a lot of our songs, that you can fiddle about with them, but you can’t change the essence of them, and it was nice to find a song that we thought we might never play again could still do that. We dropped it on the ‘Unforgettable Fire’ tour, so it’s been nearly ten years.”

This must be the weirdest part of the musician’s job. Most of us scream at pictures of ourselves a decade ago, cringe at the memory of things we thought, said or bought when we were younger. But a successful musician never escapes it. Everything ridiculous you did or wore as a youth is a matter of record, part of the fabric of other people’s lives.

“Yeah . . . playing the old songs is a bit like what I imagine travelling back in time and meeting yourself would be like. We’re quite lucky in that when it comes to the early embarrassing moments, we have so many that it’s actually just pointless even trying to defend ourselves. There’s so much there that we just have to laugh at, and be thankful that we’re still growing, still getting better at what we do. The first few weeks of
PopMart
were . . . well, we’d jumped in at the deep end and hadn’t prepared as much as we should have. But now . . . on previous tours, I remember Bono being under such a cloud for hours
after coming on stage, but on this tour we’re just laughing so much. It’s the most fun we’ve ever had on the road.”

Adam Clayton, when he’s wheeled before the tape recorder after Edge, offers a similarly sanguine view. As the only member of U2 to have racked up the traditional rock’n’roll accoutrements of court appearances, tabloid scandals, supermodel girlfriends and excess-induced absenteeism (at the end of the Zoo TV tour in Sydney, U2 had to play one show with Clayton’s guitar tech on bass), Clayton has perhaps had a better view of the bottom of the abyss than the others, but he doesn’t have any complaints this evening.

“You can have bad days,” he allows, “and every day is a challenge, because the preconceived ideas you had, as a sixteen-year-old joining a pop group, as a twenty-year-old releasing your first album, as a twenty-seven-year-old releasing
The Joshua Tree
, you have to battle against those, you have to get to the essence of what being a musician is, and you have to remember that, well, tonight I could have been playing in the Holiday Inn. By the time showtime comes around, you’ve got yourself centred. There is a discipline involved, and—I mean, this sounds very Californian—you have to reduce the number of stimuli in your day in order to become a sort of hollow vessel, so by the time you go on stage, you’ve actually got some energy to run off.”

Clayton has a strange accent that isn’t quite English and isn’t quite Irish.

“What’s fun about this now,” he continues, “is that an awful lot of the uncertainties have been removed by the fact that we have a history, by now, that indicates that this is probably what we’re going to be doing for the rest of our lives. We have a history that says we’ve done something very hard and very unnatural, for four men to grow together and live with each other for twenty years. I think everyone’s a lot more rounded and settled, and I’m realising that this is the most interesting musical engagement I could be involved in.”

That’s the thing about great bands, though: they’re always more than the sum of their parts. Lennon and McCartney’s post-Beatles efforts ran the gamut from the adequate to the excruciating. The Smiths splintered into an occasionally inspired session guitarist and a risible self-parody. Even the ones where you’d think it wouldn’t matter go this way, like Pixies—Black Francis wrote all those fantastic Pixies
songs, but listening to his solo albums was like wading through knee-deep mud in loose wellies.

“That chemistry,” nods Clayton, “is gold dust. If we went off and tried to make solo records, I’m sure they’d be as crap as everyone else’s solo records. For some reason, each of us works best in this situation. And that’s a nice thing to have figured out. We still all live within twenty minutes of each other. We spend a lot of time with each other, so we can chew a lot of ideas over. Other bands, when they get to our age, there’s a couple of divorces, there’s a couple of jealousies between members, there are management problems, and it’s very hard. We’ve been lucky, or wise, and we can devote most of our energy to being in U2. We keep a full-time staff on, which a lot of people don’t. We’re in a unique position, and we do take those risks, and we look like fools sometimes, but other times people say ‘Yes!’ and that’s the kind of band I always wanted to be in.”

 

BONO IS A restless interviewee, physically and mentally, sitting up and lying down as ideas occur to him. It’s the afternoon of the day after the Miami show, and we’re sitting in the sunshine in the Delano’s garden, roughly equidistant from the swimming pool, the cocktail bar and the giant-sized lawn chess set. Things could probably be worse.

“Are you enjoying Miami? It’s a very interesting city. It’s kind of the crossroads between North America and South America ...”

In Bosnia, Bono had said something about his attraction to the idea of Sarajevo as a cultural crossing place, though in Sarajevo’s case it had been between east and west . . . trying not to sound too much like a hack in search of an underlying theme, I wonder if he sees similarities.

“Exactly. Well, here you have the Catholicism of South America, which is the sexy end of the religion, you know, carnivals ...”

I’m starting to get used to Bono’s associative monologues.

“. . . which is something I’m becoming more and more interested in, the carnival, the celebration of the flesh—you know, carne meaning meat—before the denial, which is Lent, going into Easter, that kind of thing ...”

Keeping him to one theme is like trying to cage water—like a lot of people whose understanding of the world has come largely from going places and finding out for themselves, the connections he draws tend to
be as individual and eccentric as his experiences, and as he’s one of the most famous people on earth, it’s safe to assume that his experiences are more individual and eccentric than most. When transcribed into cold hard print, Bono can occasionally read like a stereotypical cosmic rock’n’roll mooncalf, but in person, his intellectual promiscuity just feels like the vigour of a compulsive conversationalist. It’s also something I’ve noticed in a lot of Irish and Scottish friends—a fondness for constructing elaborate, even absurd, theories out of bugger all just for the fun of seeing where the pieces land when the edifice topples over.

“... and you just get this sense that South America is coming through, you can see it in the writers and filmmakers, and this is its interface. You know, South Beach looks like lots of blocks of ice cream, Neapolitan, or ...”

I’d been thinking that earlier. The violently clashing pastel paint on the beachfront apartment buildings looks ghastly and ridiculous all day, until sunset, when the sky behind them becomes daubed in the exact same colours. Then it looks like heaven, or at least like Ernest Hemingway’s idea of it. Except I’d been thinking that the ice cream was more like tutti-frutti. U2 recorded some of
Pop
in Miami.

“Tutti-frutti, okay. Well, we came here to see if there was something here for us, but in the end our record wasn’t going to be about any one location. Because sometimes there’s almost a physical sense of location, Berlin for
Achtung Baby
, the US for
The Joshua Tree
.”

While we talk, passers-by stop to ask Bono for an autograph, or mumble terrified hellos. Bono’s lack of annoyance or condescension is startling (I mean, the interruptions are annoying me, and I’ve only been putting up with it for an hour). U2 started young—it feels like they’ve been there forever, but Bono is only thirty-seven—and they’ve been U2 all their adult lives. It may be that because of this they really don’t know any better, but they seem remarkably free of cynicism. They still get excited—they would scarcely have sunk a tidy fortune in taking
PopMart
to Sarajevo otherwise.

“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 trying to make that record that we hear in our heads, and can’t quite play. I guess when we were twenty-three or twenty-four we went through that
phase where groups move out of their flats, and into houses, and start wanting to put paintings up on the walls, and they don’t want to look like rednecks, so they start reading up on what sort of paintings they should have in their houses, and what Chinese rugs . . . I guess we must have gone through Chinese rug phases, but we were over it coming out of our twenties. The weird thing is that you’re left, in a way, with only the right motives. If the reason you joined a band was to get laid, get famous, get rich, well, they all went by the way fairly quickly, so all we’re left with is . . . make that record.”

U2 in general, and Bono in particular, have often been scoffed at—indeed, back in the dusty-leather-and-white-flags pre-
Achtung Baby
era, I had, occasionally, been party to that scoffing. Scorn is not unusual for a successful rock group. What is unusual is the equanimity with which U2 shrug it off—many are the millionaires who will, given half the chance, bitterly recite every bad review they’ve ever had. I once spent an afternoon in New York listening to Gavin Rossdale of Bush relate chapter and verse of the critical batterings his band had received, mostly in publications that sold a hundredth of what his records did. I suggested that a) next time, he send the journalist a statement of his net worth and a photo of his big house in the country, or vintage car collection, or whatever, and b) perhaps he could lighten up; “You don’t understand,” he replied, and rarely has a truer word been spoken.

“Oh,” says Bono, with a dismissive wave of his cigarette, “bands at our level deserve to be humbled. But it was the 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 that most artists—most people, come to that—condemn themselves to mediocrity because their fear of looking like a fool outweighs their potential for greatness. Hoping that Bono will forgive the impudence, I think it’d be fair to say that this has never looked like 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. People who . . . people who jump off, like . . . like Jimi Hendrix trying to put Vietnam through his amplifier, or like the way Lester Bangs wrote about rock’n’roll, that
takes a certain courage. I think one of things I found difficult in the 80s was this din of voices telling me, ‘But you can’t fly, you arsehole.’ But that’s the kind of thinking that results in restrained, reasonable music—or, for that matter, restrained, reasonable writing. You must not find yourself tiptoeing.”

Pop
contains at least two songs, “Staring at the Sun” and “Please,” that appear to address the Northern Irish peace process, and concludes with an open letter to Jesus, titled “Wake Up Dead Man.”

“Well . . . look. As far as what I actually believe myself goes, I’m not up for discussing it in any detail, because some subjects are too precious for interviews. I let them come out in songs. Also, I haven’t got it all figured out, so I don’t want to make an arse of myself. But yes, I do feel that there is love and logic behind the universe, and that in recent years that instinct that we all have has been written off, we’re reduced to being two-dimensional. There’s a heartache that goes with that, or if not a heartache, then certainly a soul-ache, that music . . . I mean, I have great admiration and respect for atheists, though. I feel God would have a lot more time for them than for most people who are part of a religion, who seem so odd, to me, or doped, or just believe because they were told to. I think atheists have a certain rigour. In the absence of God, people have promoted a lot of lesser types to the same position, which is quite confusing. Film stars, pop stars, royalty . . . are not actually heroes. Nurses are. Mothers are. Firemen are. Some things are arse about tit.”

It must also be difficult trying to maintain a conventional view of religion when you’ve spent so long being worshipped yourself.

“That’s . . . good,” he laughs. “I’ll have to have a little lie down after that one. Wow, that’s great. I’ll get out of bed for that. No, basically, but most musicians I know say that the great stuff they kind of stumble on, and the average stuff is what they can claim authorship over. I do still feel that U2 write songs by accident, and 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 away again.

“It all started with the Psalms of David,” he continues, with a smile that indicates that he knows he’s being preposterous, but is determined to see where this goes. “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?’ That’s basically what music has been doing since. I’m still a student, so I’m still knocking on Bob Dylan’s door ...”

Ouch.

“. . . no pun intended, and I’m still going to turn up to Al Green’s church, I’m still going to invite Bob Marley’s mother to our gigs, talk to Frank Sinatra, talk to Quincy Jones, just trying to figure it out.”

It could be argued that this reverence for their forebears was what got U2 into trouble on
Rattle & Hum
, when they recorded with Dylan and B.B. King, effectively sneaking into the rock’n’roll hall of fame and hanging their own portraits on the walls.
Rattle & Hum
was derided, and not without reason, as work of epic humourlessness and egomania. Though it did, buried somewhere beneath the homage and piety, contain the line “I don’t believe in riches but you should see where I live,” which might have been the beginning of U2’s rebirth, an acknowledgement that they badly needed to resolve a few contradictions.