The Frontman

by Harry Browne

  Larry’s contempt for those who viewed the Northern Irish conflict as a religious war was lacerating, albeit confused. One wonders how he felt when Bono said, years, later: ‘Remember, I come from Ireland and I’ve seen the damage of religious warfare.’35

  Despite the hostility to militant nationalism and the sense in ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ of distance from the events it describes, Bono was always ready to declare that the Troubles took place in Ireland, ‘my country’. This sounded less like united-Ireland defiance of the border imposed by Britain’s partition of the island than a means of conferring credibility on U2 for their proximity to and involvement in the situation.

  And however one interprets ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, what is beyond question is that the song, and that (false) sense that U2 intimately knew whereof they spoke, played an enormous role in turning U2 into international stars. Bono’s own version of the story says that on the previous tour, for the October album, he had already begun deconstructing the Irish tricolour on stage: he tore the green and orange away to leave only a white flag, which became the constant prop for performances of ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ thereafter.36 Whether that was the origin of it or not, the image of Bono marching to the martial beat of that song with a white flag in the misty rain at a 1983 festival gig in Colorado was part of the band’s breakthrough video on MTV. For those who didn’t know much about the Irish Troubles, it seemed that this song and the way Bono performed it were saying something terribly defiant about something or other of great, albeit obscure, political importance. And few people were prepared to point out that, in reality, he was defying no one except a beleaguered, oppressed community of mainly working-class people who were already under physical and ideological assault and were themselves looking for ways to break the cycle of violence.

  By 1987, U2 were big enough, and the IRA bomb that killed eleven people at an Enniskillen war memorial was horrible enough, for Bono to make very publicly explicit that the song’s ire was directed at the Provos, as well as their Irish-American supporters. In a powerful US performance on the night of that bombing, featured in arty black-and-white in the film Rattle and Hum, he took a mid-song break to declare:

  I’ve had enough of Irish-Americans who haven’t been back to their country in twenty or thirty years come up to me and talk about the resistance, the revolution back home, and the glory of the revolution, and the glory of dying for the revolution. Fuck the revolution! … Where’s the glory in bombing a Remembrance Day parade of old-age pensioners, their medals taken out and polished up for the day. Where’s the glory in that? To leave them dying or crippled for life or dead under the rubble of the revolution that the majority of the people in my country don’t want.37

  He then, as always, led the crowd in chanting ‘No more!’ – this time with no question about whom the words were targeting. The target most definitely wasn’t the state that had conferred those harmlessly polished medals on those old-age pensioners, perhaps, or perhaps not, for their services to the cause of nonviolence.

  The truth was that this seemingly courageous, militant stance for Peace was no more than an impassioned dramatisation of the useless, war-weary but war-prolonging shibboleths of the Irish and British establishments, which cast the conflict as fundamentally the fault of a mad, blood-crazed IRA. In this respect, Bono Vox was no more than a ‘good voice’ of his adopted class, a young man whose career benefited greatly from the Northern conflict.

  In a twenty-first century interview Bono indulged in considerable revisionism about this time: ‘I could not but be moved by the courage of Bobby Sands, and we understood how people had taken up arms to defend themselves, even if we didn’t think it was the right thing to do. But it was clear that the Republican Movement was becoming a monster in order to defeat one.’38 Such understanding, including an acknowledgment that Sands was courageous and the British presence in Northern Ireland constituted a ‘monster’, was, however, unspeakable and unspoken by Bono in the 1980s. Writing in the New York Times in 2010 as he visited Derry to see the British apologise for 1972’s Bloody Sunday, he was even critical of his younger self when describing his newfound respect for Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness, by that time deputy first minister of Northern Ireland: ‘Figures I had learned to loathe as a self-righteous student of nonviolence in the ’70s and ’80s behaved with a grace that left me embarrassed over my vitriol.’39 His studies of nonviolence had nonetheless left him strikingly unconcerned about the violence of the state responsible for the very atrocity that he so blithely name-checked in ‘Sunday, Bloody Sunday’ – the song for which he was invited to Derry that day.

  His revisionism, in any case, should come as no surprise. In the years after the ceasefires of the mid 1990s Bono, U2 and most of the rest of the Irish and British establishments learned to speak a retrospective ‘peace-process’ language of respect, dialogue and inclusion. But it was not their native tongue.

  And whatever the truth of the deconstructing-the-tricolour story, Bono would not always be so sensitive about the dangers of associating ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ with nationalism, even violent nationalism. On stage in Madison Square Garden in October 2001, as the US dropped bombs on Afghan cities, during that song he ‘embraced the Stars and Stripes’ and otherwise ‘reverently’ handled the US flag.40 He didn’t tear it apart.

  SELF AID: CELEBRITY AT HOME

  It was obvious by the mid 1980s, when Rolling Stone called U2 the ‘Band of the Decade’ – not an entirely obvious characterisation in 1985, since their five albums (including a ‘live’ one) had sold millions of copies but not reached any higher than number twelve in the US charts – Bono and the band had successfully used their Irishness as a calling card in the United States. Back home in Ireland, it was also clear that their American success could in turn be a route to domestic power and influence. But despite their increasing association with a liberal human-rights discourse internationally (see Chapters 2 and 3), U2’s interventions in Ireland were of a distinctly cautious and conservative hue. As noted above, they kept their heads down during the huge, and hugely divisive, referendum campaigns in 1983 and 1986, on abortion and divorce respectively, when Irish liberals were demoralisingly trounced.

  Six weeks before the divorce referendum, however, U2 did lend their credibility and popularity to a local follow-up to the previous summer’s global Live Aid concerts. Especially given that Live Aid’s creator was Irishman Bob Geldof, and Bono had proved one of its most telegenic stars (see Chapter 2), ‘Self Aid’ was a predictable enough response to widespread populist grumbling about the readiness of celebrities, and indeed of ordinary donors, to help poor people in faraway Africa – Ireland had led the world in per capita giving to Live Aid – but not the poor on our own doorstep. The grumbling gained depth and resonance from the devastating recession that had taken hold in the Republic in the early 1980s. By May 1986, when Self Aid took place, there was anaemic growth, but no one would have mistaken Ireland for a thriving country, with Irish unemployment having hovered for years between 15 and 20 per cent, and emigration back at levels not seen since the 1950s, tens of thousands of young people, from a total population for the Republic of only 3.5 million, leaving each year.

  But the organisers of Self Aid were determined not to see it become a focus for the country’s growing political anger. U2 themselves had already begun to be appropriated by politicians and pundits as a reason for the nation to be cheerful and encouraged; in the words of one historian of the period, they were seen as ‘proof that a better Ireland was possible’.41 Self Aid too, as it approached, began to look more and more like a star-studded, TV-friendly paean to the power of positive thinking. And while there were many big Irish stars involved – the Boomtown Rats doing their last gig, Thin Lizzy returning only a few months after singer Phil Lynott’s death, the London-and-Liverpool-Irish Elvis Costello – by now there was no doubt that Bono was the biggest of them all.

  There was a groundswell of opinion on much of the Irish Left that Self A
id, with its emphasis on positivity and the ‘pull up by our bootstraps’ type of capitalism of much of its rhetoric, would do more harm than the little good it would achieve through fundraising for jobs-creation projects. In addition to a charitable trust that raised more than a million pounds, and to which community groups and start-ups could subsequently apply for funds, viewers were encouraged to phone in if they could offer employment themselves: thousands of dubious ‘jobs’ were thus ‘created’ by the concert/telethon.42 This sort of charade, critics argued, was letting the state and economic elites off the hook by suggesting that the economic crisis could be solved by some apolitical form of ‘self’ activity by the unemployed and employers, who suddenly discovered they could employ people and get their names on TV in the bargain. Bono hadn’t been especially noisy in the run-up to the concert, but as its most recognisable face he became the target for left-wing criticism as the day approached. Posters featuring Bono went up around Dublin and other cities, parodying the Self Aid ‘Make It Work’ slogan by declaring: ‘Self Aid Makes It Worse’.

  The left-wing posters would have been insulting enough to Bono’s vanity – campaigners had chosen a less than attractive mulleted photo, though Bono had finally abandoned that hairstyle – but worse was to come. On the Thursday before the weekend Self Aid gig, listings magazine In Dublin, normally reliable in its support of U2, appeared on the stands with Bono on the cover. ‘The Great Self Aid Farce’, the magazine declared, constituted ‘Rock Against the People’.43 Inside, several pieces denounced the concert and singled out U2 for odium for allowing themselves to be used in this way. The polemics were led by the great Derry Marxist and journalist Eamonn McCann (then still a fan, later to become Bono’s most trenchant Irish critic), along with the magazine’s editor, John Waters (later to become an increasingly conservative grouch, and who rarely had another bad word to say about Bono).

  Anyone who hoped that Bono might take the opportunity of the Self Aid gig to answer his critics by underlining his genuine radicalism – and there were still some in Ireland who wanted to believe in that – was to be sorely disappointed. The most political speech he made for the occasion came in the middle of a vamping little version of Bob Dylan’s ‘Maggie’s Farm’: U2 were starting their ‘exploring the blues’ period, and were checking out how their elders and betters had done it, incorporating a bit of John Lennon’s ‘Cold Turkey’ in the mix. Because many young Irish people were emigrating to Margaret (‘Maggie’) Thatcher’s Britain, Bono reckoned it would be clever to present Dylan’s great, funny, devastating broadside about power relations as an earnest plea to be able to stay in Ireland rather than emigrate. In effect, ‘I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm, coz I’m gonna stay and work on Garret’s farm.’

  The result was the effective emasculation of the cocky anger of Dylan’s song, whose protagonist runs through a list of people for whom he will no longer work, making it clearer and clearer that they probably include every conceivable species of boss. Dylan’s rejection of any chance to ‘sing while you slave’ wasn’t clear enough, however, to emerge intact in Bono’s telling, as he made clear in a rather pathetic spoken interlude over the pumping riff: ‘You see I like it just where I am. Tonight that’s Dublin city, Ireland. And I prefer to get a job in my own hometown, mister.’ The American twang in Bono’s accent had rarely stood out quite this strongly. The distinctly unDublin phrasing, including the faux-proletarian ‘mister’, pointed to the other major influence at play: Bruce Springsteen was still near the height of his popularity, and the previous summer had played a huge outdoor gig at Slane Castle in nearby County Meath; U2 had even done a (reportedly dismal) cover version of his song ‘My Hometown’ during a Dublin show in June 1985.

  It was striking that Bono made his watery political declaration sound such a false and borrowed note. But he had more to say. In an extraordinary bout of self-pity, he turned part of the long and winding final section of ‘Bad’ into an apparent tribute to himself. Singing over the repeating guitar figure to the tune of Elton John’s terrible, maudlin song about Marilyn Monroe, ‘Candle in the Wind’, Bono achingly intoned: ‘You have the grace to hold yourself, while those around you crawl. They crawl out of the woodwork, on to pages of cheap Dublin magazines. I have the grace to hold myself. I refuse to crawl.’44

  Refuse to crawl he might, but even today the effect of viewing this outburst via YouTube may make the viewer’s skin crawl. It was clear that the attack on ‘cheap Dublin magazines’ was aimed at McCann and Waters, but to whom on earth was he directing his refusal to crawl? Was he really just declaring himself satisfied with his display of courage in belittling his critics? And this grace – then as now among his favourite words – did it come direct from God? U2 biographer Eamon Dunphy, critical by the standards of Dublin journalists but still inclined to cut Bono slack on this incident, wrote that it showed that ‘Dublin still got to them’ – that their hometown’s mode of badmouthing had a knack for getting under their skin – but also that, ‘this being Dublin’, Bono and McCann had chatted and cleared up any ‘misunderstandings’ at a party after the gig.45 What could hardly be misunderstood was that this young man had a disproportionate sense of his own righteousness.

  However, Bono’s strange and chilling onstage attack may have had some effect. It would be more than two decades, until the time when U2’s tax arrangements were revealed, before there was any comparable sustained criticism of Bono in the major Irish media. (Paul McGuinness was also capable of his own brand of chilling: when in 1991 a Dublin paper rounded up a few mildly mocking comments about Bono’s lyrics for ‘The Fly’, the band’s burly manager wrote a nasty letter to the bylined journalist, calling him ‘a creep’, and CCing the chief executive of the newspaper company.46)

  The main exception to Irish press quiescence in the face of Bono’s power and glory was the small investigative and satirical magazine Phoenix. While Phoenix mostly kept a close eye on the band’s business interests in Ireland, it wasn’t above teasing Bono on other fronts. When, for example, in the year 2000 the magazine reported on the legal negotiations then ongoing between Bono and a local tabloid over paparazzi shots of the singer’s sunbathing buttocks, his lawyers threatened Phoenix with prosecution under the Offences Against the State Act – generally employed against serious crime and ‘subversion’ – for revealing ‘sub judice’ material, and said they had sought the intervention of the attorney-general over the matter. Phoenix responded by reproducing the lawyers’ letter under the unusually large headline: ‘L’ETAT C’EST MOI! KING BONO INVOKES OFFENCES AGAINST THE STATE ACT’ – and by continuing to produce story after story about ‘Bono’s bum deal’.47

  It was also Phoenix magazine that reported on how Bono’s wife Ali described their relationship with journalists. Ali had been contacted by an old acquaintance named Dónal de Róiste, the brother of one of her closest charitable partners. De Róiste was still fighting to clear his name more than thirty years after being unjustly ‘retired’ from the Irish army under a cloud of suspicion of IRA connections. Ali refused to help, though in the nicest possible Christian way: ‘I wish I knew a journalist that one could entrust with this cause … but I’m sorry to say I don’t at present … the nature of our position unfortunately means that we stay as removed as possible from the press.’ She continued sympathetically: ‘I am sorry that you feel so wronged. I, like you, believe in fair play and justice … which I know you will receive in the next life …’48

  MOTHER: NURTURING NEW U2’S

  Bono was rarely shy about where he felt U2 fit, in this life, into the history of rock ’n’ roll, the art form and the business. ‘I don’t mean to sound arrogant,’ he told Rolling Stone rather redundantly soon after their first album had appeared, ‘but at this stage, I do feel that we are meant to be one of the great groups. There’s a certain spark, a certain chemistry, that was special about the Stones, the Who and the Beatles, and I think it’s also special about U2.’49

  So it is not surprising
that U2 established a record label, in the mode of the Beatles’ Apple Corps, with the stated ambition of nurturing Irish talent, though it is perhaps surprising how quickly they got around to this task: they established Mother in August 1984, before they had even started playing arenas, let alone stadia, in the US (and almost exactly ten years after the death of Bono’s mother, Iris). The Beatles left the task till rather later in their development as the world’s biggest group – that is to say, when they were indisputably on the top of the world and were in a position to establish a sophisticated corporate apparatus in the heart of London, then probably the world’s pop capital – and still made a mess of it.

  Perhaps the worst that can be said with certainty about U2’s label, Mother, is that it fits quite comfortably within a history of poorly performing record labels founded by artists themselves. That is not the worst that is said about Mother, however. While U2 have benefited from a compliant press in Ireland, the gossip that plays such an important role in this small, talkative society is often far less kind. One persistent and false strand of local discourse – now of course searchable on the internet – has long suggested that Mother was deliberately established, and operated, to kill off the Irish competition, to ensure that, far from a ‘next U2’ emerging from a thriving scene, Irish acts who threatened U2’s hegemony would be signed up to Mother, then mismanaged into obscurity. This false theory is the writing-large of the false story of Paul McGuinness’s malevolent impersonating phone call to promote U2 from the band’s early days, and frankly it has just as little evidence to support it. It vastly overestimates the power of U2 to affect the behaviour of a whole range of international companies that would have been delighted to make stars of an Irish ‘next U2’, and it equally underestimates the extent to which plans and intentions can go awry and astray with just a little nudge from incompetence and complacency, and no help at all from conspiracy.