The Frontman

by Harry Browne

  Rattle and Hum, directed by a Frenchman but heavily crafted by U2 themselves, also features a few familiar signifiers of ‘real’ Ireland, not least the camera swooping across the sea, up some cliffs and along forty shades of grey sward – this is arty black-and-white, remember – behind its opening credits. A recent scholarly book suggests the film could be ‘regarded as a problematic and flawed attempt by the band to “un-whiten” its sound and to intertwine the two authenticities of blackness and Irishness’,29 to become, in the words of Dexys Midnight Runners, Celtic Soul Brothers – and perhaps also to justify their overt and oft-criticised Christian spirituality by connecting it to the critically reputable sounds of African-American religiosity.

  The nature of their effort was, in any case, something quite different from what Bono’s teacher Keith and the rest of the Rolling Stones had done in the early 1960s. When the Stones visited the Chess Records studio in Chicago in 1964, it was, after all, still producing R&B hits. The U2 pastiche of African-American musical history was so thin and disconnected from contemporary reality that Bono was reduced, in the lyrics of ‘Angel of Harlem’, to singing that he heard Billie Holiday on New York’s black-pop radio station WBLS – not out of the question since the station had a ‘classics’ slot in the weekend graveyard shift, but not exactly representative of its output.30 The reference sounds like Bono simply stringing together signifiers of blackness. (By contrast, the Clash famously came to New York in the early 1980s to hear their own music being played on the likes of WBLS.)

  Paul McGuinness’s later concession that Rattle and Hum ‘became a little too self-reverent’ as the band moulded it in post-production considerably understates its faults, despite some powerful concert footage.31 He remained partly defiant nonetheless: ‘We sold twelve million copies of the record so that is the kind of failure I can live with.’32

  The band came to see this late-1980s period of earnest, conspicuous roots-hunting in America as a dead end, or at best, in Bono’s words, ‘a necessary part of our development’, its role in the ultimately glorious U2 narrative summarised instrumentally, as it were, by the singer: ‘Listening to black music helped us get the groove ready for Achtung Baby.’33

  But actually it’s hard to hear direct black-American sources even when U2 eventually get their groove on. U2 had their black moment not, as their predecessors had done, to find sexy ass-shaking sounds. ‘The U2 fascination with African America was more to do with furthering their brand of “caring rock”, drawing on a mix of African-American political struggles (most notably the civil rights movement) and a respect for musical traditions, than with reproducing any racialized sexual essentialism.’34 The Irish academic authors quoted here, Noel McLaughlin and Martin McLoone, seem to credit U2 for not adopting ‘racialized sexual essentialism’. They’re right insofar as there is rarely anything sexy about U2. But one might well counter that a white rock group playing the blues (or a semblance of it) to show that they cared about something-or-other is at least as silly and patronising as playing the blues to show that they were sexually potent and could boogie.

  Bono’s artistic turn after this period from soulful truth-seeker to arch Euro-postmodernist is considered in Chapter 3. It is fair to say, in any case, that Africa and humanitarian causes in general became a relatively low priority for him for much of the 1990s. He did not even travel to Africa again until a U2 concert in Cape Town in 1998. He did, however, make a further, quiet return to African-American music in 1995, recording a Marvin Gaye cover for Inner City Blues, an ultimately low-profile Motown tribute album to the singer, who was then eleven years dead. Bono’s choice? What else but ‘Save the Children’, to which he contributed a maudlin vocal – his version never achieves anything like Gaye’s spiritual lift-off – and an even more maudlin video, directed by South African–born Earle Sebastian, in which Bono sits outside a peepshow in a New York red-light district and gazes sadly at the mostly black low-life unfolding around him, contemplating the tragedy of the poor brown people.35 Both its name and its gaze strongly prefigure much of what was to follow once Bono got engaged – or ‘re-engaged’, though that risks overstating his previous efforts – in humanitarian work.

  ‘I’M NOT A CHEAP DATE’: THE DEBT CAMPAIGN

  That re-engagement only became very public early in 1999, when he put his name to a creditable editorial for the British Guardian newspaper under the faux-innocent headline ‘World debt angers me’. In fact, the editorial didn’t read as especially angry, even when it claimed to be: ‘Live Aid raised $200 million for Africa. Anger is the only response on realising that that sum is spent every week by the poorest countries of Africa – on debt service.’ That’s a good point made clearly, and the emphasis throughout the article is on reason and persuasion in the name of debt cancellation, suggesting there was fault on both sides of the global divide, and showering flattery on leading politicians, ‘a unique set of players, who I believe are ready to face the implications of their own script’ – Blair, Brown, Schroeder, Clinton. He pointedly shouts out to the Wall Street Journal and the Adam Smith Institute for their words of support for debt relief, along with another economist previously regarded as right-wing: ‘Jeffrey Sachs, formerly the architect of “shock therapy” ultra-monetarist reforms in post-Soviet Russia, argued that the first fundamental need for the poorest countries is that their debts should be “cancelled outright”.36 It’s his first public mention of the man who would be his guru and partner for many years to come.

  For all the occasional outbursts of ‘caring’ that had dotted his career prior to this article (they are discussed further in Chapter 3), it should be recalled that this opinion piece calling on governments to embrace debt cancellation marked his real coming-out as a serious campaigner. (There is evidence of him being quietly involved in debt campaigning for some months prior to the editorial.) He arrived, full-grown, via what must have seemed at the time like a canny invitation from the Jubilee 2000 campaign, a mostly British-based coalition that sought to mobilise popular and political support for debt cancellation to mark the millennium, and in response to a widespread belief, shared within the UN, that the World Bank and IMF needed reform to make them more supportive of global development. Led by Catholic and Anglican relief agencies, it included groups from across the spectrum of Africa-oriented development organisations, from the traditionally radical to the gently charitable. By 1999 Jubilee 2000 had been running for several years and had already gathered tens of thousands of protesters at the 1998 G8 meeting in Birmingham, England. Bono’s op-ed was published a few days before another global leaders’ summit, this time in Bonn.

  It is no criticism of Bono to point out that his first foray into serious campaigning was a leap into an existing campaign with considerable infrastructure, and that in backing it he put out a moderate message designed to appeal across the political spectrum, just as he would continue to do for all the years to come. Perhaps it does, however, cast some doubt on the image of a man drawn impulsively and inexorably by his great love and anger into political involvement.

  Bono’s timing was that of a politician, and had been carefully planned with his Jubilee 2000 adviser Jamie Drummond, a posh Londoner and former Christian Aid worker who had convinced him to join the campaign.37 The op-ed was followed the next day by a speech from the stage at the televised ceremony of the Brit Awards, for pop music, in London: Drummond had convinced the Brits’ organisers to allow Bono to raise the debt issue in the context of giving a ‘special award’ to Muhammad Ali, who was in the audience and supportive of the campaign.38 After the tele­visual moment came the politics: the British chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, was happy two days later to tie himself to the campaign, making a plea before the G7 summit in Bonn for more debt relief, as the press reported: ‘Mr Brown praised the efforts of Jubilee 2000 and celebrities, including singer Bono …’39 This was within three days of Bono’s first prominent public pronouncements on the matter! Two glaring facts emerge from this sequence of ev
ents: (1) Bono, far from afflicting the powerful with his outburst, was part of a coordinated effort between campaigners and the British government to advance the debt-relief agenda and present Britain as an enlightened global leader on the issue – a partnership that would re-emerge some years later; and (2) anyone would get a taste for campaigning if their first effort went this well.

  Bono went into global action on the debt question, with scant regard for his bandmates: McGuinness acknowledged wryly that ‘there were times when they were left waiting because Bono was meeting the Pope’.40 His main focus was on the United States, on the basis that for the US to cancel the debt owed to it by the poorest countries would be important in itself and would set an example for others. He later recalled: ‘The best phone call I ever made in my opinion was to the most extraordinary woman in the world: Eunice Kennedy Shriver … A legend and a lesson in civic duty. All the Kennedys are …’41 Again, he was pushing an open door. ‘She told me to ring her son Bobby [Shriver], which I did. And he immediately put the family Filofax to work for me … his brother-in-law Arnold Schwarzenegger had a lot of Republican friends.’42 Shriver, he has said, ‘knew, from his family’s experience, just how many layers of body armour we would have to get through to find a beating heart in America’s body politic’.43 The body-armour metaphor was perhaps a little unfortunate in relation to the Kennedys, but you know what he means.

  Shriver’s Filofax didn’t merely contain key party-political contacts. Shriver, then in his mid-forties and a Kennedy in all but name, was not only nephew to Jack, Bobby and Ted; he was a successful corporate lawyer who had, just a few years earlier, worked in a venture-capitalist firm, James D. Wolfensohn Inc. – the selfsame Jim Wolfensohn whom Clinton had appointed as president of the World Bank in 1995. Before he had even switched on the vaunted charisma, Bono had direct entry to virtually every office not only in Washington, but on Wall Street as well.

  Bono’s love-bombing of America’s most powerful political family bore bipartisan dividends. From the autumn of 1999, Bono rather impressively devoted much of his time, into the following year, to working his way through America’s corridors of power in search of legislation that would deliver bilateral debt relief. He had the smooth Shriver by his side, and for extra Republican appeal, he teamed up with a friend of Schwarzenegger, representative John Kasich of Ohio, later to become governor of that state. Knowing that he needed to beef up the economic aspects of his arguments, Bono sought out the somewhat notorious mainstream economist he had cited in his Guardian article, Jeffrey Sachs – the man he had accurately labelled as the author of ‘shock-doctrine’ rapid privatisation of the Russian economy – and ended up sitting in on some of Sachs’s classes at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The two men soon became close. And Bono made a special target of the economics team in the Clinton administration, slowly but surely charming his way into the office of an initially hesitant treasury secretary, Larry Summers (Bono’s incarnation as a Washington lobbyist is discussed further in Chapter 3).

  Ultimately the Clinton White House was especially susceptible to his charms. Writing in 2005, James Traub of the New York Times revealed in unlikely detail how Bono had convinced Clinton’s chief economic adviser, Gene Sperling, to join the crusade:

  One Sunday morning that fall [of 1999], Bono called to ask Sperling if he could come to his office in the West Wing. There he put his hand on top of a giant stack of papers Sperling was working through and said: ‘I bet that most of the things in this pile feel more urgent than debt relief. But I want you to think of one thing: Ten years from now, is there anything you’ll feel more proud of than getting debt relief for the poorest countries?’ Bono understood something about people like Sperling: that in their heart of hearts, the chastened New Democrats of the Clinton administration yearned for morally resounding acts, but that they needed political cover, and they needed permission – the feeling that the thing could and must be done. When Bono left, Sperling called a treasury official and said that he wanted to insert something on debt relief into a speech Clinton was about to give at the World Bank.44

  Traub does not say which of the two men is his source for this tale, which resembles nothing so much as a clip from Aaron Sorkin’s pragmatic-liberal fantasia, The West Wing. Bono’s own story of how he persuaded the administration to adopt his policy is that he convinced Bill Clinton directly by suggesting obliquely to him that the leader of the Free World needed a big millennium vision for the end of 1999.45 In truth, for all the dramatic recollections, the White House had already been committed before Bono’s arrival to two-thirds debt reduction for the poorest countries through a World Bank plan.46 The additional cost of Bono’s plan would be relatively trivial in the context of the federal budget – not much more than $100 million, and even that sum was largely theoretical, since everyone knew that the poor countries were never going to be able to pay all their debts anyway.

  Clinton’s support for even such a modest measure was not enough, however. Congress had to be convinced. Washington insiders noted the rapid proliferation of photos-with-Bono on the walls of countless members of Congress, though it has been suggested it was the vast population of congressional staffers – well-educated under-forties, the U2 generation personified – who drove his progress through those corridors. Bono’s most famous conquest during his time in the capital, because it seemed the unlikeliest, was the right-wing North Carolina senator, Jesse Helms, whose deserved reputation as a racist, homophobe and xenophobe was less important than his role as chair of the senate foreign relations committee. Speaking about it some years later, Bono described their meeting in September 2000:

  I went into his office in the Senate to find out why they were blocking debt cancellation and after talking for some time to really get under the hood of the issues, he became quite emotional, even tearful about Africa. It was clear beneath the tough skin of this old cold warrior was a heart that could be moved. It was front page of the Wall Street Journal: Jesse Helms Brought to Tears by Stories of African Children. [Bono neglects to mention that he was the named source for that item.47] People couldn’t believe this had happened. As I was leaving he wrapped his arms around me and gave me a blessing like an ancient Jewish patriarch to his son. I was very moved … God was on the move.48

  It may take a strong stomach to picture this encounter. The fact that Bono conferred anti-poverty credibility on such a hateful character is indeed distasteful. But it is surely rather unjust to criticise Bono – as some on the Left do – simply for his repulsive associates. After all, if he had achieved something of real and revolutionary impact for Africa’s poor, then a little unmerited burnishing of previously bad reputations would be a small price to pay, wouldn’t it?

  Moralising about Bono’s guilt-by-association with these characters diverts attention from just how little was at stake in reality, especially in the early phase of this campaigning. Put simply, while some in Washington were certainly opposed on principle – ‘ideologically’, if you like – to forgiving debts, no one could claim that substantial Western material interests were at risk if the debt were written off. Unlike the debates that whirled around Latin American and Asian debt in the 1980s, or around Irish or Greek debt after 2008, no major First World banks, or indeed governments, were in danger if the US, the UK, other states and multilateral institutions decided to forget about what a few of the world’s poorest countries owed them. The upside was at least potentially just what Bono and supportive neoliberal economists such as Jeffrey Sachs promised: African economies, freed from some of their onerous, odious debt, in a better position to provide stability and infrastructure for foreign investment. Moves toward debt relief in the poorest parts of Africa wouldn’t discommode the global economy, though they were unlikely to do it much good either; and once you factored in the feel-good glow that Bono conferred, it counted as a win–win for many of the major players. And debt relief often, of course, came with strings attached, as the small number of lucky recipient countri
es were monitored for necessary ‘reforms’, often involving opening up their public services to privatisation by foreign firms – the sorts of things that rendered them ever-friendlier for foreign capital. Why, really, would Jesse Helms or Jeffrey Sachs be imagined to have any serious problem with any of that?

  That is not to say that the Jubilee 2000 campaign was pointless or worthless, or that the NGOs that had worked for many years to build it were cynical or misguided, or wrong to adopt the media-friendly Bono. However, the small good they achieved in gaining some debt cancellation – the US Congress in 2000 eventually forgave just half the US debt owed by the poorest African countries – and making the issue a public concern should be weighed against the publicity boost that was given to some of the most viciously destructive forces in the world. History tells us that, as they were being hugged by Bono for dropping a few pennies to the poor, his friends in the Washington–Wall Street axis were gorging themselves on the fruits of massive and newly unregulated financial speculation, all the while running up unpayable debts that would eventually dwarf those they were so magnanimously forgiving in Africa – these debts have been estimated as running into trillions of dollars, compared to the hundreds of millions under discussion to be ‘forgiven’ in Africa. (Those First-World debts were happily socialised after 2008 without any need for rock-star lobbying: the bank bailout in Bono’s native Ireland alone saw the government assume responsibility for more than €300 billion in private debt, and it has actually had to pay back tens of billions of euros of that debt already.)