The Frontman

by Harry Browne

  Bono, it seemed, had come a long way from his Sandinista sympathies and ‘Bullet the Blue Sky’ – indeed, he had never shown any sympathy or solidarity with the twenty-first-century wave of left-led governments in Latin America. Meanwhile, the game’s release was delayed until 2008 – after the Pandemic and Bioware partnership had been sold on to the gaming giant Electronic Arts – but Bono never publicly commented on the complaints from Venezuelan politicians and activists, along with American clerics, who pointed out how fearful many people in Venezuela were of just such a US-backed coup against their country’s government. Pandemic, it seems, had deep roots when it comes to war-games, having developed the Full Spectrum Warrior series, which grew out of training software for the US army, developed in conjunction with the CIA-funded Institute for Creative Technologies.35 The US military makes no apologies about the usefulness of video-games when it comes to training young soldiers and soldiers-to-be, and this sort of ‘overlap’ is scarcely remarked upon in the fake-violent world of gaming. It was hardly likely that Bono, who had helped to whitewash the politicians responsible for the real war in Iraq, would have any serious misgivings about a virtual one in Venezuela, and there is no suggestion that Elevation’s sale of its creators Pandemic and Bioware was motivated by anything other than money.

  Bono was a personal investor at Facebook even before Elevation bought into it in 2009, and Elevation’s myriad personal and financial connections with the company led a journalist in 2010 to call them ‘one chummy bunch’.36 Even with the rapid drop in the value of Facebook shares that occurred after its public launch in the summer of 2012, Bono and Elevation were still hugely in profit compared to their initial investments. More modest but still enormous profits – estimated at about $200 million in mid 2012 – were made by Elevation on Yelp!, a website and tool for word-of-mouth on restaurants and other service businesses. In 2012 Bono and The Edge invested an unknown sum of money in the online file-storage and sharing service, Dropbox.37 On one of the many, many occasions when he has flattered politicians and business people by dressing them up in rock-star garb, Bono said of that company’s founders: ‘Meeting Drew and Arash is like meeting guys in a band.’38

  This was scarcely visionary investment: the likes of Dropbox, Yelp! and Facebook each had tens of millions of users before Bono got involved; Forbes was among the most established brands in American media. Suggestions in the fund’s early days that Elevation would be involved in supporting music enterprises have thus far proved unfounded, perhaps because in recent years no one but Apple has found a reliable way to make money from tunes. And these investments made Bono a ‘paper billionaire’ only in the sense that a lot of ill-informed newspapers started calling him a billionaire. He still had quite some way to go before his net worth reached that glorious ten-figure sum, whether in dollars, sterling or euros.

  However, the fact of this very public investment profile, complete with alleged windfall, conjoined with the widespread reporting of U2’s tax, ahem, efficiencies, did contribute to a change in the public image of Bono between 2009 and 2012. Is this reputational damage justified? In reality he may simply be a highly visible illustration of the maxim that the rich get richer; his particular investment portfolio may just be suggestive, no more, about aspects of his character, connections and priorities. It would be absurd, surely, even to begin to judge Bono definitively on the basis of Steve Forbes’s politics or Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to commercialise people’s private information. Or even U2’s tax arrangements. We should look, instead, at what Bono has said, and what he has continued to do, and on whose behalf, in the public sphere, as an alleged force for good in the world.

  ZOOROPHILIA: FROM SALVADOR TO SARAJEVO

  Whatever the limitations of his early politics – and we have already considered those at some length in relation to both Ireland and Africa – the relatively naive, earnest Bono of the 1980s did help to organise the Amnesty International ‘Conspiracy of Hope’ tour, volunteered in an Ethiopian orphanage, and even travelled in Central America. And while you couldn’t call him a Catholic, exactly, he had been influenced by the Catholic liberation theology he encountered in the Western hemisphere: the director of Amnesty in the US, Jack Healey, had been both a monk and a priest, and had a big impact on U2’s political commitments.

  Bono went for a week to Central America in the mid 1980s in support of the US-based Sanctuary movement, which was largely based in churches, though not just Catholic ones.39

  He recalled, in a twenty-first-century reminiscence published in U2 by U2, that the ideas of the Nicaraguan Sandinista revolution were ‘a coming together of many of my interests: Christianity, social justice, artists in power’. That recollection, for the most part, badly garbled the politics of the 1980s situation. For example, he said Sanctuary was ‘supporting peasant farmers who were caught in the crossfire of what was essentially a civil war in El Salvador’.40 Most US members of Sanctuary would almost certainly not, in fact, have engaged in such mealy-mouthed neutrality about the revolution in El Salvador and its violent suppression by the US-backed government, and their support was not only for innocent victims of ‘crossfire’ – Bono’s reflexively banal language by the time of his remembering – but, as the name suggests, for Salvadorans, of whatever profession or occupation, seeking refuge from that government in the US, against the hostility of the American immigration authorities.

  Perhaps the book’s U2-appointed editor is to blame for the further mess that arises as Bono tells of getting shot at while visiting ‘our peasant farmers’ in what appears at first reading to be Nicaragua. Summarising that country’s situation, he appears to have inhaled a Ronald Reagan speech that he is spitting out randomly, mixing its metaphors: ‘The powers that be [by which he appears to mean US leaders] felt the Sandinista revolution had to be squashed because it had the potential to catch fire, and had that happened in Mexico, the United States would have felt very unsafe.’ His under-fire location turns out, however, to be El Salvador, where he appears to have witnessed the fire-bombing and mortaring of a rebel-sympathising village. ‘I remember watching this horror happen on another hillside, in another world, next door to where we were but not so far away that we couldn’t feel it.’41 One can only speculate as to how frustrated the young Bono might be at his middle-aged self losing the political point of his experience but managing to rhapsodise about it anyway; but Bono does pull his thoughts together long enough to rattle off a few more vaguely pointed clichés:

  I had this love affair with American literature happening at the same time as I became aware of how dangerous American foreign policy could be in the countries around it, with the brutal crushing of the Sandinistas. I started to see two Americas, the mythic America and the real America. It was an age of greed, Wall Street, button down, win, win, win, no time for losers. New York was bankrupt [sic – that was a decade earlier]. There was a harsh reality to America as well as the dream … I wanted to describe this era of prosperity and Savings and Loan scandals as a spiritual drought. I started thinking about the desert …42

  And thus was born the Joshua Tree album – though, contrary to what this memoir implies, the Sandinistas were by no means crushed yet by the time of its release in 1987. He put his Central American experience in a song: Bono’s violent El Salvador experience was distilled in the chainsaw sound – mainly generated by The Edge – of the album’s fourth track, ‘Bullet the Blue Sky’. In the version of the song performed in Rattle and Hum, Bono, speaking through the musical bridge in an exaggerated American accent, establishes that even in the 1980s geography was not his strong suit, as he locates the rural attack he witnessed – on ‘women and children’ naturally, because why else would he sympathise – in ‘the hills of San Salvador’, which was and is in reality the capital city.43 This song and performance are, nonetheless, both very good, and as good as it gets when it comes to Bono and U2 manifestly – if not quite directly – attacking US policy. Especially when, as in that performance, the song foll
ows a clip of Jimi Hendrix playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. It is impossible to imagine Bono, at that time, cosying up to President Reagan. Sadly, on subsequent tours the song was framed visually so that it referred to religious conflict, handguns, Nazis – almost anything other than US foreign policy.

  But then, U2’s general interest in America seemed to wane for several years anyway. That loss of interest has been read largely in aesthetic terms, in relation to their rebirth as postmodern poseurs, but it had a political dimension.

  U2 were lucky, in a sense, that the crisis of ‘authenticity’ that saw their B. B. King partnership wearing so thin by the late 1980s (see Chapter 2) was immediately followed by the fall of communism in Europe, the reunification of Germany, and the rise of pop-cultural postmodernism to boot. Lucky, that is, because it gave them somewhere reasonably interesting to turn, as well as lots of old East German cars to hang from the rafters around their stage. Even the names of their first two albums of the 1990s alert us to their new setting: Achtung Baby and Zooropa, the latter with the twelve-star European flag on its cover. This is not the place to consider this turn as an aesthetic move for U2, though clearly their creative juices were initially revived by the change and by the thumping European dance scene they found themselves feeding off, developing musical and staging ideas that were, in Bono’s words, ‘more Eurocentric … more decadent, more old world’.44 Onstage, according to Bono, the band even ‘played upon’ the resemblance of a rock concert to a fascist ‘night rally’.45

  It is futile to try to determine with certainty if this turn also marked the start of a sea-change in Bono’s politics, or if what changed in his outlook simply reflected global changes in what was deemed worth looking out upon. He would scarcely be the only person who lost interest in the Third World, and its relations with the US, in the 1990s; since developing countries were no longer a Cold War battleground, both policy elites and solidarity activists found their attention drifting.

  His band’s post-1990 turn to Europe was also an attempt to prove that U2 had a sense of humour, with funny costumes, pranks, all those televisions and cars and golden arches onstage. U2, we were assured, and contrary to their previous reputation, were not taking themselves too seriously – there was even a whole song full of commercial advertising slogans. It did not depoliticise Bono and U2 per se, but American imperialist violence soon disappeared permanently from their political target list. As they moved on from Salvador and South Africa, their world-view of the 1990s might be summarised with three more S’s: Sellafield, Sarajevo and, briefly, Salman Rushdie.

  These issues were being contested on home European turf, but that was not the only difference. Whereas the commitments of the 1980s were relatively low-key – how many U2 fans at that time would have known that Bono considered himself a Sandinista sympathiser? – the band’s political actions of the 1990s were stunts, enacted for public impact.

  Sellafield is a nuclear-waste reprocessing plant on England’s northwest coast. In 1957, when it operated under the name Windscale, part of a reactor core had caught fire, releasing radioactive material into the environment. The change of name didn’t dispel the controversy surrounding the plant; but by the early 1990s a second plant, known as THORP (thermal oxide reprocessing plant) nonetheless had approval, and was about to be built. Greenpeace – which U2 had been supporting for years – vigorously opposed the new plant, as did the Irish government, concerned at reports of illness clusters already occurring in regions just across the Irish Sea from Sellafield, at high levels of radioactivity in the sea, and at the increased transportation of dangerous material from as far away as Japan to the plant through the waters between the two countries. The Edge pointed out the links to the nuclear-arms industry: ‘Just as the rest of the world was ending the arms race … Sellafield had the brainwave of building a multi-billion pound reprocessing plant to create more weapons-grade plutonium.’46

  U2, with Public Enemy, Kraftwerk and Big Audio Dynamite II, put on a ‘Stop Sellafield’ concert for Greenpeace, but they did more besides. In 1992, along with Greenpeace activists, they carried out a highly publicised not-quite-civil-disobedience action in which they landed on the beach outside the plant – carefully staying on the public-domain side of the high-tide line. Bono recalled: ‘It was high comedy. We stormed the beach and recreated the cover for the Beatles’ Help, using semaphore, except we were dressed in protective clothing.’47 In Bill Flanagan’s long and amusing eyewitness account of the escapade – complete with a Greenpeace campaigner who joked with Bono about his ability to walk on water – Bono acknowledged that they were ‘rock stars on a day trip’, and the band discussed their agreement that this would be their only do-gooding of the year. But though they literally sipped champagne en route to the action, they come across in Flanagan’s version of the story as knowledgeable and committed, and their action helped to raise the profile of the campaign, which earned increased media coverage and popular support for years to come, especially in Ireland but also in Britain.48

  The second Sellafield plant went ahead, however. In an interview roughly twelve years later, Edge wondered whether ‘our protest made any difference’, but Bono, beside him, wasn’t having any of that defeatism: ‘After years and years of protest, including a campaign led by my own dear wife, Ali, who … organized a million and a half postcards from Irish people protesting to Tony Blair, the British government have finally concluded Sellafield has to be closed down. That’s what I always tell people. These things take time.’49 Bono’s faith in gradual change through postcards is touching, but when the THORP plant eventually closed in 2010, several years after this interview, the evidence suggests that it was because it was losing so much money, not because of polite protest.50 And other facilities at the scandal-ridden Sellafield site remain very much active.

  If Sellafield was a group endeavour – Larry Mullen Jr appears to have been the most informed and active, but all of U2 were articulate on the subject – then Sarajevo, and Salman Rushdie, were largely Bono’s passions. Sarajevo’s siege by violent Bosnian Serb forces was scarcely the only horror of the bloody war being waged in Bosnia – tens of thousands of Bosnian Serb peasants had been killed or ethnically cleansed, for example; but since it was taking place in a modern, Westernised city, it aroused sympathy among the world’s metropolitan journalists like no other story in the Balkans, and it was pretty easy to tell.

  An American film-maker, Bill Carter, interviewed U2 for Bosnian TV in 1993. As Bono recalled: ‘So I agreed in an emotional moment to do a gig there. And after I’ve agreed on Sarajevo Television, I then have to explain to the band why putting our lives at risk is going to help the people of Sarajevo.’51 The explaining didn’t go so well: Bono was voted down. So instead of doing a one-off publicity stunt in Sarajevo, U2 instead did a publicity stunt for Sarajevo at every one of their concerts for about a month on the European stadium leg of their 1993 Zoo TV tour: a live satellite-video link to the city for five or ten minutes, up on the big screens. Even the band’s official autobiography doesn’t gloss over the problems and tensions this created in the context of a rock concert, with band members arguing over whether it was exploitative. And, you know, a buzz-kill. Mullen recalled:

  We were playing a rock ’n’ roll show and it was lots of fun, and although the political stuff was serious it was done with a smile. Then suddenly seeing video footage of people being bombed and a satellite link-up with people in Sarajevo saying, ‘We’re being killed, please come and help us.’ That was really hard to watch and hard to listen to … I remember saying to Bono, ‘I don’t know if I can handle this any more, it’s really hard up there.’ He just pushed through. He said, ‘I want to do this and I’m going to do it.’52

  Paul McGuinness took up the recollection:

  The worst night was Wembley Stadium, when three women came up on the screen [from the Sarajevo studio] and said, ‘We don’t know what we’re doing here. This guy dragged us in. You’re all having a good time. We’re n
ot having a good time. What are you going to do for us?’ Bono started to reply but they just cut him off. They said, ‘We know you’re not going to do anything for us. You’re going to go back to a rock show. You’re going to forget that we even exist. And we’re all going to die.’ Right in the middle of a show at Wembley. And the show never really recovered.53

  McGuinness is one hard-hearted impresario – years later he boasted to a music magazine that he never paid the European Broadcasting Union bill for the Sarajevo satellite link.54 There is some unintended black humour in the fact that he thought the correct way to finish this dreadful story of pain, anger and exploitation was to reflect, his head shaking regretfully no doubt, that ‘the show never really recovered’. Bono, again, wasn’t admitting defeat: ‘It was very upsetting. But the next day Brian Eno was inspired to get involved with the War Child project and a lot of great things came out of that. So some people were inspired to take action and some people were just horrified.’55 Bono couldn’t help it if his chief measuring gauge for whether something was worthwhile had become whether it convinced a celebrity to support a charity. It must be said, though, that U2’s efforts were at least a part of increased attention and sympathy among the media and public to Sarajevo’s plight. Four years later, with the fighting over, U2 played in Sarajevo, but the summer of the satellite link had proved controversial, for obvious reasons, and it exposed divisions in the band. Ultimately, though, the question of whether U2’s Sarajevo special was annoying and/or repulsive is less important than that of whether U2 contributed to a partial and one-sided anti-Serb version of the Balkan conflict, a version that was to have deadly consequences. Years later, NATO planes were bombing the Serbian capital, Belgrade – a series of attacks ostensibly intended to drive Serb troops out of Kosovo, but that got widespread popular support partly because Western audiences had been so conditioned to view the Serbs as aggressors. Bono and U2 showed no interest in protesting against these attacks, or in linking up with the Serbs who were now under fire.