Killing Bono: I Was Bono's Doppelganger

by Neil McCormick

  I went to see Bono. I ran into him less and less these days as U2’s touring and recording became all-consuming. And he was a married man now. Bono and Ali had tied the knot at the end of the previous year. But the truth is that I felt our paths had drifted apart since the evening at Edge’s house. The whole Shalom scene was too weird for me. I could hardly even be bothered arguing about it anymore. Their tenets of belief were so utterly out of line with my own perception of reality they might as well have existed in an alternative dimension, where the rules of logic and science did not apply. For his part, I could hardly blame Bono if he had concluded that I was a godless pagan whose soul was unredeemable.

  But I managed to get hold of him and, for some reason, we arranged to meet at Ali’s parents’ house in Raheny. We sat outside in his car and he slid my cassette into the stereo. I couldn’t help grinning as he became increasingly excited. “It’s pop music, all right,” he said, “but there’s something nasty in there, a bit of acid in the mix.” The synth sent a dramatic rumble pulsing through the car. “How did you get that sound? This is so far ahead of anything coming out of this country.” He played the tape a second time, banging along to the rhythm on the steering wheel. “You know, I’d love to put this out,” he said.

  “Are you serious?” I asked, amazed.

  “I’m totally serious,” he said. He revealed that U2 were thinking of starting their own record label. He planned to call it Mother. “It’ll bring out my nurturing side,” he joked. It was primarily intended to release one-off singles, to help get bands started, although he had plans for a few offbeat projects of his own. “I’d love to do a single with Ali,” he confided. “It would be great to go into a studio with someone who doesn’t know anything about music but has got so much natural spirit and just try to see if we can capture that on record!”

  “How does Ali feel about that?” I asked.

  “Oh, she doesn’t know,” he laughed. “She won’t even sing in front of me. I’d have to sneak in and record her in the bath.”

  Bono proposed that Yeah! Yeah! could be the debut release for Mother. “Wow,” I said, contemplating my first offer of a record deal. “That’d be fantastic!”

  But there was a catch. It would have to wait until U2 had finished promoting their third album, War, which had just been released in March.

  “How long is that gonna take?” I asked.

  “Could be a year,” Bono admitted.

  A year? He might as well have asked me to wait a lifetime. I took a deep breath and told Bono I would have to pass.

  In Tua Nua eventually became the first band to be released on the label, in 1984. Our former roadie’s band went on to pick up an international deal from Virgin (which was galling news for us, much as we congratulated Ivan O’Shea through gritted teeth). Sinead O’Connor left In Tua Nua and landed her own deal (with Ensign). Cactus World News also benefited from Mother’s support (signing to MCA). And a group called the Hothouse Flowers went from Mother to London Records and had a massive worldwide-hit album. For a while there, Mother seemed to be spawning a whole new generation of Irish musical stars. We were its orphans.

  But our tape was out there, working its own magic. Without any fancy packaging, witty press releases or pleading letters. It was just being passed around. After years of vain attempts to stir interest, we discovered that when you are in demand word spreads quickly. Several Irish record-company representatives approached us, some talking of local deals, others of taking it to their London offices. I was struck by how out of touch most of them were. We had a meeting in the office of a well-known Irish music-business figure who wanted to sign the publishing on “Amnesia.” “It could be a big hit in the right hands,” he said. “I’d like to get it to Elvis Costello. I think it’s a song he might be interested in recording.”

  “Elvis Costello writes his own songs,” I pointed out.

  “Does he now?” said the publisher. “Well, he’s a talented fellow, isn’t he? Still, everyone’s looking for a hit and I think this is right up his alley.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “He’s one of the world’s leading singer-songwriters. It would be like asking Bob Dylan to record your song.”

  “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.

  She staggers into the garden, throwing up among the flowers

  Drunk on passion’s poison after closing hours

  She didn’t know his name, she didn’t know his address

  Never took a second look till he was tearing off her dress…

  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.

  Twelve

  London. 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 adver
tisement 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.