And I was having adventures. I was reckless, taking stupid risks. I went all the way to Russia to attend a rave, dropping acid with members of the Mafia who were so unhappy with what I wrote they threatened to have me killed (mind you, I already had a psycho writing threatening letters from prison, so they would just have to wait in line). I went to South Africa to explore a country riven by apartheid and somehow got stuck halfway up a cliff, alone in the middle of nowhere (I really thought I was going to die that time, but somehow sheer embarrassment at the notion of expiring so uselessly and pathetically gave me the will to pull through). I went to America and traveled the country getting drunk in bars with complete strangers until I got robbed by a stripper in Nashville and had to talk my way back to London with only $25 to my name. I had a good time in the States. I got roaring drunk with Billy Joel in a bar, where we persuaded the manager to let us have a lock-in and boozed away till daylight. A couple of Billy’s old New York cronies showed up, and a very dubious bunch they turned out to be. I particularly remember a guy called Rocco. “Would you fuck the waitress?” he kept asking me. She was kind of an ugly waitress but then Rocco was no oil painting himself. “I’d fuck the waitress,” he admitted. “But right now, I’d fuck a can of worms.” Billy got on the piano and we ran through some rock ’n’ roll standards. As I recall, my rendition of “Twist and Shout” (with Billy on backing vocals) was particularly well received.
OK, so I did some rock journalism. But only the big guys. I drew the line at talking to up-and-coming stars—that would have been too painful. When I saw bands on stage—any band, any stage—I was sick with envy. I wanted to jump up and grab a guitar and show the audience what I could do. This is not a good critical position. But I met some of my heroes. I spent some hours being charmed by Leonard Cohen, one of the most gracious and eloquent gentlemen I have ever encountered. And I rode around L.A. in a limousine with Keith Richards, drinking vodka and listening to old Motown records on the radio (we were only supposed to drive from a video shoot to Keith’s hotel, but he was having such a good time telling me about the musicians who played on each track that he instructed his driver to keep going, waving his vodka glass and slurring, “Just drive. Drive all night!”). Maybe I never made it as a pop star. But I could console myself that, in the less starry firmament of journalism, I was beginning to shine.
In May 1992 I was in the GQ office when a call came in from U2’s office in Dublin. They wanted to make sure I had tickets and passes for the band’s forthcoming gig at Earl’s Court. It was U2’s first British show since Wembley Stadium five years before. I was surprised and flattered to have been tracked down. Although I had spoken to Bono a couple of times on the phone, I hadn’t actually seen anyone from the U2 camp in years. I never even caught up with Adam to sell him the old bass guitar—though I had been in search of it, when I was back in Ireland, thinking of all the money I could make. It was last seen in the possession of Yeah! Yeah!’s old bassist, Deco. But when I went around to his house Deco handed me what I can only describe as the neck of a bass guitar with a tiny square bit of wood attached.
“What’s that?” I said.
“It’s the old Ibanez,” he said.
“What have you done to it?” I shrieked.
“I sawed the body off,” he said, cheerfully. “I wanted it to look like one of those Devo basses. Don’t worry. It still works.”
My dreams of screwing a small fortune out of Adam evaporated. “It’s worthless now,” I said, despondently contemplating the wreckage.
“Oh, come on, Neil,” said Declan. “It was always worthless. It’s just a cheap piece of crap. But now at least it looks really cool!”
Anyway, I went along to the Earl’s Court show with Gloria. I wanted to introduce her to Bono. When I wasn’t traveling on assignment, Gloria and I were living together in her flat in Belsize Crescent, the very same street where Ivan and I had partied a decade away while dreaming of stardom. But things were very different now. I had embraced the concept of fidelity and responsibility and my relationship with Gloria had blossomed from there. Once I had shown that I was serious about getting my act together, Gloria supported me during my struggle to establish myself as a journalist and I was doing my best to repay her faith. We were becoming a family. The kids were easy to love, as kids generally are. You just open up your heart and they’ll move in. I wasn’t their dad but I was becoming something else, maybe even something better: a guy they liked to be with, somewhere between parent and friend. Life was taking a whole new shape for me. But I made a very peculiar discovery when I first mentioned the U2 gig to Gloria.
“Are you really friends with Bono?” she said (the band were so famous now, even Gloria was aware of them).
“Of course!” I said. “I’ve told you before.”
“Yeah, well, you tell me lots of things,” she shrugged. “I’m never sure when you’re pulling my leg.”
“You mean, you don’t believe me?” I said, incredulously.
“Well,” she said, quite reasonably, “I know most of your friends. How come I’ve never met him?”
I couldn’t really explain that. If I wanted to get hold of Bono, I had to call U2’s office and speak to an assistant who would pass a message along, usually telling me something discouraging about where he was on the planet doing great work in the name of social justice and what a backlog of calls was building up for him.
Sometimes it would be weeks before he would actually call back and then it was pure chance if he caught me. There would be a voice on my answer-phone saying, “I will hound you down!” So I’d have to call his office and start the process all over again. It was, really, too much to go through for something as trivial as touching base. It was not just that access was restricted by the channels of success, but also that everyone wanted a piece of Bono now. On one of the few occasions when I got hold of him (or he of me) he was interrupted by an assistant and came back to say, “I’ve got to go; I’ve got the President on the other line!” “Which president?” I asked. “Good question! Which president?” he asked his assistant (it was the president of Ireland, by the way). With world leaders, film stars and supermodels to compete with, I was somewhere near the back of the queue and I just couldn’t bring myself to make the effort required to push to the front.
And the thing is, maybe I even preferred to maintain my distance. I still woke up in a cold sweat sometimes from a Bono nightmare and I didn’t like that at all. U2 were so popular they had become inescapable. They flashed like a beacon on my personal horizon, a constant reminder of everything I had failed to achieve.
Still, I was looking forward to seeing them again. As a live band, they were my touchstone: the first group I had ever seen perform, and the finest. And as friends, well, it would be interesting to find out where I stood.
The Earl’s Court show was part of U2’s extraordinary Zoo TV tour, which started out in arenas before moving on to stadiums. Achtung Baby had been released in 1991, a superb album of big, complex, emotional songs delivered with a contemporary cut and thrust that saw U2 shift away from their dalliance with roots music to reconnect with modernity and art rock. They sharpened up their image: there was a lot of flash and humor. Critics claimed they had embraced irony but there was really no irony in the songs, which were as substantial, soulful and committed as ever. The irony was in the packaging. U2 embraced the contradictions of their place on the world’s stage: passionate Irishmen being feted as superstars in the trivial, gossip-hungry universe of celebrity. And they embraced the contradictions of their own personalities: true believers with a sense of humor. They decided to have fun.
And the Zoo TV shows were a lot of fun. And a lot more besides. It was a hi-tech multimedia art-installation extravaganza with heart and soul, a breathtaking spectacle of flashing slogans, prerecorded images, live footage and random television channels bombarding the senses from walls of interactive video screens. Bono remained the lightning rod for the audience, the conduit for communal experie
nce, but he was conducting this symphony of collective emotion with a weird new vitality, channeling everything through the character of the Fly, a representation of his own darker self, dressed in black leather and black shades, a barstool pundit from hell, a creature every bit as provocative as Gavin Friday in his Virgin Prunes heyday.
The Zoo TV concert was constructed on an incredible scale, but with U2 at its center it seemed a living, breathing thing. It was truly the most amazing live event I had ever witnessed. Could rock ’n’ roll really really have come this far? And could it have been brought all this way by the same bunch of kids who had rocked the school gym with Bay City Rollers covers?
You could say I was impressed. And I was genuinely looking forward to telling the band so. All my reservations receded as Gloria and I made our way backstage. I had some very impressive plastic-laminated passes which eased our passage through a massive throng of well-wishers. As much effort seemed to have gone into the backstage setup as had into the show itself. Guests with ordinary VIP stickers were restricted to a common-parts bar but our laminates admitted us to a white-tented tunnel, past a bar set aside for less well-connected associates, leading to a large hospitality marquee, with Zoo TV screens displaying random footage and waitresses dishing out sushi and champagne. There was a smattering of celebrities. Elvis Costello was there. And Chrissie Hynde. And Sinead O’Connor. I had met them all in my travels, and said hello, introducing them to Gloria (well, all except Sinead, of course, in case she wanted to search me for a tape recorder). There was no sign of the band, however. I thought perhaps they would come out to meet and greet once they had freshened up. But time passed. And then I noticed Elvis, Chrissie and Sinead being led away by a girl with a clipboard and escorted down another tunnel. Into a farther chamber.
I approached the security guard at the entrance of the tunnel, with a sinking feeling in my heart.
“Sorry,” he said, politely. “That pass doesn’t let you through here.”
I turned back to Gloria. “Let’s just go,” I said. I felt heavy with disappointment but I didn’t want to countenance such a feeling, that sense of debasement so familiar to me from my dreams.
“I thought you wanted to say hello,” said Gloria.
I could taste the bitterness welling up, a childishly petulant reaction to seeing celebrities being accorded the privilege of a personal audience while I was left outside. But I didn’t want Gloria to suspect that such pettiness might reside within me. I wanted to be bigger and better than that. I had to accept that whatever personal connection I had to U2 had been eroded by time and changing circumstances. They had moved far beyond me. That part of my life’s journey was over.
“I just want to go home,” I said.
Twenty-One
Sometime in late 1995, I was sitting in front of my computer in my office above the bookie’s in Piccadilly, deep into a feature on the murder of my old friend the General and his supplanting in the pecking order of the Irish underworld by an equally bizarre character known as the Monk, when I received a call from Sarah Sands, the new deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph. I had not spoken to her before. My contacts in the world of journalism were curiously limited. Despite my relative success, I could never really work up the enthusiasm to engage in the practice of networking by which most of my fellow freelance journalists seemed to survive. I was on a retainer from GQ and I was confident that when I was done with one story I would always pick up another commission. But I knew the Telegraph, of course. It was one of Britain’s most venerable and popular newspapers. Its politics were some way to the right of my own, with strong affiliations to the Conservative party and the old British establishment, but I often perused its pages. The Telegraph always had well-written and well-researched national news coverage, which often provided me with inspiration and leads for the kind of hard, criminal features I favored. Anyway, Sarah made me an unexpected offer.
“As I am sure you are aware,” she said, “Tony Parsons is leaving.”
“Yes,” I said, even though I was aware of no such thing. I didn’t know Tony Parsons had ever been at the Telegraph, let alone that he was leaving it. But I suspected that such an admission might be a mistake. Anyway, I knew who Parsons was: an ex-NME punk who had gained a reputation as one of Britain’s most pugnacious and opinionated arts journalists.
“We were wondering if you would be interested in taking over his column,” said Sarah.
“Certainly I’d be interested,” I said, trying to sound as calm as possible. A column is the dream of most journalists, a forum of your very own from which to spout your theories and opinions (and I had a lot of theories and opinions festering away in the dark catacombs of my mind). And a column in Britain’s bestselling broadsheet newspaper…Well, it might not mean the same thing to me as getting a number-one single but in my business this was definitely Top of the Pops material. Still, it would help if I knew what this column was supposed to be about.
“Can you meet with me to talk it over?” inquired Sarah.
“Any time,” I said.
“How about now?” she said.
“No problem,” I said. “Can you give me an hour or so?”
Actually, I had a big problem. Quite apart from not knowing exactly what we were supposed to be talking over, I had been engaged in a major writing stint for several days, during which I had not paid much attention to my appearance. I had a few days’ growth of stubble on my face. And I was compensating for the lack of heating in my office by wearing a pair of woolly trousers and a big, shaggy jumper. I did not feel like prime Telegraph-employment material. But I had an idea. I ran up Regent’s Street to the GQ offices and threw myself at the mercy of the girls in the fashion department. They fitted me out in an ultrasharp suit, shirt and slightly extravagant tie (which were intended for an upcoming fashion shoot), gave me a shave, sprayed me with some cologne and dispatched me looking every inch the GQ man. Sarah must have been impressed, at any rate. She offered me the job on the spot. But what job? I was on full alert for clues.
“I think you would be ideal material for the Telegraph,” said Sarah. “You’re young…”
(These days it wasn’t often I was called young but journalism is very different from the music business, and at a newspaper whose most famous correspondent, Bill Deedes, was pushing eighty, I suppose a thirty-four-year-old could be considered a spring chicken.)
“…dynamic…”
(I could tell she liked the cut of my suit.)
“…you’re a really terrific writer…”
(What can I say? I just felt flattered that somebody had noticed all the good work I had been doing.)
“…and you can bring a wealth of your own experience to the job…”
(What experience was she getting at, exactly?)
“…Because, unlike most people in this profession, you’ve seen it from both sides…”
(I wasn’t sure I liked where this was going.)
“…You’ve actually been there and done it.”
“I certainly have,” I said. Hoping she wasn’t going to ask me to elaborate on where I had been and what I had done.
“I think you would be an outstanding rock critic for the Daily Telegraph.”
I nodded thoughtfully. My past had caught up with me. Well, it was bound to, sooner or later. But there was one thing we had to get straight.
“I’ve never liked the term ‘rock critic,’ ” I said.
“Whyever not?”
“It’s not all rock music, is it?” I pointed out. “What if I wanted to write about a rapper? Or a reggae singer? Or a disco queen?”
“I take your point,” said Sarah. “What term do you prefer?”
“Pop,” I said.
And so I started writing a weekly column for the Telegraph. I had a picture byline: “Neil McCormick on Pop.” And if that sounded like I was high on lemonade, it was a small price to pay for not having to admit I had finally accepted the destiny fate had clearly marked out for me, staggering do
wn the byways of fame and fortune, from putative rock star to embittered rock critic.
Actually, not that embittered. To no one’s great surprise but my own, I found that I enjoyed my new role. I had my soapbox from which I could rant and rave about the evils of the music business but also champion the music that I loved, be a voice for the artist rather than the corporations, celebrate talent (in its hugely diverse array) while keeping tabs on the cynical machinations and manipulations of the industry. Music had never stopped being part of my life, even if I had become a regular consumer rather than an active participant. It still infected my imagination. I couldn’t pass a record store without wanting to scour the racks, looking for gems. Gloria sometimes complained that there was never a moment’s respite from music in our household. So if I was going to play it, listen to it, read about it, think about it, talk about it, then I might as well write about it too. And, once the cork had been removed from that particular bottle, there was no stopping me. I was frothing over. I kept ringing up my editor on the arts pages and asking for more space. “I can’t possibly explain the rebirth of ambient music as part of club culture in eight hundred words,” I’d complain.
“Well, what kind of length do you think you need?” the long-suffering Sarah Crompton would sigh.
“I need a book,” I’d say.
“I can squeeze in twelve hundred words,” Sarah would generously reply.
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