Killing Bono: I Was Bono's Doppelganger

by Neil McCormick

  But I caught up with the traveling sci-fi circus in the U.K. and U.S. as it evolved and mutated into the greatest show on earth. Well, the latest model anyway. There was a particularly extraordinary night in the Stadio Olimpico in Rome, where I was standing on the base of the claw, at the foot of the stage, so close to the band we could have all been back in McGonagles in Dublin. But their eyes were focussed on another space altogether, over my head. So I turned to see what they see, and watched the mass of people, 89,000 Italian U2 fans spreading out across the stadium floor and rising vertiginously up the sides, just a dense, pulsating throb of humanity, absorbing all that music and emotion and powering it back at the band, hands aloft, mouths open in song. There was a mad energy to the moment, an intense feedback of feeling, looping and crackling between rock band and rock fans, with Bono as the lightning rod. And I was struck again by the sheer improbability of all this, that my schoolmate from Dublin had become this fantastic, iconic, ridiculous and amazing twenty-first-century superstar.

  Later, we had a high-speed police escort out of the stadium. “Do you ever wonder how this happened?” I asked him. By phone. Because he was in one car, and I was in another.

  “All the time,” he laughed.

  Life is strange … and getting stranger every day. At a gig in my local bar, I met a Northern Irish musician named Joe Echo. When I introduced myself, he said “You’re Neil McCormick? I’m writing the songs for your film!”

  Which is how I found out the producers were not going to be using our original music. I was gobsmacked, even though Ian Flooks patiently explained he wanted a sound track with a rockier, contemporary edge. After some debate, they agreed to use two of our original songs, “Sleepwalking” and “Some Kind of Loving,” in radically rewritten forms. Nick Hamm, for his part, said he just wanted music that worked with each scene, which meant being able to ask his composer for a bad punk song, or telling him to rewrite “Sleepwalking” as an embarrassing example of jerky Eighties’ synth pop. For some reason, he thought I might prove resistant to such demands.

  “But ‘Sleepwalking’ is a beautiful song, why would you want to ruin it?” I protested.

  “Exactly!” he said.

  I sort of got the point. It still felt like the ultimate insult. They make a film about your life as a failed musician and decide your own music isn’t good enough.

  I was consulted on casting. The first time I saw a screen test of an actor playing me, I wanted to crawl out of the room with embarrassment. The great Scottish poet Rabbie Burns has a famous couplet: “O would some power the giftie gie us/to see ourselves as others see us.” But I am not convinced this is a gift at all. Writing my story, I have had a chance to acknowledge my worst characteristics with the ironic awareness of an older and wiser self. Maybe I was the butt of the joke, but at least my narration allows me the grace of acknowledging that I am in on the joke. But confronted with this unmediated vision of my youthful gaucheness, my pretentiousness, my tendency to overexcitement and propensity for motor-mouthed bullshit, I wondered how I had ever once convinced myself (let alone anyone around me) that I was destined for great things.

  At least the actor eventually cast as me was extremely good-looking. Maybe even too good-looking, if there is such a thing. Ben Barnes is among the most handsome, charismatic young leading men in Britain. He played Prince Caspian in The Chronicles of Narnia, for goodness’ sake. This may have been pretty much how I always saw myself, but I am not sure everyone agreed with this assessment. I said to Nick, “With his looks and my talent we could have gone far.”

  Nick said, “It’s okay, he’s playing you as a kind of supergeek. That should be enough to put people off.”

  On the set, to distinguish between us, the crew started calling me Real Neil. I wondered how long that last? I fear I am in the process of becoming my own doppelganger. I am waiting for the day when I introduce myself as Neil McCormick, and the response is “Rubbish. You look nothing like him.”

  Or maybe just a disappointed “You were much better looking in the film.”

  I suggested we get Brendan Gleeson or Colm Meany to play Bono. You know, a good Irish character actor, preferably old, overweight, and balding. That would have been the ultimate revenge.

  Instead, they cast young Irish actor Marty McCann. He was spooky. I was on the set for a scene at the launch party of The Joshua Tree when Marty appeared, in character, and I just caught him out of the corner of my eye and turned, thinking, for a split second, “It’s Bono. What’s he doing here?” Marty has a way of jutting his chin and pumping up his chest, the walk of a boxer getting ready for the big fight, that spins me back twenty years through time. Then he’ll drop the whole thing, and chatter away in a merry Northern Ireland accent.

  While they were shooting, I called Bono and told him the actor playing him was more like him than he was himself.

  “Just as long as he’s tall,” said Bono. And then added, after a moment’s thought, “And modest.”

  Tall and modest. Well, perhaps not the characteristics most people would associate with Bono.

  So, in an effort to bring this enterprise to some conclusion (this being not so much a third act as a fifth), the book you have just read has become a film. If you’ve seen it, you will know it doesn’t stick too closely to the original. Film has its own language, and the screenwriters went to some lengths to create visual metaphors for what was, essentially, an internal, psychological journey. And they gave me that third act, which is a lot more dramatic than anything I managed to come up with for myself. I think of it as a kind of riff on the themes of my book, my life in a parallel universe, where I still don’t get to be a rock star, but I do get the best lines.

  Ivan, on the other hand, tells everyone that it’s exactly the way it was. He was the real star in the family. And I ruined his life.

  People tell me the film is very funny and I am prepared to believe them. I can only watch it through my fingers, squirming with humiliation.

  As a child, of course, I firmly believed that one day someone would make a film of my life. It just never occurred to me it would be a comedy.

  Still, like I said at the start of this book, what seems a whole lifetime ago …

  … I always knew I would be famous.

  Photographs

  The ever-changing image of a wannabe rock star.

  Neil McCormick from 1963 to 2003:

  clean-cut kid to hairy rocker and back again.

  Mount Temple class of ’78. Bono is front row, third from left, with his arm resting on Ali. There is something already so assertive about his pose. Dave Evans (the Edge) is fourth row from the back, bang in the middle of the photo, with a big mop of hair, a tie and a badge, which no doubt bore the legend U2. Neil is second row, sixth from right, also wearing a badge, which no doubt bore the legend Frankie Corpse and the Undertakers. Adam had already been expelled by the time this picture was taken.

  The second gig, in the Mount Temple school car park, 1978. The Undertakers on top, left to right, Neil, Keith, Ivan, Frank. U2, looking a good deal more professional below: Adam, Bono and Edge (with Larry obscured by kit).

  The Modulators live at Howth Community Centre, 1978. From left, John McGlue, Eric Dennehy, Neil and Ivan. One of the many drummers who only lasted a single performance, Eric was given the punk name Hopeless Eric, which proved sadly prophetic when he fled at the end of the show, quaking from nerves, and was never heard from again.

  Neil trying not to set light to Bono during a photo shoot for a Hot Press poster campaign. (photo credit: Colm Henry)

  Yeah! Yeah! attempt to fulfill the author’s Beatles fantasies. The only trouble was the McCormick brothers both wanted to be Ringo. Left to right: Leo, Deco, Neil and Ivan.

  Hot Press Awards, 1981. Bono contemplating the notorious Elvis Award (designed by Neil) that fell apart the moment he accepted it. (photo credit: Colm Henry)

  “The women in my personal passport booth…”

  1. Neil and Barbara McCar
ney, the first love of his life, 1980. The bowler hat became useful during Busking sessions.”

  2. Neil and Joan Cody, the second love of his life, 1986, approaching heartbreak point.

  3. Neil and Gloria Else…true love at last! 1989, worth the wait.

  The official new-look Yeah! Yeah!, 1983. It was a very colorful period in pop music. It was pictures like this that seemed to get the rather camp Billy Gaff excited about them…. until he discovered they were brothers.

  1984, the first Shook Up! photo shoot: a new look evolving, slight more somber, as Yeah! Yeah! came crashing to the ground. (photo credit: Joan Cody)

  Shook Up!’s last photo session. Ivan is in the background, kissing Ina, who he was later to marry. (photo credit: Leo Regan)

  Backstage at a David Bowie concert in 2002. From left: Neil, Bowie (holding a photo of his daughter), Bono, and Brian Eno. This was another occasion where Neil was cruelly cut out of Bono’s life. A version of this picture appeared in the British tabloid newspaper the Daily Mirror but they cropped around Bowie’s shoulder to remove Neil’s head! (photo credit: Rex Features)

  At an exhibition of Bono’s paintings in 2003. This is a very rare photo of Bono without his glasses, which his doppelganger is modelling instead. (photo credit: Martin Pope)