Killing Bono

by Neil McCormick

  My mother affectionately explained that my idols were actually puppets. But I was way ahead of her. “I know,” I petulantly insisted. “I’m going to be a puppet too.”

  She just didn’t get it. You see, what I really wanted was to be inside that magic tube, looking out, with all of my little friends watching my every move, laughing and applauding. I was only an innocent child but I had already been bitten by the Bug, that most sinister and pernicious creation of the mass-media-saturated modern era. You must know what Bug I’m talking about. It breeds in celluloid and vinyl, crawls across cinema screens, rides the airwaves and mingles with the beams of light emanating from cathode tubes, infecting vulnerable egos with delusions of grandeur. And it had me in its grip.

  I wanted the camera to confirm my existence. I wanted to be somebody. I wanted to be a contender. I wanted to be…

  …a Flowerpot Man.

  Over the years my career plans changed, but the fundamental motivation remained the same. To paraphrase David Bowie, a much later influence of my psyche but no less damaging: fame was the name of the game.

  My family moved from Scotland to Ireland in 1971. The Beatles had broken up, a new brand of so-called glam rock was in the ascendant with T-Rex, Slade and Sweet and the pop charts seemed to be crammed with singalong gobbledegook with titles like “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” and “Bridget the Midget” but the truth is that none of this was of much significance to me. At the age of ten, I regarded the music business with a healthy disdain, an attitude which, had I managed to maintain it for another twenty years or so, would have spared me a great deal of personal pain.

  While my older sister, Stella, watched Top of the Pops with something akin to religious veneration, I saw myself as having much loftier tastes. I liked Frank Sinatra, a mature artist who could act as well as sing and never wore eyeliner. My younger brother, Ivan, was a willing ally in the hugely entertaining sport of tormenting my sister about whatever teenage idol currently occupied center stage in her fantasies. But I began to harbor deep suspicions about Ivan’s allegiances when he started wearing tartan trousers with turn-ups in the style of the Bay City Rollers.

  The last of the McCormick siblings was our little sister, Louise, seven years my junior, who was too young to have an opinion on the great Sinatra/pop schism (or, at least, too low down the family pecking order to have an opinion that counted). Louise listened to whatever anyone else played and seemed to like it, even tolerating the Aran-sweater-wearing, kilted folkies from the Scottish highlands whose tunes my father favored and the collections of classical highlights my mother would occasionally try to foist on us in the name of education.

  Apart from musical differences, a symptom of a sometimes unpleasantly intense sibling rivalry, ours was, by and large, a happy family. I report this with no pleasure whatsoever, for reasons that I hope will become clear. Both my parents came from staunchly working-class, British-coal-mining backgrounds but my father had (through a process of apprenticeship, night studies and endless exams) hauled us up to the comfortable plateau of middle-classness (to which my mother, in particular, had taken like one to the semidetached born). Having started on the factory floor at fifteen years old, Dad had become a qualified engineer before being fast-tracked for senior management in car manufacturer Chrysler. We relocated to Ireland for his latest promotion, moving from a bungalow in a dreary Scottish town to a five-bedroom, two-story house in Howth, a beautiful fishing village on a peninsula at the northern tip of Dublin. It was quite an idyllic place to grow up—fields and forests bordered by the sea, with a city within easy reach.

  I have to say that my parents treated us children exceptionally well, apparently wishing upon their offspring the education, opportunities, financial security and, crucially, freedom of expression and artistic fulfillment that had never been an option in their own childhoods. I have often complained about this to them.

  “Do you think we should have made you suffer more?” my mother tuts whenever I essay my theory that family hardship is an essential ingredient in the otherwise almost intangible metaphysics of fame, acting as a kind of psychic spur on the drive for stardom, especially in the music business. Think about it: how many well-balanced rock stars can you name? From the shared grief over the premature deaths of their mothers that united John Lennon and Paul McCartney to the divorce that rocked the childhood world of Kurt Cobain and the paternal abandonment that fired up the Gallagher brothers, the family backgrounds of rock idols are littered with misery. In particular, there is something about an absence of parental love that drives some individuals to entirely give themselves over to audiences, seeking out the approval of mass applause not just for glory but also as a balm for their tortured souls.

  Perhaps, like my mother, you think I am being melodramatic; but while I was comfortable in the bosom of my family, positively reveling in the sense of freedom and almost unlimited possibility I felt in those early years in my newly adopted country, over in another part of Dublin a boy I had yet to meet was having his world turned upside down.

  Paul Hewson—the boy who would become Bono—was fourteen when his mother died, suddenly and unexpectedly, in September 1974. He grew up, with his older brother, Norman, and father, Bob, in a household of men numbed by grief, unable to share their feelings. It is something we have talked about over the years. “You don’t become a rock star unless you’ve got a lot missing somewhere—that’s becoming increasingly obvious to me,” Bono once admitted during another rambling call down a transatlantic phone line in the middle of a U.S. stadium tour. “If you were of sound mind you wouldn’t need seventy thousand people a night telling you they loved you to feel normal. It’s sad, really. It’s the God-shaped hole. Everyone’s got one but some are blacker and wider than others. When you’ve been abandoned, when someone’s been taken away from you, when you feel like a motherless child, the hole opens up. I don’t think you ever fill it. You can try to fill it up with time, by living a full life, but when things are silent you can still hear the hissing.”

  For Bono, the opening up of the God-shaped hole was the defining moment in his life, pushing him in two directions simultaneously: toward the emotional sanctuary of rock ’n’ roll and toward the salvation promised by a profound faith in his maker. If I had anything resembling a God-shaped hole, I think it would have been God (Him, Her or Itself) that was missing.

  I was raised as a churchgoing Catholic boy, and my gradual estrangement from the comforts of faith was a long and torturously painful process (as much, I suspect, for those around me as it was for myself). At seven years old, I served a brief tenure as an altar boy in the local church. For me, the altar was a stage, the worshippers merely a captive audience, but my scene-stealing posturing during service did not go down well with the priest, who quietly took me aside after a particularly melodramatic dispensation of the Holy Host and suggested that I might not be cut out for the job. (As it turned out, neither was he: some months later he eloped with a member of the congregation.)

  My faith was to be seriously tested by our move to Ireland—still a rigidly Catholic country, with little separation between Church and State. At the tender age of ten, I fell into the grip of the Christian Brothers, an order of repressed sadists who operated a policy of beating the fear of God into you. Violence was deemed a healthy way for boys to occupy their time. Certainly, the pupils in St. Fintan’s Primary School did little else but fight, usually under the approving supervision of their teachers. At breaktimes the playground was a seething mass of young bodies gripped in a variety of wrestling positions. I think I spent most of that first year in a headlock.

  With spirits low, my parents made the decision to remove all their children from the clutches of the various religious orders (Stella was being educated by nuns up the road) and install us in a private school of excessively liberal inclinations. In its own way, this proved every bit as ill judged. Sutton Park was full of rich kids whom no one could discipline for fear that their parents would withdraw their fe
es. Needless to say, I loved it.

  There was no religious education in my new school. Acts of worship were reserved for music appreciation classes, to which pupils were encouraged to bring in their own records. Our teacher would play us a piece of Mahler, which we would listen to in bored silence, and then it would be the turn of someone in class to get up and stick on an Alice Cooper or Mott the Hoople record, every aspect of which would be furiously debated while the teacher rolled his eyes in despair.

  When it came to my turn to bring in a record, I did not exactly have a lot of choice. I only owned one single, Terry Jacks’ number-one hit “Seasons in the Sun.” It remains a source of embarrassment to me that the first record I ever bought should be something so trite. I wish I could claim, like most rock critics, that I was into the Velvet Underground before I even learned to read. But there you have it. In 1974, this maudlin ballad of a dying man bidding farewell to those he has loved appealed to the tragic self-dramatist in me. All together now: “We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun…”

  To my horror, my selection did not go down at all well among the young bohemians in Sutton Park, some of whom groaned loudly while others sang along with the chorus in silly voices. My teacher praised the song’s melody and economy of storytelling, which only made my peers’ mockery worse. I felt my cheeks burning with humiliation when he decided to spin the B-side, a sentimental country song about an old lady who couldn’t feed her dog because there were no bones left in the cupboard. I was suddenly confronted with the sheer banality of my musical tastes. Terry Jacks did not even wear makeup, for goodness’ sake. I was thirteen now, and there were no excuses for being so uncool. When I got home, I contemplated the seven inches of black vinyl with a sense of intense shame. Stella, who had always hated the song, finally put me out of my misery. She took the single from my hands and with a nail file proceeded to gouge an enormous scratch across the record’s surface before coolly replacing it in its paper bag and handing it back to me. “There,” she said, with assured finality. I didn’t even protest. I simply returned the scratched record to the rack, never to be played again.

  The next single I bought was Ralph McTell’s “Streets of London.” Would I never learn?

  The McCormicks liked to think of themselves as a musical family, although our instrumental skills left something to be desired. My grandfather would proudly proclaim that he had never had a lesson in his life as he regaled us with near-unrecognizable organ renditions of “Amazing Grace” and popular classical pieces replete with false starts and bum notes. He was the first in a mercifully short line of self-taught musicians. My father learned to play guitar by following a series on television, frequently blaming his inability to play a complete piece from beginning to end on the fact that he had missed episodes two and five. My mother, meanwhile, shrugged aside the minor handicap of being tone deaf to apply herself to mastering the out-of-tune piano that occupied our dining room. Our regular family singsongs were not for the faint-hearted.

  Ivan was the first to apply himself to learning to play an instrument properly, attending guitar lessons from an early age. While at Sutton Park he formed his first group, Electronic Wizard. They made their debut at a lunchtime concert in the school, kicking off with an original composition, the opening couplet of which I still vividly remember: “Electronic Wizard is our name / Playing electric music is our game.” This bold assertion was somewhat undermined by the fact that the quartet’s lineup consisted of three acoustic guitars and a snare drum. I swiftly concluded that Ivan’s musical ambitions represented no significant threat to my plan to become the first famous McCormick.

  I wanted to be an actor and, while waiting to be discovered by Hollywood, I landed the lead role in the school’s annual end-of-year theatrical production. In 1975, at only fourteen years old, I was to make my debut as Hamlet. I prepared by walking around reading poetry, muttering to no one in particular and generally affecting intense self-absorption, although I doubt anybody but me noticed a great change in my behavior. I even started spending time in the cemetery that bordered the rear of the school, which was where, two weeks before the end of term, disaster struck. Posing dramatically on a cemetery wall, I lost my balance and plummeted to the gravestones below, breaking my ankle quite badly. My drama teacher visited me in hospital, where I was lying in traction. I gamely tried to persuade him that I could play the part on crutches.

  “The show must go on, sir,” I insisted.

  “It will, Neil,” he cruelly replied. “One of the other boys will play Hamlet.”

  This was not the first such incident during my time at Sutton Park. I had previously received seven stitches after someone struck me over the head with a chair during a fight in the library. And the mayor of Dublin’s son, a classmate of mine, had blown the skin off his face in a bomb-making experiment involving gunpowder extracted from fireworks while his friends looked on shouting words of encouragement. When a pupil was expelled for a sexual assault in a classroom, my parents, fearing that it was only a matter of time before one of their offspring ended up dead or in jail, decided it was time for us to change schools once again.

  Thus, at the beginning of the 1975 autumn term, Stella, Ivan and I lined up for assembly at Mount Temple. A progressive establishment that had opened only three years before, it was the first state-subsidized, coeducational, nondenominational school in Dublin. A thin, rigid old man who identified himself as the headmaster, John Brooks, delivered a speech about enabling us all to fulfill our potential. Standing among a throng of unfamiliar faces, I felt nervous yet optimistic about the future. Perhaps, down these dusty corridors, my destiny would, at last, begin to unfold.

  If some time traveler from the future had told me then that, one day, Mount Temple Comprehensive would become a legendary institution in the annals of Irish show business, I would not have been remotely surprised. And if they had informed me that among this generation of students were four individuals who would become the most famous Irish exports since Guinness, why, I would have shrugged bashfully before looking around at my schoolmates to try to work out who were the other three.

  Two

  Paul Hewson was in my sister’s class, a year ahead of me, but we soon established something that was more than a nodding acquaintance if less than a friendship, falling into conversation at choir practice and morning assembly and during brief encounters as we made our way to separate classes. It was a passing relationship fueled by one characteristic we have always had in common: a capacity to talk about anything as if we were experts on the subject, no matter how limited our actual knowledge.

  My rapport with Paul did not much impress my sister, who was proprietorial about such matters and did not think I should be fraternizing with any of her contemporaries. Indeed, in normal circumstances, there tended to be little socializing between pupils from different years. When you are young, even a year in age difference is usually perceived as an unbridgeable chasm. But, long before the days of his A-list celebrity, Paul was already something of a star in the school corridor, known to one and all.

  Even now, I think of Bono as the Man Who Knows Everyone. His visage is inescapable in modern media. Open a newspaper or magazine and there he is, standing shoulder to shoulder with world leaders and political agitators, poets and pop stars, show business legends and flavors of the month. I’ve seen him pictured with his arms around presidents, glad-handing prime ministers, quaffing wine with Nobel Prize winners and swapping sunglasses with the Pope. Mention his name to movie and music stars and you are almost guaranteed to hear an amusing anecdote about their friend Bono, with a coda about what a nice guy he is.

  He was always a gregarious charmer, loping about Mount Temple like a stray dog, sniffing out interesting conversations and activities, making sure he was part of whatever was going on. There was a lot of mischief in his smile and he had a stubborn, jaw-jutting, bull-headed streak that emerged whenever he felt put upon, but at his core there was a tangibly gentle, compassionate a
spect that made him popular with girls (who always seemed to be fluttering about) and tolerant of younger pupils, such as myself. You felt honored when Paul spoke to you.

  He could often be found hanging out in our common room because Paul was engaged in a vigorous, amorous pursuit of Alison Stewart, one of the most beautiful and universally admired girls in our year. Alison had thick, black hair, smooth, olive skin, dark, warm eyes and deliciously curled lips. Being a hormonally charged fifteen-year-old boy, I could not help but notice these things. She was also smart, kind, good-humored, strong-willed and, frankly, way out of my league. Actually, at that stage in my adolescent development, pretty much any member of the opposite sex seemed out of my league. But with some, at least, you felt you might have half a chance. Alison had a sort of aura of impermeability about her. I never really felt she belonged in the same world as an ungainly youth like me. On principle, I was against older boys going out with girls in our class, since their seniority and bullish air of experience seemed to grant them unfair advantage, but Alison and Paul seemed to fit. He wooed her over the course of a long year, until, when you saw them nestle intimately among the stark arrangement of chairs and lockers in the common room, it became apparent that they were an item.

  One of our principal topics of conversation at that time was God (the existence or non-existence thereof); and, indeed, this was to remain a subject of vigorous debate between us over the next twenty-five years. My personal problems with the deity had not subsided, but my confidence in challenging the religious order imposed by Irish society was growing daily. To be fair, religious education at Mount Temple was a very different proposition than under the Christian Brothers. A consequence of its being the only nondenominational state school in mainly Catholic Ireland was that most pupils were drawn from Dublin’s Protestant minority. The school itself, however, toed no sectarian line, offering Religious Education (RE) classes characterized by a kind of woolly Christian liberalism, presided over by a well-meaning, but—as far as I was concerned—drippily ineffective young teacher named Sophie Shirley. There would be Bible readings and class discussions in which Jesus took on the character of a beatific hippie while God seemed to be personified as an avuncular old geezer who only wanted the best for His extended family—if that was the case, I wondered, why was I being kept awake at night wondering if the torments of Hell awaited me when I died? I would fire this and related questions at my long-suffering teacher but I never received satisfactory answers, just platitudes about Jesus loving me.