Killing Bono

by Neil McCormick

  Paul was another matter. He was really a frustrated musician. He simply could not get his guitar to do anything he wanted it to do, so would usually abandon it and instead expend his considerable energy attempting to almost magically summon, coax and cajole music from the others. During an endless jam of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” (a song Ivan was hearing for the first time), Ivan was astonished to see Paul get down on his hands and knees in front of Dave as he played the famous riff, holding his fingers in front of Dave’s fingers, as if he was trying to play the guitar himself without actually touching it. Paul assumed the role of organizer, telling everyone what they were going to play and how they would tackle it yet actually contributing little himself. He would sing along as best he could, struggling to find the right notes, but without a microphone his vocal limitations were not immediately apparent to anyone other than himself. As the biggest character in the group he began to assume the role of frontman.

  Excited about the band, Ivan decided to invest in a new amplifier and blew his entire savings of £12 on a secondhand Falcon Combo. That very evening, as he sat at home fiddling with his new purchase, sending feedback howling through the house, he was summoned to the telephone by our mother. Apparently there was a very well-spoken young man on the line who urgently needed to talk to him. It was Adam. He wanted to know if Ivan had bought the amp because of the group.

  “Yes,” said Ivan.

  “I wish you’d spoken to me first,” said Adam, improvising wildly. “You see, the band has got a gig…”

  “That’s great,” said Ivan, enthusiastically. On the road at last.

  “The thing is, it’s in a pub,” said Adam. “And, you know, you’re too young to get into pubs.”

  “Oh,” said Ivan.

  “In fact, all the gigs we’ll be getting will be in pubs,” said Adam. “And you won’t be able to play any of them.”

  “I see,” said Ivan.

  “I knew you’d understand,” said Adam. “Look, no hard feelings, eh?”

  Even at thirteen, Ivan knew when he was being given the elbow, however diplomatically. He put the phone down in a state of utter dejection and went back to his guitar and amp, turning the volume up to the max and losing himself in a wall of noise.

  There was, of course, no pub and certainly no gig. The group could barely string a whole song together, so attempting to deliver an entire set would have been premature to say the least. But, as rehearsals began to illuminate everyone’s strengths and weaknesses, so the band began to settle into a core lineup of Larry on drums, Adam on bass, Paul on vocals, Dave on lead guitar and Dick on rhythm guitar. In fact Dick, too, was not really wanted by his bandmates, but he simply ignored any intimations that he might be surplus to requirements and continued to attend rehearsals until he had established himself as a member.

  His pride wounded, Ivan neglected to inform the family of this new development. The truth did not emerge for weeks, until Stella asked Paul how he was getting along with her little brother and Paul, rather embarrassed, admitted they had kicked him out.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” asked my astonished father.

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” said Ivan, defensively. “They’re crap. I’m going to start my own group.”

  My acting career was not progressing any better. My parents like to proudly tell people that their son was once in a play in the prestigious Gate Theater with the venerable Irish thespian Cyril Cusack. What they neglect to add was that after two performances I was sacked for missing my cue. I thought the part was beneath me, anyway. I had no lines and was really a glorified stagehand whose sole purpose was to move furniture for the other actors. As far as I was concerned, anybody could have done it (well, anybody apart from me, it would seem). I craved the physical rush of performing in front of an audience, the ego buzz of recognition by other human beings allied to the strange sense of power that coursed through your body as you held strangers in your spell by sheer force of will. I wanted to utter speeches that resonated in my soul and made sense of my complex internal world. “To be or not to be?” That was the question I wanted to ask, almost the only question that mattered. I wanted to be Hamlet. But I couldn’t even land a part in a burger commercial, when it was deemed that my mixed Scottish and Irish accent might be confusing to viewers. The director was not impressed when I suggested that the phrase “Mmm, deeeee-licious!” would have sounded equally lame in any accent.

  I resolved to solve my casting problems by writing plays myself. As the 1976 autumn term drew to a close it was announced that a talent contest would be staged in the school gymnasium. This, I decided, would be the ideal opportunity to demonstrate my writing and acting skills. And so, with a couple of friends, I concocted a short comic play, which involved our teachers being put on trial for crimes against humanity. The parts were filled by various classmates, with the juicy role of judge being kept for myself. Banging my gavel to sentence unpopular teachers to a variety of extravagant punishments was sure to prove a crowd-pleaser. We had a run-through the week before for our avuncular form tutor, Mr. Moxham, who was sufficiently impressed to schedule our production as the grand finale on the condition that we went gently on his character and removed certain of our more cruel and tasteless gags.

  I gathered with my small cast at the side of a makeshift stage of jammed-together tables as a succession of pupils larked about, singing, dancing, playing accordions, telling jokes. The large audience of schoolkids heckled the performers mercilessly but most took it in good humor, shouting back insults. Mr. Moxham cheerfully patrolled the gymnasium, patting pupils on the back, uttering words of encouragement.

  “Ready for your moment of glory, lads?” he inquired of my little crew.

  “We’re ready, sir,” I reported.

  “And you have made those changes we discussed?”

  “Do we really have to lose the gag about Mrs. Prandy’s dog, sir?” I asked.

  “Only if you want to live through another term,” replied Mr. Moxham.

  Four members of Feedback stood around their amps and drum kit, waiting to make their live debut. Dick was absent, since he was not a pupil at the school, but Paul, Dave, Adam and Larry were going to do a ten-minute set, scheduled as the penultimate act, just before our play.

  “All right, Dave?” I asked, feeling every inch the seasoned professional comforting a nervous debutante. Dave looked as if he was going to be sick from stage fright, clinging to his guitar and staring anxiously at the crowd. The others appeared considerably more at ease. Larry had played plenty of shows before, albeit with such less-than-rocking outfits as the Artane Boys Band and the Post Office Workers Band. Adam lounged about, affecting his usual seen-it-all-before cool. Paul was practically jumping up and down with anticipation, firing encouraging smiles and nods at his colleagues.

  When their slot came, the group started to hoist their equipment on to the stage. It took them about ten minutes to set up, an extended period of inactivity in which any last remnants of discipline in the room evaporated. Kids were running about the gym in all directions, yelling at the tops of their voices, climbing the climbing-frames. I was marshaling my cast, instructing them that as soon as the band was finished we were to get on to the stage and launch straight into our play. I really had no idea what was coming.

  An electric hum began to sound in the room as the amps were turned on. Paul stood center stage at his microphone, guitar slung around his neck, looking defiantly over the boisterous crowd. Dave and Adam stood either side of him. Larry clicked his sticks together and the group launched into a coarse, speeded-up version of seventies pretty-boy rock star Peter Frampton’s “Show Me the Way,” kicking off with a roaring D chord that sent a shockwave through the room.

  With the wisdom of hindsight, I know this debut performance of the group who would one day rock the world must have been, in truth, a fairly dubious affair. There was nothing remotely cool about their selection of songs, for a start. They played, of all things, a tongue-
in-cheek version of the Bay City Rollers’ pop anthem “Bye Bye Baby” and a Beach Boys medley. They had no sound-check, no experience, nothing to go on but hope and desire. But I was completely stunned. Absolutely floored. This was the first live, electric band I had ever heard and a rush of adrenaline shot through my body, apparently disabling my central nervous system and rearranging my entire molecular structure. At least, that’s what it felt like. Dave’s guitar was splintering in my ears. The pounding of Larry’s drums and Adam’s bass shook the tables they were standing on and seemed to make the whole room vibrate. I had listened to records in my room, headbanging in headphones, but nothing prepared me for the sheer visceral thrill of live rock ’n’ roll. When Paul stomped across the shaky stage, grabbed his microphone stand and yelled, “I want you…Show me the way!” the little girls from the junior classes started screaming.

  And that was it for me. I turned to my fellow would-be thespians and announced that there was absolutely no way I was going on after that. It was quickly and unanimously agreed that our play should be canceled. Mr. Moxham, as I recall, seemed quite relieved.

  Feedback belted through their bizarre set and then stood there, stupid grins plastered across their faces, as the crowd roared for more. Their repertoire being rather limited in those days, they had to resort to a repeat version of “Bye Bye Baby.” The gym was in complete uproar, with kids singing, yelling, screaming, clapping, dancing. I looked about me in a daze. A new vision of my future was forming in my feverish adolescent brain.

  Forget about becoming a fabulously famous, multi-hyphenated actor-writer-director.

  I was going to be a rock star.

  Three

  Ivan and I decided to form a band. There was something inevitable about our hitching together our ambitions. We shared a bedroom for much of our childhood and would lie awake at night conjuring up fantasies of fame and fortune. I don’t know if I infected him with my own delusions of grandeur or whether it was something in the competitive dynamic of our family, but we seemed equally convinced that stardom was our birthright as we role-played the parts we believed we would make our own. It was a relatively small journey from Bill and Ben to John and Paul.

  Our relationship was a complex mix of filial loyalty and sibling rivalry. We had many qualities in common, not all of them appreciated by those closest to us. It was often remarked that we had the same sense of humor, an observation rarely offered as a compliment. Our jokes could be rather cruel (and were rather too often directed at other members of our family), underpinned by a mutual streak of rebellious irreverence. We both exhibited powerful creative drives and were motivated by a sense of ambition out of all proportion to our circumstances, but our endeavors were often hampered by a ridiculously fierce rivalry. We made short eight-millimeter films together but still fought about who should be credited as director. My sister used to say we thought we were better than everyone else, and that included each other.

  For our first songwriting session, we sat on my bed, him with his guitar, me with a pen and pad. “What should we write about?” he wanted to know after strumming aimlessly for a while.

  “I don’t know,” I confessed. “What do people write songs about?”

  I wonder if Lennon and McCartney ever had this problem? Our chosen subject matter in the end was rather mundane, reflecting the priorities of two bored teenage boys. It was a twelve-bar blues entitled “Pass the Pepperoni Pizza,” the chorus of which went:

  Pass the pepperoni pizza

  Pass the pepperoni pizza

  Pass the pepperoni pizza, baby

  And another slice of apple pie

  Neither of us was particularly impressed with our efforts, so the group project was sidelined for a while.

  Music was playing an increasingly important part in my life. In 1975 I had discovered the Beatles, somewhat later than the rest of the world, admittedly, but with much the same devastating effect on my psyche. In an effort to catch up with my peers, I was working backward in my musical education and one day decided to invest my pocket money in their blue “best of” collection, The Beatles 1967–1970. What a revelatory purchase that turned out to be.

  Having returned home with my new acquisition, I sat in the living room and listened to the whole double album on headphones. It was an ecstasy-inducing, quasi-religious experience. I was lost in the swirling psychedelic colors of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” cast adrift in the awe-inspiring depths and lonely floating vocal counterpoint of “A Day in the Life” and left battered and bewildered by the surreal epic drama of “I Am the Walrus.” When it came to the “nah nah nah’s” at the sentimental conclusion of “Hey Jude,” tears filled my eyes. I sat there, blubbing uncontrollably, emotionally overwhelmed by pop music for the first time.

  I studied the slightly mysterious black-and-white photo of the band on the inner sleeve. These four people had made this whole magical world that seemed to open up new chambers in my brain. They looked impossibly wise and cool. From that day on, I became a voracious consumer of all things Beatle. I investigated the albums gradually, over a long period of time, savoring each record for as long as possible before moving on to the next, fearing that the pure joy of listening would evaporate when I eventually reached the final album. What I learned instead was that great records have strength in depth, expanding rather than retracting with repeated listens.

  By the time I saw Feedback I was ready to crumble, falling headfirst into what would turn out to be a lifelong love affair with rock ’n’ roll. The Beatles led to other groups: the Animals, the Dave Clark Five, the Kinks, the Who, the Zombies. I became interested in beat groups, unexpectedly aided by my maternal grandmother, who turned out to have a stash of rather hip sixties vinyl that some lodger had left behind. I was fascinated by David Bowie (who had collaborated with John Lennon on “Fame,” a song I loved for pathetically obvious reasons) but progressive rock bands of the seventies such as Yes and Genesis held no interest for me. Their music seemed tricksy, overelaborate and devoid of wit or emotion. It belonged, in my perception, to the long-haired older kids my sister hung around with. As far as I was concerned they could keep it. Sixties music seemed far more fresh and urgent. With typical arrogance, I was already becoming a snob about something I barely knew anything about.

  In 1976, just going on seventeen years old, Stella was too young to be a real hippie chick but this was certainly the pop-cultural status to which she aspired. Her friend Orla Dunne wore her hair in long neoclassical ringlets, dressed in swathes of gauzy material and walked about with two enormous, shaggy Afghan hounds. Stella and Orla listened to soft rock of the seventies (the Eagles and the Moody Blues were great favorites) and chased boys who had long hair and droopy mustaches and smoked dope. They liked to sing and were good enough to be included in the Temple Singers, an elite school ensemble which included past pupils and the pick of the regular common-or-garden choir (of which Paul, Dave and I were undistinguished members). After choir practice one day, the girls were approached by Paul with a proposition.

  Adam had managed to blag Feedback a Saturday-night support slot in the hall of my old school, St. Fintan’s. Encouraged as they were by the positive reception to their first performance, the group felt they had to take things to a more professional level. It was suggested that a couple of sexy female backing singers might add some class and Paul (who seemed to know most of the girls in Mount Temple) said he had just the right girls for the job. And so my sister became the second McCormick to join the group who would become U2.

  Although they were in the same year at school, Stella did not know Paul particularly well. He was in Orla’s class but, since he didn’t conform to the girls’ rigidly defined concept of “dishiness,” he had never been of great interest. They both remarked, however, on how amusing he could be, a facet of his character which actually rather puzzled Stella. At the behest of another classmate, Stella attended a couple of the Christian Movement meetings. She watched with growing incredulity as, during prayer
s, several participants started babbling animatedly in gibberish—or rather, as they would have it, “talking in tongues.” They were heartily congratulated for these performances by their fellow believers, who claimed to recognize the dialect as ancient Hebrew, albeit delivered, according to Stella, with a distinctly Dublin flavor. Stella found the participants to be a rather ridiculous bunch who managed to be weird and dull at the same time and were all a bit too pleased about their personal relationship with their maker. Paul, however, was different. For a start, he did not check his sense of humor at the altar. “You finding it a bit hard on the head?” he had asked her, sympathetically, as she watched her schoolfriends roll their eyes and commune with the Holy Spirit. “It’s all very uncool. God doesn’t seem too interested in helping you look your best to your mates, that’s for sure.” Stella was amazed that somebody could actually be funny, irreverent and devoutly Christian at the same time.

  Rehearsals were held at Adam’s house in Malahide during a week’s break in the winter term. Stella and Orla would turn up at midday, with Adam usually answering the door in his dressing gown, sleepily rubbing his eyes, having just emerged from bed. In the sizeable living room, the rest of the band would assemble and start tuning up, while Adam slowly got himself together with the aid of coffee and cigarettes. The first afternoon, he wandered about with his dressing gown flapping open, his prodigious member occasionally poking through. Having had limited exposure to the male sexual organ, Stella and Orla sat debating the strange purple color and lumpy texture of Adam’s underpants until it finally dawned on them that he wasn’t wearing any. They burst into giggles while Paul instructed Adam to “put it away before you frighten somebody.”