Killing Bono

by Neil McCormick

  I saw Bono at a bus stop in town sometime afterward. There was another mental adjustment to be made. I thought that record deals were synonymous with limousines, the beginning of the easy life. “You know, you spend all this time and energy trying to get a record deal,” said Bono. “Then you get to the end of this whole struggle and find out it’s only the beginning. The real work starts now.”

  We sat at the back of a 31 bus, talking. He was riding out to visit Ali at her parents’ house in Raheny. I was on my way home from work. Bono was in a serious mood, contemplating the future, talking in an urgent, intimate whisper. “U2 are alone out there. We don’t fit in. We’re not going to be able to take the usual roads to success. But I really think it’s important that we get to where we’re going, we get a chance to fulfill our potential. ’Cause music can be a celebration of life. It’s a contemporary art form for everybody–working-class, upper-class; never before has there been an art form so versatile. And it’s being abused. It’s being commercialized. And it’s being bent. Punk was about trying to straighten it out but it was just the same old story. Power corrupts and it bent it out worse than it was in the first place. U2 are standing against that. It’s one up for the positive side of this culture—the pop culture, as you always call it. If we’re on the radio, if we get to number one, we’re doing all the people that make that crap factory–produced music out of a job. I think it’s important.”

  Oh, I was convinced! Bono can be a mesmerizing speaker. He has the poetic language and proselytizing gifts of a preacher, but rather than ranting and raving his delivery is low-key and intimate, filled with warmth, humor and surprising humility. Small talk is not really his forte. He has a tendency to go straight for the big issues. But he doesn’t talk at you; instead he puts his listeners at the center of the conversation, making you feel as if your involvement and agreement is vital. That you are in this together. “You’ve got to get your band going again, Neil,” he told me, pressing the notion as if the very future of the music business depended on people like me standing up to be counted. “You’ve got a big talent, you’ve got a part to play.”

  Then we were at his stop and he was off, with a last “God bless.” Why did he always have to bring God into it?

  Ivan had been gigging with two friends who used to roadie for the Modulators, Ivan O’Shea (who will be henceforth referred to by his surname, to avoid confusion) and Declan Peat (who shall be known by his nickname, Deco, the basic approach to male nicknames in Dublin being to take the first syllable of the Christian name and add an o at the end. Thus I knew lots of people with names like Philo, Johno, Robbo, Kevo and Steve-o. But, funnily enough, only one Bono). They called themselves the Jobbys, a euphemism for noxious waste products expelled from the posterior. “We’re shit and proud of it,” as my brother would say. The basic principle behind the Jobbys’ unique sound was that each member was assigned to the instrument he was least competent on. Thus Ivan was drummer, O’Shea was guitarist (though he had never before touched the instrument) and Deco was bassist (ditto). Their songs involved them all changing chords at the same time but not necessarily in the same order, and they performed with buckets on their heads and their backs to the audience. This was all very amusing (to them at least) but it was essentially just a diversion, bringing Ivan and me no closer to our goal of global stardom. It did not pass unnoticed, however, that Deco was threatening the very raison d’être of the Jobbys by making swift progress on his chosen instrument. So one day we asked him to accept promotion from roadie to bassist in our new group. Given that we didn’t actually have a new group, in reality this represented only a minute step upward in the band infrastructure, but Deco was so slobberingly grateful you might have thought he was joining the Rolling Stones. “I won’t let you down, guys,” he declared in tones of humble conviction.

  “That’s what they all say,” I countered.

  Like all our former bassists, Deco inherited Adam’s old Ibanez and required some instruction on how to play it from Ivan, but otherwise his enlistment represented a distinct improvement in our recruiting policy. As indicated by his fandom, friendship and voluntary roadie status, Deco was one of us, sharing an outlook, sense of humor and taste in music. Immediately we began to feel like a unit. Now all we needed was…

  No, not a drummer. Top of the list of our priorities was a new name.

  Things were changing on the band-name front. “The” was becoming increasingly redundant. From Liverpool, we were listening to a burst of exciting new psychedelia from bands with fanciful names such as Echo & the Bunnymen and Wah!Heat. Sex Pistols manager Malcom McLaren was promoting the Burundi beats of Bow Wow Wow, while the extravagant new glam of Adam & the Ants was rising to prominence in the charts. And from the underground were coming whispers of a “new-romantic” movement that wanted to shake off the dourness and negativity associated with punk by emphasizing the fabulousness of fashion and glamour, spearheaded by outfits with names like Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and Culture Club.

  While I tended to be unimpressed by the lumpen dance beats of the new-romantic recordings (my record of the year was Elvis Costello’s “Get Happy,” a spirited reworking of sixties Motown music suffused with much romantic misery), I was enamored of the conceptual thinking behind it, the idea that this might deliver a shot of alternative culture into the mainstream pop charts. I briefly took to wearing gaudy, multicolored chiffon scarves over a bright-yellow shirt and some baggy, wine-colored trousers that I thought of as rather piratical. There may even have been, on occasion, a touch of eyeliner, although it would have been hard to spot under my hair, a curly mop-top with an excessively long fringe designed to hide my despised spectacles. This was the cause of frequent disasters, as I had to constantly brush the hair out of my eyes in order to see, whereupon I often caught the edge of my glasses and flicked them off my face. “I’ve never known anyone to break so many pairs of specs,” my optician observed one day. “Don’t you think it would be cheaper to get a haircut?”

  At any rate, to someone as caught up in the shifting currents of pop fashion as I was, it was imperative that our new name reflect this spirit of adventure. And there would be no room at the front for the definite article.

  “What about just Modulators?” suggested Ivan.

  “The whole mod thing is over,” I countered. “It’s finished. We’d be dead before we even started. We’ve got to come up with something fresh, new and original.”

  “Bats with Guns and the Third Earth Radio,” suggested Deco.

  “Not that original,” I said.

  “Lucky Frogs Evaporate,” said Deco, who was reading random words from the pages of a comic.

  “Oh God,” sighed Ivan.

  “I like it! One big word on the posters. GOD. Live at the Baggot Inn.”

  “Amen!” said Ivan.

  “That’s not bad! Amen! I can see it now, crowds chanting, ‘Amen! Amen!’ ”

  Eventually, following this convoluted line of thought, we came up with Yeah! Yeah! (complete with exclamation marks, our bold use of punctuation reflecting my growing appreciation of the typographical properties of Letraset). I loved that name, since it suggested a modern interpretation of the spirit of the Beatles, who remained our principal role models. And it got a big endorsement when Bono gave it his seal of approval. “You can usually tell if a band is going to be any good by the name,” he said. “I like Yeah! Yeah! already.”

  Now it was imperative that we find a drummer. Deco invited a schoolfriend, Leo Regan, to audition. He was a scrawny fellow with outrageous eyebrows: a pair of thick, black, beetley arcs that seemed to have a life of their own. They lent a soulful, almost mournful air to his expression and complemented his intense nature. Actually, the word intense barely does Leo justice. Leo is a kind of emotional and philosophical extremist. When he was young, it was the extremes of hedonism to which he dedicated himself, but, as he grew older and more serious, he became a highly demanding, almost self-punishing artist. We have been friends
for life but it wasn’t the easiest of beginnings. I identified him straightaway as an oddball, but he could play the drums and that was all that really mattered. For his part, Leo recalls a great uncertainty about getting involved with Yeah! Yeah! He thought that Ivan and I were a couple of egotistic arseholes but he had never met two people so confident and committed to achieving their goals, and decided, on balance, that he might as well come along for the ride.

  Ivan and I had a plan. Well, we always had a plan of some kind but this time we had convinced ourselves (and several of those closest to us) that we had a plan that would actually work. We were going to create new-wave pop based on the Beatles’ template: melodic, intelligent, sing-along songs delivered with wit, panache, passion and invention. And then we were going to practice until we were note-perfect before launching ourselves on the scene in a blaze of glory.

  And that was it. That was the plan in its entirety. In retrospect, of course, it wasn’t really much of a plan at all. It was more like a hopeful punt.

  Ivan and I were born in the sixties, children of a class revolution, the spawn of TV and pop culture. We were part of what was probably the first generation to take fame for granted. Everybody is at it now, of course. Something previously represented as available only to the highest achievers in mankind is now seen as a career option. We wanted to be famous. Therefore we would be. It was obvious, wasn’t it?

  Ivan finished his leaving certificate and entered Trinity College to study for an engineering degree. I suppose he felt he was doing something Dad would approve of but it did not take Ivan long to realize he had made a mistake. There was clearly far too much hard work involved, for one thing. After just four weeks he dropped out, with the solemn undertaking that he would resit some exams and gain the points necessary to study natural science, a course that promised to leave far more time for his real interest, the pursuit of rock stardom.

  My parents must have begun to worry that there was a pattern developing when I announced that I was dropping out of art college. Karl Tsigdinos had departed Hot Press to oversee a glossy women’s magazine, to much derision from his colleagues, who viewed teaching Irish women about the mysteries of the orgasm as a much less honorable vocation than keeping the country safe for rock ’n’ roll. So, at the tender age of nineteen, I was offered his job. I persuaded my parents that I was better off working as art director of a magazine than studying for three more years to get a degree that might, if I was lucky, get me a job sharpening pencils for someone like me.

  Around the same time, I broke up with Barbara. This was entirely my doing. She was the first great love of my life but I was restless and confused, driven by the notion that my destiny lay out there somewhere, in a world as yet unexplored, with people I had not even met. I thought of myself as fearless and yet I was desperately, secretly afraid of becoming tied down in the world of my childhood. So I told her it was over one night, rather unsympathetically breaking the news on the back of a bus. She fled in tears. I went home and wrote a song, “Tears Turn to Rain,” and felt mightily satisfied with my evening’s work. “Perhaps I should break up with girls more often!” A short while later, to my horror, Barbara started going out with my former bassist John McGlue. Conveniently overlooking the fact that I had brought this on myself, I adopted the pose of wounded lover. At night I listened to Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, the Everest of breakup albums, with new appreciation. I had discovered this album when I was eighteen and the nearest I had come to heartbreak was not getting past first base with Ronan’s sister. Listening to “Tangled Up in Blue,” I wanted to fall in love with a difficult woman who would leave me broke and drunk with lipstick on my collar and whiskey on my breath, rambling the city streets after midnight, ranting at the stars in the sky, just to savor some of these bittersweet sensations for myself. Now here was my chance. I would mope around near McGlue’s house every night in the hope of bumping into the new couple, so that they could see by my expression of stoic melancholy and transparently false cheerfulness that I was holding up despite suffering from a badly broken heart. They never seemed particularly pleased to see me, for some reason. I was also churning out lyrics to torturous love songs, with titles like “Love Is Was,” “I Broke a Promise,” “See My Face,” “Cut It Out.” I began to entertain the rather dangerous notion that misery was conducive to creativity.

  U2 were recording their debut album at Windmill Lane studios and one night I paid a visit. The studio, located down Dublin’s docks, was like something out of science fiction to me, dominated by what looked like an enormous flight desk covered with a spectacular configuration of little knobs and a sheer glass internal window overlooking a sound booth in which headphones hung from microphone stands, leads trailed everywhere and the Edge’s guitars were racked up along one wall. Lights flashed on and off, visual displays showing vertical green bars of dots jumping up and down in time to the music crashing from the two biggest speakers I had ever seen, the sound so rich and deep it made the hairs stand up on my neck. I had never heard anything like this before. The Edge’s lush guitar lines cascaded from the speakers like sheet lightning. Adam’s basslines were sleek and silvery. Larry’s drums an echoey, piledriving force field. And Bono. I think he was worried back then that his vocal frailty would be exposed in the studio. He was a frontman more than he was a singer. It was his passion, his life force, that drew people in but, technically at least, he wasn’t going to win any singing prizes. His range was limited, his tone stretched and often thin. But context is everything. Under Steve Lillywhite’s inspired production, Bono’s voice was a vulnerable, emotive shimmer that swam through the songs, lending color and character, while Edge’s waves of guitar provided dynamic focus. The band seemed to have made an incredible leap forward in the studio, ironing out any rough edges.

  They were all lounging around, listening to this playback mix with considerable satisfaction. It transpired that many of their established live favorites (such as “Cartoon World,” “Silver Lining,” “The Speed of Life,” “The Dream Is Over,” “Jack in the Box”) were not being recorded for the album.

  “So what’s going to happen to them?” I asked.

  “Gone forever,” smiled Bono.

  “Whoosh!” said the Edge, as if watching their old material disappear at high speed over the horizon.

  I felt a tug of nostalgia for this music that had meant so much to me over the last couple of years, never to be heard again. “That’s the past,” said Bono. “We’re looking to the future now. I’m already thinking about the next album. I’ve got a head full of songs that haven’t even been written yet.”

  “The way you go, they’ll never be written,” Edge joked. Bono seemed to have a reluctance to commit his onstage extemporizing to paper. I have a sheaf of old lyric sheets that I once badgered Bono into writing out for me in ballpoint, in big schoolboyish handwriting. “Stories for Boys,” already a live favorite recorded for their debut EP, concluded with the note: “NB: pop stars, bionic men soon to be featured in verse 3, as yet unknown.” The sheet for “Speed of Life” just said “P.T.O.” On the other side Bono had written “It’s gone.”

  As the evening progressed, I picked up an acoustic guitar to play the first song I had composed entirely on my own, entitled, prosaically, “I Wrote This Song.” My ability on the guitar was minimal. I knew only three chords and this song included all of them (for the record they were G, E minor and C). My strumming was restricted to a leaden downbeat but it was a sweet little number that did not need much adornment.

  I don’t know any real songs

  ’Cause I don’t know what’s real

  But I wrote this song

  And I don’t know any love songs

  ’Cause I’ve never been in love

  But I wrote this song

  And it won’t stop the leaves from burning

  Won’t stop the light from turning blue

  It won’t stop the rain from falling

  But take this song

&nbs
p; ’Cause I wrote this song

  For you

  Bono was effusive in his praise, which meant a lot to me, but expressed astonishment when I told him I didn’t see this song fitting into my plans for Yeah! Yeah! I laid it all out. We intended to start out with bright, poppy material aimed at winning over a large commercial audience before introducing more complex and personal work as we progressed, taking the audience with us step by step. This was the way the Beatles had done it, after all.

  Bono was horrified. “Oh no!” he declared, with a sudden burst of passion. “You’ve always got to do the very best, just play the best stuff you can.”

  Ah, what did he know? The peculiar thing is that, as much as I loved U2 and felt convinced they had what it took to become a successful international rock band, I seriously doubted whether they would ever trouble the singles charts. And that is where I saw Yeah! Yeah! heading. I wanted the mass audience. Given the obvious commercial limitations of their high artistic principles, U2 could perhaps reach the level of playing arenas (if they were lucky) but I had my eye set on stadiums. Fuck it. I wanted the planet.

  In my mind’s eye it was already real to me. This was my plot for the eighties. I would get a major record deal and release a classic debut album of teen-angst pop that would delight critics and teenyboppers alike. My band’s first three albums would be melodic, punchy, meaningful and, most of all, commercial. We would make a couple of films that would be the finest synthesis of rock and cinema since Hard Day’s Night. I was already working on the script for one of these, a story about the meaning of life, the universe and everything, based on an obscure science-fiction novel by Kilgore Trout entitled Venus on a Half Shell. My main concern was how to turn the banjo-playing hero into a four-piece rock ’n’ roll band. I had George Lucas, fresh from his Star Wars triumphs, penciled in as director. At the height of our success we would astound the world by producing a daring, innovative album that would be to the eighties what Sgt. Pepper’s was to the sixties. A new hi-fi system would have to be built to cater to this recording revolution, which would mix multichoice visuals with Sensurround sound. We would follow it up with an on-the-road album mixing live work with studio demos, rehearsals and other off-the-cuff recordings. Critics would write theses about the meaning of my increasingly convoluted lyrics while pop magazines would worry about how weird we were becoming. We would break up acrimoniously, sending suicide rates soaring. My long-time lover, Nastassja Kinski, would leave me and I would retreat to the studio to work out my pain in a solo outing to rival Blood on the Tracks. At the end of the decade, the group would triumphantly re-form to play a concert to be broadcast live all over the world from the first moon station. I would be knighted.