Killing Bono

by Neil McCormick

  You see, I was still convinced that I would make it. It was just taking a bit longer than planned, that’s all.

  I had a chilling moment while sitting with Yeah! Yeah!’s old drummer, Leo Regan, in a pub in Kilburn (an area of London known by locals as the twenty-eighth county of Ireland). Leo still walked with a limp from our accident, a physical disability that (following a stint playing stand-up drums with a hugely popular rockabilly trio named Those Handsome Devils) had eventually curtailed his musical career. Leo received a substantial insurance payout and had done some traveling around the world, during which he developed an interest in photography. He surfaced in England to do a course at the London College of Printing, and became the latest emigrant to move into our flat.

  Anyway, Leo had come up with the idea of doing a photo feature for Hot Press on London’s Irish community, which was a good excuse to trawl around drinking pints of Guinness in every watering hole in Kilburn. I was interviewing a publican, when our attention was drawn to a wrinkled old fat man sitting at the bar, chuckling away to himself.

  “Are you Irish, yourself?” asked Leo.

  “Oh, I am, yes, indeed,” chuckled the old fella in a thick Galway accent.

  “When did you leave Ireland?” asked Leo.

  “I came over to London in 1952 for a game of soccer and I never went back,” said the old man. He began to tell us how he played for the Galway Rovers and emigrated on the promise of a professional football career that never materialized. He was twenty-six then. He was sixty-three now. And he had never returned home. But he was adamant that he would be going back someday. “I never signed anything!” he insisted.

  “What do you mean, you never signed anything?” I asked.

  “Oh, I signed the dole, all right, but I never pledged allegiance to the Queen!” declared the old man. He supped from his pint of bitter. The Guinness was too expensive for him these days. “I’ll go back someday, I will,” he said. “Oh yeah, I’ll go back.”

  “That’s you in another forty years,” said Leo as we left the pub. I didn’t laugh. The thought had already occurred to me. I was in danger of turning into the character from the beautiful old Irish ballad “The Mountains of Mourne”:

  Oh Mary, this London’s a wonderful sight

  With people here working by day and by night

  They don’t sow potatoes, nor barley, nor wheat

  But there’s gangs of them digging for gold in the street

  At least when I asked them that’s what I was told

  So I just took a hand at this digging for gold

  But for all that I found there I might as well be

  Where the mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea

  Joan left, traveling to Australia. I had driven her away and I was sick with myself. Joan was beautiful and she was funny and she loved me totally, unreservedly, hopelessly. And I…didn’t know what I wanted. Just something else, something different. I worried that I would never feel anything more than I felt for her but I was afraid of going through life without finding out for sure. Our relationship was all push and pull but those last few months together had been weirdly harmonious. Once Joan posed a solution to my commitment dilemma by telling me she was leaving, all problems between us evaporated. We spent the summer of 1986 like a young couple tenderly in love. Then, one day in October, I accompanied her to Heathrow Airport. Joan was in tears. We kissed good-bye at the departure gate. Then she turned. And she was gone. Out of my life. And it was as if a huge wave of nausea came rolling down the airport concourse and blasted through my body. I found myself staggering from the shockwave of emotion, dazed and bewildered, a cold sweat prickling my skin. I lurched into the public toilets and just made it to a sink to throw my guts up. A toilet attendant stared at me with reproach as I wiped the vomit from my lips.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. And I was sorry. Truly, truly sorry. But not for him.

  That night I wrote a song, which was the way I always dealt with my emotions. It was called “Fool for Pain.”

  Your disappearance moves through me like a tenant

  Touching all the things you left behind

  Whispering your name for my penance

  Leaving fingerprints on all I thought was mine

  So this is what it means to be free

  And all my independence was in vain

  How could you be a fool for me

  When I’m such a fool for pain?

  All alone, I know there’s something missing

  I fill the space but the emptiness remains

  It tugs my mind, like the sound of gas escaping

  Fool for Pain

  On the phone, the sound of heavy breathing

  It’s just mine, there’s no way to explain

  I wanted you to go…till you were leaving

  Fool for Pain

  Can there be any greater art form than the song for exorcising a feeling? It’s poetry with melody to fill in all those spaces that words can’t touch. But surely songs need to be released into the world to work their magic? Mine were becoming congested inside the studio of my own mind, turning cancerous.

  Bono phoned one day to tell me he had just written a song. He was full of the excitement of the creation, bubbling over with the need to share. “You know how you are always saying U2 don’t write real songs? Well, I think we’ve cracked it,” he said. “I think we’ve written a real, classic song.”

  “What’s it called?” I asked.

  “ ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,’ ” said Bono.

  “Great title,” I admitted.

  He proceeded to sing to me down the phone line. “I have climbed highest mountains / I have run through the fields / Only to be with you…/ I have run, I have crawled, I have scaled these city walls / These city walls / Only to be with you…/ But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

  It gave me a chill. How could Bono know what was going on in my head? After all, he was the man with everything. Fame, riches, love, faith, creative fulfillment. But as for me, I was still searching.

  You might have thought that Ivan and I would have given up by now. Surely any sane person would know that it was over? We had shot our bolt. We had exhausted all avenues of inquiry. But we had each other to sustain our mutual madness, talking up the notion that what did not kill us could only make us stronger and that talent would win out in the end. We even took rejection as a kind of perverse encouragement, rationalizing that we had learned a great deal along the way, improving as musicians and growing as people. And we were still young and free and without responsibilities. The future was ours. And the prize would be all the sweeter when it came.

  We had other encouragement, too, to keep us hanging on. We were told that Clive Davis, the legendary head of Arista in the U.S., had taken an interest in our demos. The problem he identified was the lack of that all-important first single, the unstoppable hit that seemed to us to be the Holy Grail of an A&R community too timid and unimaginative to trust the artists themselves. Have you ever wondered why so many manufactured bands are launched with cover versions? Because the songs have already been hits. They are tried and tested. Even George Martin wanted the Beatles to record a cover version as their second single, before John and Paul, stung at the implicit criticism of their songwriting, delivered “Please Please Me” and unleashed Beatle-mania.

  Ivan and I decided to do something we should have done years before: record and release our own single. We had been too precious about our songs. Because we aspired to state-of-the-art pop, which is an expensive business, we had spurned the idea of releasing anything that was less than perfect. Now we wanted something that at least acknowledged our existence, some kind of testament to years spent making music. We wanted something we could actually hold in our hands and play on our record decks. As usual, there was one overriding problem. We had no money.

  Our agent, Barry Campbell, stepped in. Barry was basically a small-time, hardworking hustler, who cheerfully admitted
to being no more knowledgeable about the machinations of the big-time music business than we were. But, in exchange for a management contract, he was prepared to put his money where our mouths were and frankly we had no one else to turn to. He would pay for the recording and arrange its release on an independent label he was in the process of setting up. We shook hands on a budget figure of £4,000 and while contracts were drawn up we booked three days at Terminal studios in Elephant and Castle.

  Vlad came back on board as producer and bassist. Steve returned to play drums. We got hold of a new keyboard player through Melody Maker. Richard Ford was a young television repairman and a brilliant, highly technical musician. The only problem being that he lived hundreds of miles away in Yorkshire, which was costing us a fortune in petrol money. It was a round trip of 500 miles just to rehearse.

  The song we chose was “Invisible Girl.” It had been a live favorite but it was, for us, an unusually subtle track, with a lovely, gentle groove and a rich, melancholic melody. The lyrical topic (in typical Shook Up! fashion) was child abuse—inspired by a news story in which a victim of abuse had complained that no one ever listened to her—and it included the striking phrase “We are the silent children / We speak but no one listens.” The sentiment seemed to draw audiences in. A young woman came up to me after one show, crying and desperate to talk about “Invisible Girl.” “I’m the girl in the song,” she kept saying.

  Work at Terminal studios was laborious. Hours were spent just fine-tuning the drum sounds. Making records is like assembling a sonic puzzle, and we were still painstakingly slotting the first pieces into place when Barry called. He seemed oddly nervous as he related a long, involved saga about a promoter in Eastern Europe who had ripped him off for a considerable amount of money.

  “That’s terrible,” I said, wondering what any of this had to do with me.

  “The thing is, Neil, I find myself stuck between a rock and a hard place,” he said.

  I did not like the sound of where this was going. “What exactly is the problem?” I said.

  “I don’t have the money to pay for the studio,” he admitted. “I’m going to have to pull out.”

  What is the deal here? You must surely be wondering the same thing as I was. Just what is the fucked-up deal with the mismanagement of this godless universe? I mean, did somebody really have it in for me up there?

  “You can’t pull out,” I said. “It’s too late to stop now.” What a joke. We should have stopped years before.

  “I’m sorry,” said Barry. “That’s just the way it is.”

  Of course it was. Why would I have expected anything else?

  I whispered the news to Ivan. We had a hushed confab. It would have cost us at least half the amount to stop recording there and then, so we elected not to confess our sudden insolvency. While Vlad and the musicians worked on oblivious, Ivan rushed around behind the scenes, begging from various allies and associates. His close friend Martin Lupton, a trainee doctor from a well-to-do background, came up with £1,000. Leo, who still had some money left from his insurance settlement, came up with another £1,000. A phone call to our long-suffering dad in Ireland delivered the rest. By the time it came to mixing, a day or so later, we had the money to pay for everything, and a string of IOU notes hanging over our heads.

  Ah, but when we listened to the playback, it was all worth it. “Invisible Girl” did not sound like a demo. Plush and full and crystal clear, sweet and sad and dreamy, it sounded like the real thing, a proper record. But it was a record that did not have a home.

  There was one call I could make, however. One favor I had always been reluctant to ask. I went back to Ireland, to see Bono.

  U2 were ensconced in a studio off St. Stephen’s Green, working on mixes and B-sides for their new album. Everybody was there. Bono, Edge, Adam, Larry. Even Paul McGuinness. The playback snatches I heard were astonishing: tough and dark and muscular, burning with emotion. They had made another bold creative leap and at its forefront was Bono’s voice, tearing his way through the band’s wall of sound. The gap between U2 live and U2 on record had always been the gap between the Edge and Bono. Now they had come together with a vengeance.

  “What do you think?” said Bono, his secret smile telling me that he already knew.

  “I’m speechless,” I said.

  “That makes a change,” said Edge.

  Bono and I retired to the studio’s recreation room where we sat together while I explained the situation to him. I pointed out that he had really gone to bat for Cactus World News and In Tua Nua, among other Dublin bands, making calls to record-company bosses to press their cases. I had never asked him for anything like that. But I reminded him that he once offered to put a single out for us on Mother and I wanted to know if his offer still stood? “I don’t want to put you on the spot,” I said. “But we really need a break.”

  Bono explained that all decisions concerning Mother were made by five people: the members of U2 and their manager. Decisions had to be unanimous. Each person effectively had a veto. “I don’t want to fall out with you about this,” he said, “so you have to understand the process.”

  “We’re not going to fall out,” I promised.

  “Let’s take a listen, then,” said Bono, slipping the tape into the rec-room stereo.

  “Invisible Girl” came gliding out of the speakers, sweet and melodic. It was a million miles removed from the dark-hewn rock we had just been listening to.

  “Pop music,” Bono noted with a warm smile.

  “Everything is pop music,” I said.

  “Leave it with me,” said Bono.

  As I got up to go, Adam came into the room. “Nice groove,” he observed.

  “Well, thank you, Adam,” I said with genuine delight. I felt as if the weight of the world was lifting off my shoulders. Everything was going to work out fine.

  My younger sister, Louise, had left school the previous year and got a job in a recording studio, apparently unperturbed by the fact that her brothers were pretty much a walking advertisement for everything that was wrong with the music business. She was following a much more practical course than we ever did, however. She studied musical engineering and now had the run of the Lab studio, a small 8-track in Dublin. With time on our hands, Ivan and I availed of this facility. In the absence of a band, we opted to record some of our less poppy, acoustic-oriented material, offbeat songs that we always imagined would provide us with a future folky sideline. The titles might give you some idea about my general state of mind: “King of the Dead,” “Buried Alive,” “Heaven Bent,” “Fool for Pain” and “This House Is Condemned.” My lyrical bent was becoming ever so slightly twisted.

  A couple of days later, I got a call to meet up with Bono in a pub close to where U2 were rehearsing. We sat in a dark recess and ordered a couple of pints. Bono was tapping the table, thoughtfully.

  “The answer’s no,” he suddenly announced.

  I was incredulous but I bit my tongue. I had made enough enemies with my outspoken reactions to criticism and rejection. I was determined not to fall out with Bono over this.

  “You knew the deal,” he said. “I don’t want to say who voted against; it’s not important, because if one says no then we all say no—that’s the way it works. All I can tell you is it got vetoed.”

  I didn’t say anything. I sipped from my pint and digested this latest rejection, perhaps the cruelest rejection of all because it was delivered by a friend.

  “The thing about it is, Neil, it’s pop music,” said Bono. “I don’t think we understand pop music. It’s not what we’ve ever been about. So there it is. Are you gonna be OK with that?”

  “Yeah, I’m OK,” I said.

  Two American girls were hovering conspicuously at the corner of our table. They took the silence that had fallen as an invitation to speak.

  “Are you the Bono?” asked one.

  Bono laughed, relieved by this absurd distraction. “Yes, I am the Bono!” he admitted.
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br />   “Can we have your autograph?”

  “Of course,” he said, scrawling his moniker on the proffered piece of paper. The girls weren’t quite done yet, though. They nervously pushed the piece of paper toward me. “Are you the Edge?”

  “Sign the girl’s paper, Edge,” teased Bono.

  So I signed. “God bless—the Edge.” It was probably as close to the trappings of fame as I was ever going to come.

  Seventeen

  There was an opening gala for something or other, a big club-night launch. I was used to attending such occasions, blagging my way in to album launches and showcases as a representative of Hot Press. I would spend half my time filling my pockets with hors d’oeuvres and tucking a couple of bottles of wine into my jacket to take home to our impoverished household. But this was a very big do and, for some reason, my name was not on the guest list. “There must be a mistake,” I insisted. “Look again.” But the hatchet-faced bouncer was having none of it. He pushed me, protesting loudly, back into the huge crowd pressed up against the red ropes that separated the VIP guests from the gawking public. Spotlights arced through the cold night air. I really wanted to get inside, where the action was, and hopefully scanned the invitees for a familiar face. Which is when a white stretch limo pulled up and, amid popping flashes, the four members of U2 climbed out, waving to the crowd. As luck would have it, they were going to walk right past where I was standing. I waved. But everyone was waving. Adam, Larry and Edge trooped down the red carpet, acknowledging the applause, with Bono taking up the rear.