Killing Bono

by Neil McCormick

  And as the musical representative of Britain’s biggest-selling broadsheet, I got to meet, well, pretty much everybody I ever wanted to meet (and a few others besides), from Aaliyah to Warren Zevon (and all points on the alphabet in between).

  I never met Kurt Cobain or Tupac Shakur (both dead by the time I was getting started) and I haven’t yet met Madonna, Michael Jackson, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Eminem or even, for that matter, Robbie Williams (I must be the only person in the British music business who hasn’t met Robbie, but it’s not as if I am holding my breath). On the other hand, I got drunk in a bar with Debbie Harry (still my beating heart). And we got along famously, once we had got over my impertinent comments about her appearance. “Fuck you, you fucker!” were, as I recall, Debbie’s words to me when I suggested that she might have put on a little weight since the years when her portrait used to adorn my wall. “There are chubby-chasers in the world too, you know!” she added, laughing richly. And I had dinner with Elton John, David Beckham, Posh Spice and Lulu on the same night. Actually, that was at an album launch, where I staggered in from my drunken encounter with Debbie and sat at the wrong table by mistake. But they were very gracious about it. Elton didn’t know who I was but chatted away happily and, I am told, later inquired who was the handsome fellow in the shaggy jumper (an item of punk-rock clothing I had worn in Debbie’s honor).

  And I went shopping with Michael Stipe in L.A. We were sitting in the sun, sipping cappuccinos, when Daryl Hannah stopped and said hello, engaging the rock superstar in friendly, frothy chat. “That was such an L.A. moment,” said Michael, afterward. “I’ve never met her before in my life.”

  And Mick Jagger bought me champagne in Cannes. And I was served by a butler in Sting’s garden. And a Sugababe sat on my knee at a P-Diddy party in Barcelona. And I bumped into Boy George in a crowded square in Shanghai, where he hugged me and said I wrote the nicest things anyone had ever written about him, then spent the next twelve hours trying to seduce me (admonishing me for my habit of saying “Fuck me!” to express surprise, he declared, “If you say that once more, I’m going to have to take you up on it”). And Bob Geldof invited me to his fiftieth birthday. It was fancy dress. “You can come as a cunt,” he told me. “Then you won’t need a costume.” And a Beatle once rang me at home.

  “Paul called,” said Gloria when I got home one evening.

  “Paul who?” I said.

  “I don’t know; he just said his name was Paul,” said Gloria. I ran through all the Pauls I knew but she insisted it was none of them. “I’m sure you know him, though,” she said. “His voice was very familiar.”

  The mystery was solved when he called back. “Can I speak to Neil McCormick?” said a warm, lightly Liverpool-accented voice.

  “You’re speaking to him,” I said.

  “Well, you’re speaking to Paul McCartney,” said my caller.

  “Gosh! Hello, Paul!” I declared.

  “You believe me, then?” said Paul.

  “Yeah, why not?” I said.

  “Usually I have to spend the first half-hour convincing whoever I’ve called that it’s me,” he explained. He had obtained my number from his press officer. He wanted to thank me personally for an article I had written about the Beatles’ songwriting partnership. I had argued that it was silly to talk (as so many critics did) about Lennon or McCartney. It’s Lennon and McCartney. “I could never say those things, but what you wrote expressed exactly how I feel,” he told me. So while I had him on the phone I bombarded him with Beatles questions, which he gracefully answered. And it couldn’t have been too painful, because actually he rang me several times. It got to the stage where the kids were putting their hands over the receiver and yelling, “It’s that Paul McCartney on the phone again!”

  I think I have been a kind critic. Which is not to say I haven’t occasionally mocked and denigrated people’s creative efforts (I prefer to write about music I appreciate but when a major star releases a new recording it is part of my remit to say what I honestly think about it); and I have certainly attacked those aspects of the business I find most abhorrent, such as the overcommitting of resources to cynically contrived, lowest-common-denominator manufactured pap. But I hope I brought to my music journalism a sense that music is created by people, and that whether it is to my taste or not, I believe most people try to do the best they can. Even musicians.

  And I discovered David Gray. Well, I was the first national U.K. journalist to champion his cause, anyway, when White Ladder was still on his own kitchen-sink label, before he signed it over to East West and went on to sell some five million albums worldwide, perhaps the greatest word-of-mouth success in the history of the music business. David had been making music for over a decade to little avail, having been dropped by three different labels. I was so impressed with his homemade album, I got a number for his record label, called up, identified myself and asked if it would be possible to set up an interview with David Gray.

  “This is David Gray!” said the excited voice on the other line.

  David’s long struggle for recognition has made him the Patron Saint of Lost Causes. His name has become synonymous with the triumph of talent over hype, personifying the battles of the little guy against the big, brutal industry machine. He has been lauded as an example of how Talent and Perseverance (those twin watchwords I once spouted as a mantra before my perseverance finally ran its course) can sometimes result in triumph. But David said something that really struck home for me, words I have passed along to many a struggling artist: “I’ve been chewed up, spat out and through it all have come to some sort of wisdom,” he claimed. “I don’t blame the music industry. Although there’s gross incompetence on all levels, and I’m sure that talent by the bucketload gets crushed and thrown by the wayside, I’ve come to realize that the buck stops with you as the artist. Unless you’ve got huge amounts of money and the force to manufacture success, what you’ve actually created has to convince people of its own accord.”

  And so mostly, despite my initial reservations, I enjoyed my time as a music journalist. Mostly. I have to admit that there were occasions when a sense of envy or resentment would well up.

  Like when some pop star who had a cowriting credit by dint of sitting in a studio chipping in the odd idea while teams of established professionals assembled their record would start talking to me (me!) about the craft of songwriting. “Listen up,” I wanted to say to Natalie and Samantha and Mel, “I know more about the pain and beauty and goddamn art (not craft!) of songwriting than you could possibly imagine.” But I had to keep my peace. Because they had hits. And I had a bunch of old demos rejected by the same record companies who turned them into stars.

  Or when some joker whose looks and luck had carried them way beyond where their talent truly warranted started complaining about how hard it was to be famous. “Come on,” I wanted to scream at Gavin and Dolores and Simon, “you got more than you ever deserved, so fucking make the most of it.” But I couldn’t say anything. Because they had it. And I hadn’t. And that is all that counted.

  Or when the dread subject of Destiny reared its ugly head. And some star who had everything they ever wanted started talking about how it was meant to be. Did they really believe that shit? I mean, was it really and truly fatalistically inevitable that Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan would someday top the charts? And that I would be sitting in other people’s hotel suites, listening to the inane drivel of lucky dopes with half my talent?

  Not that I was bitter. Oh no. But whenever anyone, no matter how genuinely, supremely, indisputably talented they might be, started talking as if their fame was preordained, I wanted to turn off the tape recorder and say, “Listen, buddy, let me share with you an open secret, spoken freely in the streets but never even whispered in the corridors of power: it’s a big world out there and sometimes, despite all of your best efforts, events get out of your control.”

  I once met Rob Dickens at an awards ceremony. He was no longer head of
WEA, yet remained one of the most significant individuals in the British music business. But in my private realm of demonology Dickens was the number-one monster. His dismissal of my band had been so cruelly arbitrary. I had never forgotten that Bill Drummond told me his boss had refused to even listen to our music before tearing up our contract. A mutual acquaintance introduced us. And then promptly froze as she realized what she had done.

  “You dropped my band from your label,” I said to him, as we shook hands.

  “You’ll have to remind me,” he said, smirking. “I’ve dropped a lot of bands.”

  “Shook Up!” I said.

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “Bill Drummond’s lot. Well you never made it, did you? So I was right.”

  The fucker! I wanted to headbutt him right there, break his nose and leave him bleeding on the floor, maybe kick him while he was down, so he could see how it felt. But I thought it would probably be conduct unbecoming of a representative of the Daily Telegraph. So I just smiled and let go of his hand.

  We could have made it. I still believe that. I just think it would have required a bit more imagination than by-the-numbers industry guys like Rob Dickens have ever displayed.

  So anyway, after all these years writing a newspaper column and consorting with the great and the good of the music business, I’m often asked who is the most famous person I’ve ever met. It always feels like a trick question. I could say Dylan but I just stood next to him once. And Paul McCartney is pretty famous, but we’ve only talked on the telephone. The truth is, the most famous person I have ever met is a guy I first got to know in school in Dublin when I was fourteen years old.

  I ran into Bono again in May 1996, at a funeral. Bill Graham had died of a heart attack, aged just forty-four, his years of heavy drinking having taken a lethal toll. I went back to Howth to pay my last respects to a man who had been a mentor to so many of us, the best rock journalist ever to have come out of Ireland by a country mile, the man who discovered U2 when really there was not much to discover, and befriended them, believed in them, guided them, challenged and inspired them. But he inspired a lot of other people besides, myself included. The small band of brothers and sisters that put Hot Press together back in those early days are bound together forever by a shared history of long nights of music, laughter and fucking hard work keeping Ireland safe for rock ’n’ roll. I had spoken to Bill during a visit to Dublin shortly after landing the Telegraph job. He had been full of encouragement (after he got over asking me to return a record he loaned me over fifteen years before—when it came to music, Bill never forgot anything). I remember thinking it was good to know that I could draw on his incredible musical resources. If I was ever stuck for an idea, I could call Bill and just listen to his rambling discources. Bill was a gushing river of ideas and insights; you could spin entire articles out of the tributaries of his conversation.

  But it was not to be. We would never again have the pleasure of his rich, wild, kind and frequently rather inebriated company. Bill was gone.

  He received an incredible sending off in a funeral as eccentric as the man himself. The entire Irish music business seemed to have come to pay tribute and it was standing-room-only in Howth Church, an enormous, Victorian-era graybrick monstrosity overlooked by gargoyles in the center of the village. A weave of fiddles and guitars from folk band Altan welcomed us in. Maire Ni Bhraoinain of Clannad filled the rafters with her soft, ethereal voice as she sang a mournful Gaelic lament before the Gospel reading. But it was not an unduly somber occasion. I still chuckle whenever I think of the parish priest receiving an offertory gift from Liam Mackey, the priest standing there in all his fine robes in front of the altar solemnly holding a copy of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew above his head (the psychedelic cover of which features a naked black woman with prominent breasts). During Communion, Bono sang Leonard Cohen’s elegaic “Tower of Song” from the balcony, with backing from the Edge and members of Altan. Gavin Friday sang Dylan’s “Death Is Not the End.” And then Simon Carmody of the Irish trash-rock band the Golden Horde gave a plaintive, shaky, solo rendition of New York Doll Johnny Thunder’s “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory” while Bono, Edge, Gavin Friday, Niall Stokes, Liam Mackey and another old friend, John Stephenson, carried the coffin into the bright sunlight. That was the hardest moment. I suppose we all thought of ourselves as young and were still getting used to the very notion of mortality among our contemporaries. A few of us made the trip out to Fingal Cemetery, where Bill’s coffin was laid into the ground to the lonely strains of a jazz trumpet.

  Afterward, as tradition dictated, there was a wake in the Royal Hotel in Howth. I was trying to comfort a highly emotional Liam Mackey, when Bono and Ali sat down at our table. It had been a long time since I had seen them, but no words were spoken about that. Edge joined us. And Gavin. And we toasted Bill. “He was not an ordinary man,” said Bono. “He made so many connections he could introduce you to yourself. I’m so glad I knew him. I’m really going to miss hearing that tuba of a voice, like a whole brass section in your ear at four o’clock in the morning.”

  The afternoon dragged on with stories and drink, as these occasions must, and a small ragged band of us found ourselves still toasting him late into the night, in the Dublin club Lillie’s Bordello. I don’t remember at what stage Bono made his farewells but I do remember talking to him about my little sister, Louise, who was the latest member of the McCormick family to have become involved with U2. She had been employed as an assistant engineer on sessions recording B-sides for the Achtung Baby album and got along with Bono so well he started using her to record his personal demos. Louise had been a fan of U2 since the earliest recordings. At the age of thirteen she played my copy of Boy over and over, until even I was in danger of getting sick of it. But she had a great equanimity about her, and took employment by her teen idol in her stride. Louise had been very quiet around the studio, apparently, and it was a while before she even mentioned that she was related to Ivan, Stella and me. “Where would U2 be without the McCormicks?” Bono joked.

  “I often wonder where I would be without U2,” I replied. “Probably a fuck sight better off.”

  “Ah, don’t be like that, Neil,” said Bono.

  “You know, I’ve got my own column in Britain’s biggest-selling broadsheet newspaper, with a nice little picture of me on top,” I pointed out. “I’ve got more than a million readers, so they tell me. The BBC send camera crews around to my office whenever there’s a breaking music story. My granny got all excited ’cause she saw me on the six o’clock news. I’m a regular guest on half a dozen radio shows and, if you get up early enough in the morning, you might see me on the couch on breakfast TV. And still I feel like a failure. It’s ridiculous. I never got the kind of fame I always wanted but under almost any other circumstances I would probably be the most famous person to have come out of my class at school, at least. But I had to go to school with you!”

  “You’re not the only one of my friends who complains about how hard it is knowing me,” said Bono, smiling.

  “Everybody’s got their dragons to slay,” I grumbled.

  “Yeah, but you’ve got to kill Bono!” chuckled Bono. This notion seemed to amuse him greatly. “That’s it! You’ve got to kill me,” he laughed. “It’s for your own good! And mine!”

  “I don’t begrudge you a thing,” I said. “I think you got everything you deserved. What I worry about is: does that mean I got what I deserved too?”

  We started to establish a new relationship after that, a mixture of the personal and professional. My music column provided an excuse to stay in touch. I could ring Bono for quotes and comments without feeling like I was hanging on his coattails. The rise of the mobile phone also meant there was a number where I could leave a message for him personally, anywhere in the world, without having to go through a retinue of assistants. And he started calling me a little more often, whenever something brought me to mind.

  Like when U2 decided to call the
ir next album Pop.

  “I don’t believe it,” I scoffed. “How many times have you told me you don’t make pop music?”

  “I’ve grown to like the word pop,” he laughed. “That pop thing you’ve always been into, I used to think it was a term of abuse. I didn’t realize how cool it was. It’s the grown-ups who called it pop music. And now we’ve all grown up. Some more than others!”

  We were talking about the meaning of pop, when he went off to fetch a dictionary from his shelves. “I’ve got a great definition of pop,” he insisted. “Let me see. Pox. Practice. Pram. Prant. Prang. God, all my words! Pratfall. Preach. Prayer rug. Hold on, I’m past it. Here we go. P-o…POP. Pop, poppy, pop. To make or cause to make a light, sharp explosive sound. Isn’t that great? Or how about: an informal word for father. I like that, I like that a lot.” He idly continued his amble through the dictionary. “Popcorn. And then pope. That’s my favorite. Pop is the Pope after he’s dropped an e. I’m gonna get a T-shirt made up: ‘Pop John Paul II.’ ”

  “How about ‘Pop John Paul George and Ringo’?” I suggested.

  Bono referred to these chats as “our ongoing dialogue.” We had lunch one day and talked, just for a change, about God. “Religion is responsible for a lot of bad things that have happened in the world,” Bono admitted after one of my more stinging critiques. “But I have to say, it’s probably done a lot of good things too. It’s sort of politically incorrect but if you look around you, at practical things missionaries have achieved in some of the toughest areas of the world, hospitals and schools in Nicaragua and Calcutta, well, I don’t want to be the defender of religion, but if I had to be, I probably could. Apart from the odd Spanish Inquisition.”

  Afterward, we rambled around a labyrinth-like bookshop. When we were leaving, he handed me a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You.

  I laughed, but I was flattered. “Do you still think there’s hope for me?”

  “There’s always hope,” said Bono.