So . . . did he find you pious?
I wish I could live the life of someone you could describe as pious. I couldn’t preach because I couldn’t practice. It’s plain to see I’m not a good advertisement for God. Artists are selfish people.
2. NEVER TRUST A PERFORMER
It’s hard to say that we saw the sun setting on that day, for the light had remained unchanged since my arrival. The mood had become so peaceful we might as well have started working on a jigsaw puzzle by the fireplace. If there is an overused word in music writing and writing about art in general, it is “inspiration.” Since U2’s music has spiritual overtones, it’s often been called “inspired” or “inspirational.” It’s a myth I’ve often bought into myself, and I wondered what Bono makes of it after all these years. Was he still buying into it himself or was he ready to debunk that notion? Regardless, he was eager to puncture the myth of celebrity.
I never believed in channeling spirits, but I have always had this very naive idea that some musicians are actually able to hear voices.
Yeah, but you want to be careful who you’re listening to. That’s all I’d say. [laughs] But, you know, you’re right, the world demands to be described, and so, painters, poets, journalists, pornographers, and sitcom writers, by accident or by design, are just following orders, whether from high or low, to describe the world they’re in.
So you’re suggesting that the ideas that come to you are often cheap ideas, not even thought out?
That’s right. In fact, often, the music that’s the most eloquent is the least serious. That’s the thing that intellectuals don’t like. Think of the music of the seventies. It’s become a kind of folk music now. The music in the seventies that lasted was a lot of the pop and the dance and disco music. And the supposed serious music of the seventies, fusion, progressive rock, et cetera, played by so-called great musicians, has dated so badly. You are right, Michka. The soul will be described, but God might not use the people that you expect.
Where does it come from? Do you start hearing a melody?
Yeah, I would hear some melodies in my head. I have no idea where they come from.
With the words?
Sometimes melodies, and sometimes words . . . [gets up and comes back with a tiny sheet of yellow paper from a Post-it pad on his desk]
What’s this? Is it something that you’ve just written down?
I’m trying to find a recent example. This is the middle of last night. Apropos of nothing. [reads] If your heart was hard, that would be better/ You could only break it once or twice/After that it would be rid of blood and you could let it turn to ice . . . I don’t know. [makes a dubious face]
Not bad . . .
Yes . . . Whether they’re dreams or overheard conversations, I don’t know.
[laughs]
I know what you’re saying.
You’ve had that.
Yes, I’ve had that experience, in a way. Sometimes I see pictures that are greater than any pictures I have ever seen.
But you can’t get them out.
No, because I’m not a painter, and that makes me very frustrated.
That’s how I feel with melodies.
But, melodies, you do hear them, and you do have the ability to reproduce them.
Yes, it’s just that I can’t get them out, you see? Words, you can write down, but melodies are difficult because you compromise them with chords.
Yes, but you have Edge, you have the band.
Yes, but by the time I get to the band, they might have gone. [stirs his spoon inside his cup of tea] Strange . . . I haven’t done that for years.
What?
I’ve put sugar in my tea. I don’t take sugar. We keep on talking about the past, next thing I’m back there. Where were we? Oh yeah . . . melodies, I do have an ear for them. It’s like spotting a good idea, because a great idea has a lot in common with a great melody: certain inevitability, certain clarity, a kind of instant memorability. It can be philosophical or commercial, or a political idea, like Drop the Debt. As I told you before, I do think of myself as a salesman of melodies and ideas. I come from a long line of salespeople on my mother’s side.
That’s what my relatives did, going back a long way on my father’s side. They sold clothes.
Funny. That’s the rag trade, right? That’s the Jewish side. Great salespeople, the Jews . . . Someone suggested to me that my mother’s side of the family may have been Jewish. Rankin is a Jewish name. A member of the family came up with some interesting stuff researching the name.
I have to tell you this. I saw this one picture of you from when you were younger, and I was completely flabbergasted because you looked like my father.
All my mother’s side of the family have that taxi-driver-from-Tel-Aviv look.
Yes, the dark hair, or something. The first time I saw you, there was something familiar about you, like: “I’ve met this person before . . .”
You must have taken one of our cabs.
Yeah, and someone in my family sold you a pair of boots. Do you believe there’s such a thing as folk memory?
Maybe there is sort of a DNA pool. You inherit a cough or a bad back from your father or grandfather, maybe other cultural preferences, interests. Though I haven’t found myself studying the Kabbalah just yet. That said, I can lose myself in the Scriptures . . . and have well-known messianic tendencies. [laughs] It’s true I have an interest in most things Jewish. I would take it as a great compliment if I turned out to be Jewish. I’d be very flattered.
So that’s a possibility.
I don’t know, but romantically I hope it’s true.
How far back can you trace your mother’s ancestors?
They just sort of turned up at one point.
How did your parents meet?
Well, they grew up on the same street.
In the northern part of Dublin?
Yeah. A working-class area, a district called Cowtown. Cowper Street. That’s where the cattle market was. The farmers would come up from the country and bring the cattle into the city. The Dubs, as they were known, the inner-city people, would sit there with their nose turned up at the smell of cow dung, slagging off the muckers, the culchies, as the farmers were known, they’d think they were better.
What was your father’s first job?
He was taken out of school at fourteen. The Christian brothers who taught him begged my grandmother not to take him out, because he was the best student they had had in years, but he was put into civil service at fifteen, which was a safe, pensionable job. He stayed in that job until he retired. Fear was a big part of his life, fear of what might happen, what could go wrong, that was one of his dynamics. And fear, as you know, is the opposite to faith. And I’m sure he got that from his father, who had TB, or the Depression of the thirties, or whatever. TB was a source of shame years ago in Ireland. It was a poverty disease. And his father had it. Obviously a lot of people used to have it. They used to lose weight. And people wouldn’t admit to TB. So they used to weigh them at work. And my father told me that his father used to put lead in his shoes, so that when he was weighed, he didn’t give away the fact that he was dying of TB, so he could keep his job. It’s just the most disgraceful picture of where I guess Dublin and a lot of other places around Europe were, back then. But I think his aversion to risk probably came from that sense of jeopardy he grew up in.
Was he from a big family?
He had an older brother, two younger brothers, and a sister. Tommy, Leslie, Charlie, and Evelyn: the greatest people you could ever meet. Played cricket, listened to the opera. Working-class people who all broke the mold.
Did he have to support his younger brothers and sister?
Yes. That’s true, but he was a Catholic, my mother was a Protestant . . . or a Jew. [laughs] That was a big deal back in those days, because they weren’t really allowed to be married.
So they had to hide?
No, they didn’t have to hide, but their marriage was dispu
ted in some quarters and not recognized in others.
But, obviously, the area was Catholic. Why did a Protestant family like your mother’s live there?
I don’t know. There was a small Protestant community in the middle of this Catholic area. Both my mother and my father didn’t take religion seriously, they saw the absurdity of the fuss made over their union, though my mother used to bring us to chapel on Sundays and my father would wait outside. I have to accept that one of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God.
Do you still have aunts or uncles who are living on your mother’s side?
Yes I do. All my mother’s sisters and brothers are alive. And all three of my father’s brothers.
Did they look after you when your mother died?
Yes. There were two in particular: my aunt Ruth was very close to my mother, and Barbara was very close with my father.
Did they give you the warmth and support of . . .
[interrupting] No, I wasn’t available to it; I wasn’t really open to it. I was just an obnoxious teenager. Barbara was quite a romantic figure. She read books. She often interceded with my father on my behalf. And Ruth was a more practical character: the no-nonsense of the Rankins.
So they defended you if your father was too hard on you?
They all felt that my father was too hard on me: everyone agreed on that. I don’t know if he was hard enough. [laughs] Because I do think people should be hard on themselves, don’t you think? We’re in a climate of self-love, really. We’re in a climate of self-love and self-loathing.
I think you’re right. It’s the two sides of the same coin. People are obsessed with themselves: everything comes out of themselves and returns to themselves. I guess that’s the dead end of narcissism.
A degree of narcissism is necessary, I suppose, to look in the pool to see your reflection. And if you’re gonna write, that’s the excuse of writers for being selfish bastards. What about you? I mean, you don’t seem narcissistic or self-obsessed.
Sometimes not enough!
But you write. Why do you write?
Well, because I’m unable to express things in another way. I often believe that the words that come out of my mouth are not the ones I should be using. I can’t let things loose unless I’m really sure about them.
It’s maybe good.
Yes, it’s good, but sometimes it’s an excuse . . .
Oh yeah.
. . . for not putting yourself on the job.
That’s true. That’s often an excuse. You have to dare to fail. I think that’s the big one: fear of failure. I’ve never had fear of failure. Isn’t that mad?
That’s the maddest thing, but at the same time I think that’s the secret. Because you’ve never been afraid of making a fool of yourself, you’ve never been afraid of looking ridiculous. You’ve never doubted that you would make it. I was reading through this book that your friend Niall Stokes wrote, Into the Heart: The Stories Behind Every U2 Song, and he quoted this song that I had no remembrance of, I must confess, that went like: A picture in gray, Dorian Gray.*
Oh yeah, that’s fantastic!
I felt like a star . . .
I felt the world would go far if they listened to what I said. I mean, it’s ironic, and it’s got some wit, but it’s the thought that you have something to say.
I wanted you to succeed, because it was a sort of bet I’d made, but I never thought you’d make it this big. I thought you’d remain a cult favorite, like these eighties bands that you used to read about in the NME who were so proud to have street credibility.
I never had much interest in that. The sound of getting out of a ghetto is very different to the sound of getting into one. [laughs] It’s a very different sound, whether that ghetto is an intellectual one, or the place where you grew up.
But look, Bono, you came from Dublin, which was the most provincial of places. You had the English language, sure, but nobody had made it from Dublin.
Philip Lynott from Thin Lizzy. The only black man in Ireland . . . and he joins a rock band! [laughs] That’s great.
He was a big figure in the seventies, that’s true. But was he the only model you had?
Bob Geldof was an inspiration. He was from Dublin.
True, you had the Boomtown Rats. They were big. So was it because of these two figures that you thought it was possible?
You’re right in the sense that they didn’t live in Dublin, they moved. Both Phil Lynott and Bob Geldof moved to London and, in Bob’s case, colonized it. And I learnt a lot from Bob. I learnt a lot of my lip from Bob; I had a sense that the impossible was possible from him. Oddly enough, I didn’t learn about social activism from him. In fact we used to argue about it. He used to tell me that pop and rock ’n’ roll should never stray from sex and fun. Leave revolution to politicians! Right up until he had his epiphany, it was like: “It’s only rock ’n’ roll and I like it.” No, we had to find our own way. It’s true, in the end we stayed in Dublin, and it was us against the world. We weren’t gonna be part of any scene.
I had this vision of you as innocents, which you obviously weren’t. Young and coming from an innocent place and bringing your candor to a cynical place, and winning over the cynicism. Maybe it was a romantic French idea, that the beauty is to make an elegant gesture and then disappear. [Bono laughs] But what I underestimated was your hunger.
Yeah, hungry in a way that couldn’t be fed: that’s the thing. You know, I remember Adam saying to me somewhere around Rattle and Hum: “Look, we’re here now; we don’t have to try so hard,” and Ali and I were asking the same thing, actually: “Can we relax?” And I said: “Well, we can relax, but we’re about to become irrelevant any second. To be relevant is a lot harder than to be successful.” If you’re judging where we are by the fact that we can afford to buy this house, it’s a dangerous measure. I judge where we are by how close am I to the melody I’m hearing in my head, and how close are we to what we can do as a band to realizing our potential. That’s a different thing. I was unhappy . . . because I felt we were far from where we could be. We’re getting closer now. We always had the grasp, it was just the reach was the problem. It’s like a boxer with about six inches missing off his right hook, that’s what it felt like in U2 most of the time. Just occasionally, just because we were quick, our inner force would knock one of our goals out, but normally, the reach was less than the grasp.
Of course in the eighties, you thought that bands like Echo and the Bunnymen or the Teardrop Explodes were more fashionable, that the British press would praise them more than U2. Was there a time when you felt those bands were now behind you? Was it because of America?
These are great groups you’re talking about, but they had the conflict of being celebrated in their countries of origin. We weren’t a British band. We accepted the U.K.—they never fully accepted us. Because Irish people are very different to English people, actually. I love the English reserve, I love the rigor, but I think we were just kind of bleeding all over them a bit too much, too emotional, and just too in-your-face. We were hot when they were cool. We had a phrase to describe some of the bands of the time—not the Bunnymen or the Teardrop Explodes—but the ones you’d see walking down the King’s Road in London, so looking the part with so little to say: “Everything but It.” We, on the other hand, had “Nothing but It.” And that was the difference. Some of the bands really could have been contenders, but the mood of the time and media didn’t encourage thoughts of world domination like the Beatles, Stones, or even the Sex Pistols. They weren’t allowed to own up to their ambition. It was like the cultural revolution, it was like Mao. The music press just wouldn’t let you put your head above the parapet. You know, you’d have a custard pie. I thought: “Fuck, I don’t mind. I’ll be the clown, throw the pie.” Because my definition of art started with: you put your hands in under your skin, you break your breastbone, you rip open your rib cage. If you really wanna write, th
at’s what you ought to do. Are you ready to do that? Or is rock ’n’ roll for you just a pair of shoes and a haircut, or a certain sour existentialism or a certain sweet decay? That was one of my first definitions of art. Blood. That comes from Irish literature, that comes from Oscar Wilde writing De Profundis, that comes from Brendan Behan walking on the stage while his own play is being put on in front of an audience, telling people to fuck off. In Ireland, that pain of opening your rib cage, it’s in us.
That’s not just Irish, you know. There is this famous quote from Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who wrote Journey to the End of the Night: “When you write, you should put your skin on the table.”
Rock ’n’ roll is often the opposite. Rather than putting your skin on the table, it’s finding a second skin, a mask.
That’s one of the big contradictions for an outsider like me. How do you reconcile your earnestness with the need for a showbiz facade?
Never trust a performer, performers are the best liars. They lie for a living. You’re an actor, in a certain sense. But a writer is not a liar. There’s a piece of Scripture: “Know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Even as a child, I remember sitting, listening to my teacher in school talking about the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats. He had a writer’s block—there was a period where he couldn’t write. I put my hand up and said: “Why didn’t he write about that?”—“Don’t be stupid. Put your hand down, don’t be so cheeky.” But I didn’t mean it as a smart-arse. I have lived off that idea: Know the truth, the truth will set you free. If I’ve nothing to say, that’s the first line of the song. In fact, even on our second album [October], I was about having nothing to say: I try to sing this song . . . I try to stand up but I can’t find my feet / I try to speak up but only with you am I complete. This has always been the trick for me. And maybe it is just that: a trick. But it tricks me out of myself. I am able to write, always, because as a writer, I am always unable not to be true. As a performer, it isn’t always so. You know the thing that keeps me honest as a performer? The fucking high notes I have to sing. Because unless I am totally in that character, I actually can’t sing—it’s out of my range. That’s what keeps me honest on a stage. If I could perform with one step removed, I probably would. It is very costly, by the way, to go on tour and have to step into those songs every night. I suppose I’d like to be a non-Method actor.
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