Well, yes. [laughs]
Weren’t you a baron or a count?
What my friends had in mind is close to count. [laughs]
When he started the band, Larry was not even fifteen, and you were sixteen and a half. Didn’t you feel like a grown-up amused by the nerve of this kid?
It was his band. I think, for a minute, he wanted to call it the Larry Mullen Band.
What sort of music did he want to play?
He loved glam rock. That was his thing. The Larry Mullen Band wasn’t really a very glam-rock kind of a name.
It sounds like a jazz-blues band from the mid-seventies.
He was the star. When he sat behind the kit, definitely, the room changed temperature. There was something going on. He played the drums like his life depended on it. And I think, in some very real way, that was true.
And by the way, why didn’t Larry and Adam get a nickname, like you and Edge did?
I think the “Junior” [Larry Mullen, Jr.] certainly added the jazz-blues band bit. I convinced him to do that. Adam Clayton just sounds black anyway. But they had unofficial names: Larry was “Jamjar,” and Adam was “Sparky.”
So would you say Larry was the most dedicated musician of the bunch?
Edge was pretty good—I mean, no, Edge was more than good. But Larry was really impressive, I thought. Just the drum playing, the way the sound just fills the room, and the silver and the gold of the cymbals. His kit was a bright crimson. We’d never seen anything like that. I mean, we’d been playing shitty guitars.
And he had a perfect kit.
I mean, his kit was like a cheap copy.
But it looked great.
It looked great. It was bright and shiny. And he looked great behind the kit. Adam knew all the right words. He knew what to say; he had the lingo; he was [adopting ghetto voice] “down with his big bad self.” He had all the musician talk. But what we didn’t know, until a few practices, is that he could not play a note. He arrived with a bass guitar and a bass amp, and he looked incredible. He had all the gear, had all the right terminology. He looked funky, he acted funky. We didn’t realize at the time he couldn’t play a note. And so big was his bluff that we looked pretty much everywhere else to why we were sounding so shit. Him!
You mean you didn’t realize it in the first place.
Well, he was the oldest, and he looked the most professional.
On a more personal level, I have this feeling that the one you had to feel the closest to was Larry, because you shared some difficult experiences in your teenage years. He lost his sister and then his mother in those years. Was it something that helped you get closer to him?
We always kind of hit it off, actually. Then, as now, Larry does not let many people in. But when you’re in, he’s a very loyal and reliable friend. I’m a kind of a loyal and unreliable friend. But there’s nothing he would not do for you. The thing that stuck us together was that I had this experience of bereavement. I had lost my mother when I was fourteen and he had lost his when he was sixteen, and we both had to deal with fairly authoritarian fathers. As Larry would tell you himself, we both ran away with the circus. So, while the tent was being put up on the outskirts of Europe, we were still outside, and would look at the elephants, and talk a lot. We still do, on occasions.
What did you discuss the most with Larry—and wouldn’t as readily with Edge or Adam?
The moment, the now that we wouldn’t miss out on, the moment we were in, because of the place we wanted to get to in the future. Because Larry wasn’t sure about where we were going, and I wasn’t sure about where we were.
So Larry’s the first one you really got close to?
I’d say Larry and I were pretty close friends. We shared a room on tour. We were the odd couple, really, because he’s completely meticulous.
And you’re not?
I’m just not. My suitcase would just blow up, and there’d be stuff all over the floor. Larry used to bring his own sleeping bag, because he didn’t like to sleep in the sheets of these really cheap hotels. He would actually sleep in his sleeping bag up on the bed.
So he wouldn’t catch any fleas or lice?
I remember one time I slagged him off so much that he said: “OK.” He threw away the sleeping bag, and he left the sleeping bag at the bottom of the bed. He slept in the sheets. When he woke up, he was head to toe in this rose-colored rash. So people used to laugh at the two of us.
Insiders have written accounts about the tacit division from the very beginning between you, Edge and Larry, the Irish Christians, and then, on the other side, Adam and Paul McGuinness, the English skeptics, with business sense and posh backgrounds, raised by military fathers. Is this real or an invention?
Well, Adam and Edge were friends. They came from the same suburbs. They were kind of middle-class and they both had British passports. But in terms of fun and frolics, going out, drinking wine, looking sharp, and living the life, I think Paul and Adam had a lot in common. They became friends. Myself, Edge, and Larry were kind of zealots. And we were determined that the world, in all its finagling attempt to corrupt you, to take you away from where you should be going, would not get us. But it’s like that old story of the guy who’s hiding from the world by climbing up the mountain backwards. He gets halfway up the mountain. He finds a cave. He just looks left and he looks right, he looks up and he looks down, to make sure the world hasn’t followed him. Then he looks back into the cave, that’s dark and that’s quiet. Then he hears something. What’s that? It’s the world! [laughs] There’s no escape. We just didn’t know that, then. But it turns out that that’s a much more subtle threat than sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Self-righteousness, self-flagellation, these things are as dangerous as what you might call the worship of the self. At that time, we were determined that we would never change. The music business would never change us, success would never change us. But if you think about it, that’s a terrible thing. That would be awful, not to change. And of course you should be changing. Paul and Adam just wanted to have fun, and get out there, and see what the world had to offer. We knew what the world had to offer—we didn’t want to buy it. So we went in a completely different direction. But there was a lot of respect from us to them, and from them to us.
But have Paul and Adam tried to talk you out of this zealot attitude over the years? Or did they remain silent and respectful?
No, they were very respectful. I remember Paul saying, when we put out our second album, October [1981], which was a kind of religious experience of an album to make, very un–rock ’n’ roll: “Look, these are not questions I’m asking, but they’re questions I’m interested in. Anyone with a brain should be interested in these questions. And though you won’t find many people in rock ’n’ roll who are prepared to be so open like you are on this album, you look to black music, it’s full of songs like this. Look to Marvin Gaye, look to Bob Marley.”
That’s a case you’re often making. You’re presenting ideas of what U2 did or what you yourself are doing now by pointing to black artists. It’s interesting, because very few black artists have had a big impact on the rock audience, apart from Bob Marley or Prince.
Yeah, it’s the Irish, we are the white niggers. Paul had the overview, because he was a few years older than us. Chris Blackwell, who had founded our record company, Island Records, also discovered Bob Marley. So he was very supportive. So you have your manager and your record company who are totally supportive of what looks like completely eccentric behavior in white rock ’n’ roll. But if you look to writers and painters and poets, then you’ll often find the search for the ecstatic, the trauma of religious experience.
Which writers, painters, and poets are you alluding to here, specifically?
Well, in music, Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Bob Marley, Stevie Wonder, the list is endless. Poets: Kavanagh,* maybe an even greater poet than Yeats, John Donne, William Blake. Emily Dickinson—she was a great influence on me. All the Renaissance painter
s, torn between God, patronage, and the desires of the flesh.
Have you discussed Marley with Blackwell? And would you say, based on what you learned, that Marley went through the “trauma of religious experience”? What is it that ultimately keeps black and white artists apart? I mean, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash went through that as well.
Chris Blackwell was—is—a real support on this level. Again, another critical character in our lives. Like Paul McGuinness, he seemed to understand that sometimes the best influence you can have is not to try to have any. I mean, Chris was this great producer of music; he could easily have turned up in the studio and asked us the hard musical questions: “Where’s the single? What are you on about? Why doesn’t that groove?” He had faith we would find our own way. I think in an odd way he had faith in our faith. But as regards Dylan and Cash, they nearly were exceptions. White music is so much more uptight spiritually. Most black artists came from the Church anyway.
In a nutshell, what did you find out about yourself from your manager, Paul McGuinness?
I found out what I was capable of.
Which was?
I mean, more than anyone in my life, he is a person who believed in me and gave me the confidence to realize my potential as an artist. He has an enormous and sharp intellect, and mine was very unschooled and haphazard. On many occasions, he would sit me down and say: “You have what it takes. You must have more confidence in yourself and continue to dig deeper. And don’t be upset or surprised when you pull something out from the depth that’s uncomfortable.” [laughs]
So you discovered things that, on first glance, you’d rather have kept hidden? What were those?
The gauche nature of awe, of worship, the wonderment at the world around you. Coolness might help in your negotiation with people through the world, maybe, but it is impossible to meet God with sunglasses on. It is impossible to meet God without abandon, without exposing yourself, being raw. That’s the connection with great music and great art, and that is why it’s uncomfortable, that is why cool is the enemy of it, because that’s the other reason you wanted to join a band: you wanted to do the cool thing. Trying to capture religious experiences on tape wasn’t what you had in mind when you signed up for the job.
What about your own sunglasses, then? Do you wear them the same way a taxi driver would turn off his front light, so as to signal to God that this rock star is too full of himself and not for hire at the moment?
Yeah, my insincerity . . . I have learnt the importance of insincerity, the importance of not being earnest at all times. You don’t know what’s going on behind those glasses, but God, I can assure you, does.
What else did Paul McGuinness encourage in you?
He said to me when I was very young, like twenty-five: “You have something that very few artists have.” And I said: “I don’t think so, Paul.” He said: “No. You see the whole equation.” And that is . . . a curse and a blessing. But it’s a very interesting thing, and I’m not sure I understood what he meant back then. I’ve never really discussed it with him since, but I think I know what he means, which is: the gift is at the center of the contradiction, but the circumference is full of other stuff you have to figure out if you want the gift to really grow.
A blessing, I understand. But why should it be a curse?
It’s an end to laziness, it’s an end to being a passenger on a train somebody else is driving. You are responsible, no one else—not the record company, not the management. You’ve to develop other muscles in your bodyguarding of your gift.
I don’t think you’ve talked much about your relationship with Edge, Larry, and Adam in terms of their families. How close did you get to the families of your fellow musicians? You told me that in order to escape your father’s sternness, you wanted to go to places where you felt warmth. Was, for instance, going to Edge’s place as warm a feeling as going to Guggi’s or Gavin Friday’s?
Edge’s family are extra-special people. They’re very laid back, they’re cool in the extreme. They’re not looking for the obvious. They’re both academics, they’re not very material. Edge’s father was very successful in business. I’m sure he could have been even more successful, but he couldn’t be arsed. [laughs] He’d rather hang out, he’d rather play golf. He and my father used to play golf on occasion. They got on pretty well, though my dad did complain once that Garvin was a little bit of a stickler for the rules. [bursts out laughing] He said: “He’s learnt that fucking manual off by heart.” But they both loved opera. In fact, it was a great moment when we played Madison Square Garden some years back, when they were both drunk and singing a duet from La Traviata, walking down Madison Avenue. It was the kind of place where you could always crash out. I remember coming back at four in the morning, and Mrs. The Edge would come down, rubbing sleep out of her eyes, and ask Edge if he was hungry, and . . . [gives a bewildered look] I thought this was just a different universe, completely. I was expecting, like: where is she stashing the weapons, OK? [laughs] As soon as he says: “Yes I’m hungry,” she’ll bring out the howitzer! But he’d say: “No, no. I’m OK, yeah. You go back to bed, I’m fine.” And then, it was all very easygoing. And his brother, Dick, was a bit of a genius. The government were paying for him to go to college in computer engineering. More than just a scholarship where they pay your studies, they were paying him to study. He was that good. And then he joined the Virgin Prunes. So there were two mad musicians in the house for the Evans family to deal with. But they were very . . . open is the word. It felt like an open house. And Mrs. The Edge was always interested in what you were.
Did Edge’s mother work?
She was a schoolteacher, and then, I think, she might have just helped Garvin. Her name was Gwenda, and they were both Welsh, so they had this kind of singsong accent, which made it all the more inviting. Then, they had a garden shed that we used to play in, which is about the size of this room, maybe a little smaller, a very small thing, and they let us play in this bunker, which is about 4 foot by 3, maybe 5 by 4, but that’d be pushing it. So you could just fit the drum kit in, you could just kind of stand, but it was great for a while. I just met Garvin recently, and jokingly, he was wondering what it would be worth now on eBay. He said: “Is it the time, Bono, for the garden shed?” I explained to him that we haven’t had a whole lot of luck on eBay, trying to unload our giant lemon spaceship [from the PopMart tour].
I’m curious about your first impression when you entered The Edge’s room. Was it very tidy, very organized, the way I’d fancy it?
Oh, I don’t remember his room. I remember Adam’s room. Adam’s room was like a nightclub, by age sixteen. He had ultraviolet light—UV, you know—incense burning, albums everywhere, and a soft chair. [laughs] Oh yeah, I’d never seen a room like Adam’s.
What sort of atmosphere did you feel at the Claytons’ place?
The Claytons had a very elegant kind of house. I mean, it was a very large detached bungalow in a nice neighborhood. I had never seen anything like it myself, coming from a just regular lower-middle-class street. They kept it very well.
Was there a garden?
They had a nice garden. I remember they had this white shag pile carpet. I said to Adam: “Wow! If we had a carpet like that in the house, you wouldn’t be allowed walking on it.” He said: “You’re not. Take your shoes off! [laughs] No one’s allowed walking on it. We’re hardly allowed in here.” But his mother was very glamorous, and his father was a pilot, which is again a very glamorous occupation. He was very wry, Adam’s father, liked to go fishing. His eyes are never far from rolling at all the fuss around him. He was from the East End of London, and never wanted to forget that, despite having made it to the officers’ mess in the RAF. His mother was very able in an argument. So we had many discussions long into the night about life, death, God, and the universe . . . and why we couldn’t walk on that white shag pile carpet.
So what kind of people were the Claytons? As laid back as Edge’s parents?
No
one could be as laid back as Edge’s parents. I think Jo Clayton was ambitious for her son, very worried, because he’d already been expelled from one school, and now he joined a rock band, and was hanging out with some very strange-looking people: us. So she was very sweet to us on the surface, but I think, beneath it all, very concerned that her son had fallen into the wrong crowd.
Had Adam been thinking long and hard about becoming a professional musician? Did he feel like he’d fallen in with the wrong crowd?
Adam was looking for the wrong crowd. There was nothing else he wanted to be other than a bass player. There’s a joke in the band that goes: Edge wants to play the drums, Bono wants to play the guitar, Larry wants to be the singer, Adam . . . only wants to play the bass! Adam and his younger brother Sebastian were great. They were always laughing, I do remember that. They had that kind of English potty humor. They’d put socks over their penises and kind of walk around, trying to embarrass their sister Cindy. I mean, Adam always loved nudity. He’s always been that way. He, when we were in school, used to streak down the corridor, naked.
So he was more of an exhibitionist than you. Great!
Yeah, I know. I remember the first time, we were just teenagers. Ali was talking to him, and she felt some humidity on the side of her leg [laughs], and he was peeing, not on her leg, but near her leg. He’d whip that thing out at any opportunity. He wouldn’t want taking a pee to interrupt a good conversation. And he might forget to ask. [laughs]
And how did it feel at Larry’s place? I guess it must have been a little more somber.
Yeah, I think. Larry’s home life was much more like mine, you know. You had this bereaved man, and in some shape or other, no matter how hard they tried to hide it, you were dealing with their unhappiness.
So Larry was living with his father.
His father and his sister, yes.
His younger sister had died as well. What had happened, exactly?
I can’t remember the exact details.
Larry was living in the same sort of house as you. Or was it a different background?
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