Bono

by Michka Assayas

  Very similar.

  Was his father as harsh on him as yours was on you?

  His father was very worried about his son throwing his life away with a rock ’n’ roll band. His father thought, if he was interested in music, it should be jazz, you know. Learn to play properly. And the only difference was his father would have wanted his son to achieve more than he did in terms of university and all of that. And Larry wasn’t interested remotely. Whereas my father couldn’t really care less whether I went to college—and I would have quite liked it. That’s the only difference.

  Did you use to hang around at Larry’s place as much as in Adam’s or Edge’s?

  Occasionally. Our very first rehearsal was in Larry’s place.

  Was there enough space for that?

  In the kitchen. There wasn’t much space.

  Would his father put up with it?

  His mother probably told his father that it was a jazz group assembling. She was a spectacular woman. She was just gorgeous in every way. There was no vanity to her. And she loved her son, and wanted him to be a drummer, because that’s what he wanted, and facilitated him by letting her kitchen be used for our first rehearsal. We were all standing there, there were like six of us at that stage, and I remember even then, there were girls screaming outside for Larry. He was fourteen, I suppose, and I remember him taking the hose to them: “Go away! Leave me in peace! Shhh!” He’s been doing the same ever since. But I really didn’t hang out a lot. We went to rehearsals. Finally we got a rehearsal room—oddly—next door to the graveyard where my mother was buried. A complete accident. A little yellow house next door to a graveyard . . .

  Aside from music, what were the things the four of you enjoyed doing the most together?

  Nothing at first, but then, we realized we shared the same surreal sense of humor.

  I never imagined you’d say that. You mean you’d make practical jokes together?

  Yeah, we’d do some mad shit together.

  Like what?

  I think Edge was with me once when we got into Guggi’s car. He was seventeen years old and had a car. His father just collected these jalopies, broken-down cars, and would fix them up. I remember we snuck out of the school into his car and drove to a girls’ school with a painting that we had done, and went into the school, and knocked on class doors to sell them the painting. So before they got a chance to call the police, we had hit several classes at the girls’ school: “Excuse me. We were round here, we have a painting and we’re advised that we might find a buyer here in Class C English. [changes tone] Hi, girls!” [laughs] Just teenage stuff, but surreal. Or we’d do mad theatrical stuff.

  What do you mean, “mad”?

  Well, I remember, in one of our early gigs, we put on Christmas concerts in the middle of summer. They were called “The Jingle Balls.” And so we got on at this nightclub and we did it up with a Christmas tree. We just pretended it was winter in the middle of the summer. Childish things . . . In Lypton Village, we gave each other names and we spoke this other language. Edge fit into that very well in the end, and so did Adam, because they were all very surreal. Larry was just a little more suspicious, but he would be, anyway.

  Funny. I mean, the sort of reputation U2 had when the band began was that of a very intense and earnest act.

  Yeah, that’s why some people who saw Zoo TV were confused—I think you were one of them—and just concerned about the way things were turning out. But actually that’s where we came from. Staging, like this Christmas concert in June, you know. We have been playing with theatrical constructs from the very beginning. I had a character called “The Fool,” which I played with, which was a forerunner of “The Fly.”

  OK, I’m willing to accept that you revived a sort of very early U2 tradition with Zoo TV in the early nineties. But it looks like humor had been completely out of the question for the first ten years.

  I think we lost our humor a bit. I really do. It was the bends, really. It was just changing pressure, moving from Dublin suburbia to traveling around the world and all that comes with it. This thing we were talking about before, just this sort of determination not to be changed—this zeal, I think, came partly in response to that.

  But didn’t it exist even before you’d encountered that huge success? Boy was sort of tragic, October had a terrible solemnity and sadness to it, and War was full of anger.

  By the time we got to Boy, we had taken some of the surrealism out. We had an idea, a construct for the album, and we fit into it. The thing you have to get used to with us is that, when we have an idea, we change shape to fit into it. It’s not strange if you’re a director or a writer. In order to research a subject, you change clothes and shoes and walk funny. But bands are not supposed to. The subject of our songs, if you like, has always dictated the way we presented them, the clothes we wore, the films we made, the kind of shows we put on.

  Oh, really, Bono? From where I was standing, you didn’t seem like the funniest guy on a stage in those years to me . . .

  It wasn’t a large part of our work, no. But our life, some of our life, lost humor. I think I was the more intense. I don’t think I am now. But it was an act of will. Defeat was not an option, though it was much more likely, if you’re being honest. I think, you know, I really sensed defeat at any minute, and I was so determined to drown out the voice of failure that I just took out all peripheral vision. I just became very single-minded.

  Maybe U2 needed that kind of dedication then. Maybe your audience did.

  Maybe they did. Everyone was determined, but no one was more determined than I was. And it could get pretty intense and pretty tense, because this would have to be the best show of our life every night, which, you could say is like: “Chill out, Bono . . . Chill, OK?” [laughs] But . . . no! Every night, I am not messing or exaggerating, because in our heads this was the only way to be true. If it wasn’t, if you weren’t inside those songs, if you didn’t live it in that moment, you were lying and you were stealing from the people. We were zealots, we became prisoners of our own cult. [laughs] And we’d taken hostages. Paul McGuinness and our road crew were incredible. Joe O’Herlihy, our sound mixer, what a legend! Everybody was working hundred-hour weeks just to push the rock up the hill. It was a high hill, and it was difficult, and our talents weren’t really the obvious ones that you need for this particular journey. But it turned out we had other ones, which were maybe more important.

  What do you mean by those “other talents” that were more important?

  The spark. There was something original about our point of view, even if it wasn’t very well expressed. And we were relentless. Just those two things can get you places. When I look back at twenty years, I see the slowest, almost invisible evolution: just tiny, tiny gradations, just on the way of degrees. Just slowly the talent has opened up, and there’s moments that looked like we’re searching ahead, like The Joshua Tree or Achtung, Baby, or now. But really, it’s just so slow to me. I think, it’s taken us this long to figure all this out. I think we’re the slowest learners in the world. But you read about the Beatles, and it’s just all in ten years. [imitates sound of a jumbo jet] But, for us, we’ve just got to Rubber Soul now.

  Are you serious?

  Oh, absolutely. In my mind, absolutely. OK, I might start to feel ill with envy if John sang “In My Life,” sitting in the rehearsal room. And, in fact, all of their songs would make me feel some nausea. But I would say to them: “Your songs have extraordinary melodies that are beyond compare, but our songs have a kind of weight that yours don’t. Gravity, you could call it . . .”

  It used to be the weight of things to come. But maybe it’s a different story now.

  It’s just weight. We had weight. And weight counts for a lot. There’s an incredible moment—I don’t know if I talked to you about it—which was after 9/11, when there was a concert for the New York police, the fire department, in Madison Square Garden. The Rolling Stones played an amazing song, “Miss You,” so in th
e moment . . . [sings] Do-do-doo-doo / Doo-do-loo / How I miss you . . . Jagger looks incredible. And it was just really a beautiful performance, and it had a lightness of touch that only he has. But then on walked . . . The Who. There were three of them. And in comparison with the effete Jagger, these guys looked like they were long-shoremen. They looked like they’d just come up from New Jersey with an iron bar in their back pocket, OK? They put on the guitars and they went into “Who Are You?,” and then “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” For the first time in the night, these fire department and these police, who’d been drinking off their grief as they should, and were loud and noisy—“Yeah, there’s the Stones! Yeah, there’s such and such”—suddenly they stopped. Their mouths fell open. It was nothing to do with cool, it was nothing to do with smart, it was nothing to do with sexy. It was to do with authority—weight, some sort of weight. And our music has that. We’re learning the other stuff, even now: figuring out the more unpredictable melodies, the lyrics that can trick you into feeling one thing and then surprise you with another—that’s all craft and songwriting, and it’s coming and it’s great. But that other thing we have, we have it and it’s being very strong on this current tour, because we’re coming into something. Chris Blackwell used to say: “That’s the thing about U2. The band always feels like it’s coming, never that it’s arrived.”

  What is the thing you argue about the most in U2? Can you remember when you felt for the first time something like: Oh God, this is wrong; I thought it would never come to this for the four of us?

  I might think, if I’m honest, there have been periods of time when I have found each member of the band incredibly frustrating.

  You wouldn’t use another word?

  No, but I’m sure that has happened in reverse about me too. Luckily, it hasn’t all come at the same time. [laughs] I think that’s what you call a solo career. But I think you have to give people some space to lose themselves now and then, and I can remember when each of them had lost themselves, or lost their way in the work, and I found that very upsetting. And then, I don’t know, there’s probably a period when they felt that about me, but I don’t know when that would be.

  Can you remember a particular time when you felt the band was resentful of you?

  Recording All That You Can’t Leave Behind, I think I did push their patience the most with our Africa work, just by being on the phone a lot.

  Let’s get back to that zealot period of yours in the early eighties. How did it come to an end? How did Adam catch up with you, and how did you catch up with Adam?

  I think we met somewhere in the middle. Adam . . . we found a third way. He was tired of the world, and I was a little more curious.

  Are you all believers now?

  Yes. Adam had his own path, and it took him further out into the world. But I would say Adam is, right now, the most spiritually centered of the band.

  Because his path was very rough?

  Yeah, I think he is the person who is now the most watchful of the sheep as they stray out of the herd. [laughs] I do love the image of sheep. You’ve got to hand it to Jesus. [laughs] That is a great one, sheep, isn’t it? Because there’s something like: pigs are intelligent, they’re useful farm animals as they wallow in the muck. But sheep! I mean, they’re useful for making jumpers, of course, but they really are pretty dumb. The great image of mankind. And they move in packs as well. They all head off the wrong direction together. There’s no particular leader, anyone can become a leader, and anyone can be right for a particular stampede. They’re so frightened, and not even aware that they’re of great use for making woolly jumpers, or when they’re dead making sheepskin coats for secondhand car dealers. [laughs]

  I don’t know how much this has been true or to what extent it’s been made up, but the story goes that Achtung, Baby was mainly based on Edge’s personal crisis at that time, the trauma of his divorce. Has this really been a group crisis or, on the contrary, has Edge’s problem stayed inside the borders of his private life?

  No, you’re right. The fracturing and the fissures in Edge’s life were a perfect metaphor for what was going on with the band. There was a lot of tension between us during the making of that album, with Edge and myself wanting to chop down The Joshua Tree, and Larry and Adam wanting to put a glass house around it and play to our strength. Because Larry and Adam have that humility, but Edge and myself had the arrogance that it wasn’t the sound of the guitar, it wasn’t a collision of notes that made up a melody, or a particular bass and drums approach that made U2. We believed that what made U2 was the spark, and that you could destroy all the outward manifestation, and it would still be there. You could put my voice through a distortion pedal, you could ban Edge from playing his echo unit and those silver notes that he plays, you could change the subject matter . . . [laughs] you could just deface all that was recognizable in the band, and it still would come through. You could take subject matter that you wouldn’t normally associate with the band.

  Would you say that the chaos that reigned inside Edge’s life gave him the musical nerve to do that?

  Ermm, no. It was very hard for Edge to go through that. He’s a hard person to fall out with. It took an awful lot, I think, for him to let go of his marriage. He loved Aislinn so much, and his kids were everything to him. So it was excruciating to watch someone so averse to this kind of splitting up. In the middle of it, I think he did just focus on his music as a way of keeping. The intensity of the band must have paled in comparison. So he went on holidays to our argument from his own.

  But had his personal crisis isolated him from the band?

  Well, we worked very closely together. I mean, I was the one really pushing for the change in direction, and Edge was the one most supportive. There were times when Adam and Larry were, actually, antagonistic. But again, for reasons of modesty, they felt our reach couldn’t meet our grasp.

  How did Edge’s way of dealing with that chaos turn into music? Did it happen in the subject matter of some of the songs, like “One”?

  Yeah, subject matter, of course. They are very adult themes. There is a desperate struggle for fun [laughs], which, I think, is, you know, a contradiction in terms. There it is. All these albums, when we tried to escape gravity, Pop and Achtung, Baby, we always ended up sort of flat on our backs under the weight of the air. [laughs] It’s very funny.

  A few months ago, I listened to all those albums in a row. Achtung, Baby comes out as the strongest of the lot, but also the darkest and the hardest. It sounds harder now than it did then. At the time, I thought it was fun, because you’d been experimenting with machines, and your voice was distorted. But with hindsight, it’s amazingly violent.

  Yeah. “Love Is Blindness” is really something else. And I remember Edge played the solo at the end of this. I was pushing him and pushing him and pushing him, and he played until the strings fell off. Actually, you’ll hear strings snapping during the solo towards the end. He was, I think, in tears on the inside, and the outside was just raging.

  There’s so much self-hatred in that record.

  It’s a black beauty.

  Speaking of black beauties . . . I mean, people won’t understand—and I won’t understand [laughs]—if we don’t broach the thing that happened during Adam’s “difficult period.” How did it feel when Adam missed the Sydney show on the Zoo TV tour in 1993? I think you never really told the story from your own perspective. How did you learn about it? How did you face it? How did you live through it? And what happened when you next met up with Adam?

  [puzzled] Err . . . What’s the connection between Adam and black beauty?

  Well, I was thinking about Naomi Campbell.

  You’ve jumped over from Naomi to Sydney.

  I had the question ready, but you know what I mean.

  [a little embarrassed] No . . . I introduced Adam to Naomi. And he’d always had a thing for her. What people have to understand about somebody like that is that there is a sort of
prowess and a kind of big brain in that cat suit, and she is a wildcat—I think she’s a puma. But you know, they were in so many ways really great for each other. I think it would not be fair to characterize Naomi as being in any way responsible for Adam’s demise and final fall at Sydney.

  It was just an association of ideas. I wasn’t implying there was a logical link.

  Oh, I see. Because I think he was on a road to perdition. [laughs] And extradition, and re-ignition—any other “ition” you can find—long before he met her. He had gone out into the world, and was taking the biggest slice of the pizza he could find. He was young, he was in a great rock band, and he was the only rock star in the band. [laughs] He had four people’s portion for himself. So that’s a lot of pizza to eat! [laughs] He got sick after a while. He couldn’t do a gig because of the size of the bellyache. The real betrayal in Sydney was not between Adam and the band. The real betrayal was between Adam and himself, because there is no more pro a person in the band than Adam. He found it very hard to live with that, and indeed he couldn’t live with that. He realized that he had gotten himself quite sick, and he wanted to be better. It took him a few years, but that was a real turning point. As I say, he’s a real pro.

  A pro who didn’t turn up for work.

  Yes. We were filming, which made it even harder. It was the first night of Zoo TV live from Sydney. Twenty cameras in the house, steadycams and cranes, extra lighting—lights, action. Or in this case, lights, no action. We went ahead with the show out of respect for the people who turned up and the size of the bills we were going to have to pay if we didn’t roll cameras. Adam’s bass tech, Stuart Morgan, understudied that night, it was a heroic performance from him, and in fairness a performance deserving to be lit, which he wasn’t. He was left in the shadows. [laughs] In fact, some people who were there thought it was Adam, which probably hurt him the most, though I might say, if I could, something about Adam’s bass playing, and why in the end, it is irreplaceable. The bass can be the blandest of instruments in a rock quartet. Most concerts I go to, and not even rock—jazz, pop, blues—I don’t notice the bass. Nobody does. Nobody knows what the guy who gets the girl is doing. In U2 that is not the case. I felt an enormous void that night and I felt I was falling down it. I felt we all were.