There is one thing about your life that I find quite unusual and extraordinary for a rock star. You have been monogamous for twenty-five years.
I wasn’t set up for marriage. I was not the kind of person that any of my friends would say, “He’s the marrying kind.” But I met the most extraordinary woman, and I couldn’t let her go. I have somebody in my life, after a long time, I still feel I don’t know. And we have a real sort of almost creative distance between us, that Ali manages. Relationships need management. She has an incredible respect for my life, and she’s a very independent spirit. So I don’t know how others would have made it through a married life with that length of time, but that’s how I have. I don’t know how you have, or how anyone else does it, but I think that’s what it is. And of course, respect and love. I’m still in love.
But falling in love with another person happens to everybody. I’m sure it happened to you. What is the inner force that has kept you from breaking your marriage?
Breaking my marriage? Maybe a strong sense of survival. I can’t remember his quote exactly, but there is a writing by Jean Cocteau where he says friendship is higher than love. Sometimes, it’s less glamorous, or less passionate, but it’s deeper and kind of wiser, I think. At the heart of my relationship is a great friendship. That’s in fact, in many ways, the key to all the important doors in my life: whether it’s the band, or whether it’s my marriage, or whether it’s the community that I still live in. It’s almost like the two sorts of sacraments are music and friendship.
But you’re the singer and front man in a band, and it’s not just any band. I’m sure you’ve been tempted. Don’t you ever feel that no matter what you have decided, love needs to be incarnated?
That’s not what the Chinese say.
I had never heard you mention your Asian origins.
Yes, for the missing years, I was in China, standing on my head and studying under the Great Noodle Maker.
OK, let me put it another way. To my ears music has always been sexual. It is certainly what happened during the last U2 show I saw, during the Elevation Tour of 2001. Especially the opening song, “Elevation,” that you performed in naked light. A rock show is not only a release from sexual tension. It can also arouse your sex drive. Think of groupies.
We never fostered that environment. If you mean groupie in the sense I know it, which is sexual favors traded for proximity with the band, it sounds like a turnoff to me. When there is no equality in the relationship, it’s less interesting. Taking advantage of a fan, sexual bullying is to be avoided, but the music is sexual, and particularly our music does have this thing. It’s like the lovers’ row, like one ongoing conversation and argument. And the songs being in the first person, it’s quite weird. Sometimes, you can end up fighting with yourself, or the erotic love can turn into something much higher, and bigger notions of love, and God, and family. It seems to segue very easily from me between all those.
But when you’re onstage, do you think of, at some point, one imaginary face, or do you fancy one imaginary body, or one imaginary girl?
Usually, I’m just struggling to hit the note, or concentrating on the song. It’s not like a technique an actor would tell you, a method that you actually go through. But what I will say is when it’s really going off, you have the sense that you’re really in the song, and the song is really in the room: all of you, crowd and performers, disappear into it. It’s an extraordinary thing. I mean it really is. I think people who come to a rock show, especially at one of our shows, just turn into the perfect audience. I don’t know who that audience is. What I’m saying is they’re not an amorphous mass of faces to me. I think a lot of times performers do not play for the crowd. Despite what people think, great performers appear to need a crowd, more than not so great ones. It’s not the twenty thousand people who may be in the arena, or the one hundred and fifty thousand people. I think they all turn into one person, it’s probably the truth. One of the persons turns out to be, in my case, your dad, or your love. But it looks like, and factually is, that you’re being so revelatory and revealing to people you haven’t met before.
People who listen to your music have this impression that they know you, better than your best friend. That’s what you told me once.
One of the great ironies of these concerts is that our songs are very intimate: incredible intimacies shared with people whom you’ve never met. And I wouldn’t trust that. Who would trust that? That’s a very bizarre way to live your life.
What do you mean?
On the surface, people who are so open and raw on a first date, you mightn’t trust that, would you? [laughs] I mean, you’re going to a bar, you meet somebody and they tell you their life story in ten minutes. I generally dodge that. On one level, you can look at these concerts and go: God, this is like Hitler’s night rallies.
The thought has sometimes crossed my mind.
Well, yeah, I suppose we even played upon that. You know, Zoo TV was playing into that whole idea: the night rally. But finally, it turns out that people are much more conscious than you think, and you can’t really influence them. If you tried to get them to turn on the person to their right, they wouldn’t. In fact, people are much smarter than that.
I guess many people attending a rock show have had that. It’s the same for a child when he watches a perilous circus act on TV. When the acrobat is walking on a wire, something inside that child wants him to fall, you see? [Bono laughs] Maybe I shouldn’t tell you that, but during that show I had this appalling fantasy of someone with a gun in the audience. I felt that Mark David Chapman* thing could happen there. Did it ever cross your mind?
Are you hinting that there were times when you were unsure about being in U2?
Yeah, we had that. As you know, I don’t travel with security. I grew up around a low but significant level of violence. We always feel like a row or an argument or a grievance in Ireland or France could end up with a bottle smashed in your face. Guns are not pervasive. In America, any crackpot can get their hands on a gun, and we’ve had a fair share of crackpots over the years. At the end of the eighties, we campaigned for Martin Luther King Day. I remember, in Arizona, we got into trouble, and we had some death threats. Normally, they happen. But occasionally, you get one that the police and the FBI take seriously. There was a specific threat: “Don’t go ahead with the concert. And, if you do, don’t sing ‘Pride (In the Name of Love),’ because, if you do, I am gonna blow your head off, and you won’t be able to stop this from happening.” Of course you go onstage and you put it out of your head. But I do remember actually, in the middle of “Pride,” thinking, for a second: “Gosh! What if somebody was organized, or in the rafters of the building, or somebody, here and there, just had a handgun?” I just closed my eyes and I sang this middle verse, with my eyes closed, trying to concentrate and forget about this ugliness and just keep close to the beauty that’s suggested in the song. I looked up, at the end of that verse, and Adam was standing in front of me. It was one of those moments where you know what it means to be in a band. There was a period in my early twenties when we nearly knocked the group on the head. We nearly called it a day.
When was that?
1982.
Oh, that Shalom Christianity* thing?
I mean, it wasn’t a “thing”! It was a very well-thought-out and finally flawed attempt to wrestle the world to the ground and try to deal with some of its ails and its evils. I nearly became a full-time [laughs] instead of part-time activist at that point. At that point, we were angry. We were agitated by the inequalities in the world and the lack of a spiritual life. It’s not only me, Edge is like that.
Is Edge the same nature of believer as you?
Edge is a wiser man than I am, more meditative. I have total admiration for the way he’s able to keep his feelings, ego, et cetera, under control, and yet, that’s my biggest worry for him.
We say in French “eaten away from the inside.”
No. But I wouldn’t under
estimate the level of rage beneath those sweet notes that he plays. He can throw a dig. He nearly knocked me out one night.
Really? What happened?
It was back in the early eighties. Everything had gone horribly wrong onstage with the band fighting, rather than the audience. I threw the drum kit into the audience. I think it was in Newhaven, and Edge hit with a right hook.
What caused the argument?
It was the last in a long line of reasons. Too many miles on the same bus, sore throats, sorer hearts from missing home. When I introduced the song, counting it in, one-two-three-four, the band ignored me. Don’t ask.
So, even way back then, you thought you had to deal with all the evils of the world. Do you think it stemmed from reading the Bible as a child?
You see, I had to find that at the very bottom of that lies the feeling of justice over charity. I mean, charity is OK, I’m interested in charity. Of course, we should all be, especially those of us who are privileged. But I’m much more interested in justice. The Drop the Debt campaign was a justice issue. Holding the children to ransom for the debts of their grandparents, that’s a justice issue. Or not letting the poorest of the poor put their products on our shelves whilst advertising the free market, that’s a justice issue to me. These things are rooted in my study of the Scriptures. I guess, like most people, the world just beats them down into not expecting that things can change or be any better. When you’ve sold a lot of records, [laughs] it’s very easy to be megalomaniac enough to believe that you can change things. If you put your shoulder to the door, it might open. Especially if you’re representing a greater authority than yourself. Call it love, call it justice, call it whatever you want. That’s why I’m never nervous when I meet politicians. I think they should be nervous because I’m representing the poor and wretched in this world. And I promise, history will be hard on this moment. And whatever thoughts you have about God, who He is or if He exists, most will agree that if there is a God, God has a special place for the poor. The poor are where God lives. So these politicians should be nervous, not me.
I’m surprised at how easily religion comes up in your answers, whatever the question is. How come you’re always quoting the Bible? Was it because it was taught at school? Or because your father or mother wanted you to read it?
It’s strange, I couldn’t know. Whenever I hear people talking from the Scriptures, I always manage to be able to see past their sort of personality, to see past the difficulties of the environment I was in listening to them, and the hypocrisy. I always manage to get to the content.
When was the first time something happened when you thought about a line from the Scriptures? When you first said to yourself: yes, I can see beyond that and see how it applies to such and such situation?
Let me try to explain something to you, which I hope will make sense of the whole conversation. But maybe that’s a little optimistic. [laughs] This was not the first time, but I remember coming back from a very long tour. I hadn’t been at home. Got home for Christmas, very excited of being in Dublin. Dublin at Christmas is cold, but it’s lit up, it’s like Carnival in the cold. On Christmas Eve, I went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I had done school there for a year. It’s where Jonathan Swift was dean. Anyway, some of my Church of Ireland friends were going. It’s a kind of a tradition on Christmas Eve to go, but I’d never been. I went to this place, sat. I was given a really bad seat, behind one of the huge pillars. I couldn’t see anything. I was sitting there, having come back from Tokyo, or somewhere like that. I went for the singing, because I love choral singing. Community arts, a specialty! But I was falling asleep, being up for a few days, traveling, because it was a bit boring, the service, and I just started nodding off, I couldn’t see a thing. Then I started to try and keep myself awake studying what was on the page. It dawned on me for the first time, really. It had dawned on me before, but it really sank in: the Christmas story. The idea that God, if there is a force of Love and Logic in the universe, that it would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in straw poverty, in shit and straw . . . a child . . . I just thought: “Wow!” Just the poetry . . . Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable. There it was. I was sitting there, and it’s not that it hadn’t struck me before, but tears came down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this. Because that’s exactly what we were talking about earlier: love needs to find form, intimacy needs to be whispered. To me, it makes sense. It’s actually logical. It’s pure logic. Essence has to manifest itself. It’s inevitable. Love has to become an action or something concrete. It would have to happen. There must be an incarnation. Love must be made flesh. Wasn’t that your point earlier?
Exactly. But you see, I sometimes think that I’m religious without knowing it.
[laughs] But that’s very interesting. You’re like one of the Three Wise Men, the Magi who were studying the stars, with nothing religious on your mind! And you’re looking at your maps, going: [gets into a comedy routine] “Here it is . . . OK, it should be over here . . . There’s something funny going on over there . . . Is it the aurora borealis? No, it’s a single star. My coordinates suggest: we must go this way. OK, something should be happening extraordinary round about . . . [pauses for dramatic effect] there. Oh shit, what’s this? A little baby! Oh, we stepped into the Christmas story, I thought I was reading astronomy.”
I’m going to ask you a very naive question. Why are so many people religious but don’t own up to it? Do you think you have an explanation?
I don’t know. But religious instinct comes out as gambling, as horoscope reading, as yoga, it’s everywhere. It’s supposed to be a secular society, but I look around: everybody’s religious. They’re superstitious, they pray when they think they’ve got cancer. It’s not that far below the surface. We’ve gone two hundred years since the Enlightenment, but science is starting to bow again.
Yes, but some people won’t use the word God.
Yeah. Well, because ever since, you had to prove something, or it didn’t exist. Such thoughts were outlawed by thinking people, post-Enlightenment: “God is dead.” But as I told you once before, I saw a fantastic thing written on a wall, in Dublin. It said: “God is dead. Nietzsche.” And then written underneath, sprayed out, it was: “Nietzsche’s dead. God.” [laughs out loud] It’s so good! I mean, I do think, now, at the start of the twenty-first century, people are beginning that adventure again. We have the Eve gene, we have science talking about the big bang, we have so much in science that was, if you like, contradictory, that has become less and less so to the idea that there is God. Different disciplines work on different parts of the puzzle. I’m not a scientist, mind you, I’m in a band with one. I’m not a monk, that’s obvious, I’m an artist. I’m looking for clues through my music. Am I going off again?
Yes. Actually I was about to wander off myself, but I don’t think I’m straying that far. You said, “Intimacy needs to be whispered.” What about the whispering in “She’s a Mystery to Me,” the song you wrote for Roy Orbison? What’s the inspiration there? Are you whispering, or was someone whispering to you? To me, that song is some form of incarnation of God—one of the few I would believe in anyway. To me, it’s a religious song, a mystical song. The melody is like the one you hear in your head when you’re in a cathedral. You can’t say that of many other U2 songs.
There’s probably some mechanical reasons for this, you know. Like, we’re very attracted to suspended chords to the fifth. Edge has that in his guitar playing. You hear it a lot in religious music: Bach. That happy-sad feeling. Agony and ecstasy. It’s that duality that makes my favorite pop songs.
One of the reasons I’m sitting here today is because you and Edge wrote that song. It’s the song I throw in the face of people who say they don’t “get” U2. And their jaws drop when they listen to it. For me, it’s
way up there with the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” in the pantheon of great songs. So I won’t leave this place until you tell me how that song happened.
That’s a funny one, that. Edge’s wife, Aislinn, was the most extraordinary girl, who could surprise you with kindness when you least expected it. She gave me a copy of a soundtrack for David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet. We were in London playing a concert. I left the record on “repeat” and fell asleep. When I woke up, I had a melody and words in my head. I presumed I was singing something from the soundtrack, but then realized I wasn’t. I wrote it down. At sound check that day, I played the song to everybody and started going on and on about Roy Orbison, what a genius he was, et cetera. I told them that this could be a song for Roy Orbison, we should finish it for him. After sound check, I continued working on it. After the show, I was banging on and on about Roy Orbison in this song when a very strange thing happened. There was a knock at the door. John, our security man, was announcing the guests for that evening: Roy Orbison, he told me, is outside. He’d love to say a few words.
What? You mean you had no idea he would be coming over?
I had no idea he was there, I had no idea he was coming over, and neither had the band. They all looked at me like I had two heads. In fact, I was just getting a very large one, [laughs] feeling that somehow, God had agreed with me about Roy Orbison! He walked in, this beautiful humble man. He said: “I really, really loved the show. I couldn’t tell you now why exactly, but I was very moved by the show. I’m wondering: would you fellows have a song for me?”
That story’s even better than the one I would have made up myself.
Later, I got to finish the song with him, got to know his wife, Barbara, his family, and the song became the title of his last album. It was an extraordinary thing to record with him. I was out standing beside him at the microphone, bringing him through the song. I couldn’t hear him singing, because he hardly opened his mouth. We went back into the control room, and it was all there. He not only had an angelic voice, but a kind of way about him too.
Bono Page 13
