Bono

by Michka Assayas

  But the lyrics are extraordinary as well.

  [trying to remember, whispering in a low voice, fumbling his way through the words to a forgotten prayer] I couldn’t tell you what it was about. It was a disturbed sleep. The subject of the song was kind of haunting me, I suppose. I don’t know why, I’m always attracted to subjects like you can’t really get a grip on, like sex or God. [muses for a while] I think I sometimes confuse them both!

  “She’s a Mystery to Me” is not just a “very good song.” It seems to come from a different place.

  That’s a good question. What’s the difference between a very good song and a great song? Answer: I think, very good songs, you can take the credit for. But great songs, you can’t. They feel like you stumble upon them. Of course, then, there’s the bad songs. I wish you didn’t have to take the blame for them. It’s annoying, really, that you can only learn so much in the way of craft. You know, the muse is wayward. But I think you can put yourself in places where they might happen. For some people, that’s chaos. And that, for some people, is falling in love. That, for some people, is rage. That, for some people, is railing against the world. Or for some people it’s a surrendering to the world.

  And what makes it for you?

  All of the above. [laughs]

  Depends on the different stages of your life, I guess.

  Yes. I don’t know if I said that elsewhere, but one thing that it comes down to, I think, is a certain honesty with yourself. Did we mention that before?

  No. I guess it’s implicit.

  That’s what sets you free. You describe the situation that you’re in. Even if you’ve nothing to say, let that be your first line.

  I’m sure that when you heard Roy Orbison sing it, you felt some miracle happened.

  I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that he’d ask us for a song, because his songs are the most evolved in the book of pop. “In Dreams” is probably the greatest pop song ever written, in that it has a structure unlike any other. Most pop songs have a structure A-B-A-B-C-D—verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight, et cetera. If you listen to the structure of that song, the sections don’t repeat. It goes: A-B-C-D-E-F-G. It breaks all the rules. Try singing it someday.

  God forbid! So what’s your favorite lyric in a song?

  Kris Kristofferson, “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”

  How does it go?

  [sings] I don’t care who’s right or wrong / I don’t try to understand / Let the devil take tomorrow / Lord tonight I need a friend. You know that one? Yesterday’s dead and gone/(Bom/Bo-bo-bom)/And tomorrow’s out of sight/(Bom/Bo-bo-bom)/And it’s sad to be alone./Help me make it through the night. I could say that’s my favorite country song.

  And what’s your favorite religious song?

  “Amazing Grace.”

  And your favorite U2 song?

  We haven’t written it yet.

  Would it be something obvious like “One”?

  “Stay (Faraway, So Close),” that’s one of my favorites. I also like “Please” from the Pop album.

  The funny thing is that they’re the most operatic songs that you could pick, the ones that . . .

  . . . would take you through a journey, to a place you couldn’t imagine before then.

  This one stopped abruptly. Before Bono left, the waiter asked for a special favor: “Mister-ay Bono, can I ask-ay you something? Can you write your name, your wonderful name, on my shirt?”—“Gosh, are you sure?”—“To Paolo!”[Bono complies.]“Thank you. You’re great! You’re the greatest!” Then Bono added, mischievously, “You know, I do tattoos as well . . .”

  7. AT THE BOTTOM OF THE GLASS

  Four months passed without my hearing anything from Bono. All that filtered through was that he was “very busy,” which was not exactly breaking news to me. During that period, Bono, on behalf of DATA’s campaign Keep America’s Promise to Africa, had ensured a $289 million contribution from the U.S. Senate; had been made a Doctor in Laws at Trinity College in Dublin; had illustrated the booklet for a modern version of Prokofiev’sPeter and the Wolf,produced and narrated by his old friend Gavin Friday. He wanted to show his gratitude toward the people at the Irish Hospice Foundation, who had taken great care of his father (whose features inspired him to draw the character of Peter’s grandfather), as all royalties derived from the book’s sales went to that institution. He also enthused about the new album that U2 was preparing: “It has to be a monster, a dragon, and this is!” he claimed.

  Actually, the gestation of that dragon seemed somehow painful. I got the impression that the band, tired of Bono’s endless traveling around and his second job with DATA, were holding him hostage in order to speed things up. In late September, a magazine sent me over to Dublin for a quick piece of travel writing. At that time Bono was in his house near Nice. Catriona arranged a meeting for me at the Ocean Bar, right across from U2’s Hanover Quay Studios (it is said that band and crew, using a little motor boat, often come here for a bite). At some point her phone rang.

  “It’s my boss,” she said.

  “Our next conversation will be on the phone,” warned the Godfather, after having described in a lyrical tone the sun setting on the Mediterranean Sea.

  A couple of weeks later, I had a phone appointment. It was a Sunday morning. I was in the countryside near Paris, in the house where I was raised. It felt weird to talk to him in a place where all my child’s memories still linger on and where the world, in my view, seemed very small. On the street below, my son was playing with a friend, both of them crouching on an old trolley formerly used to carry wooden cubes. Sometimes their screams would disrupt the recording of the conversation, here and there shot through with their cries of excitement. This time again, I was struck by the serene tone in Bono’s voice.

  Maybe you remember the handwritten letter I sent to you right after Bologna. I don’t know if you got it.

  Yeah, I’m sure I did.

  I want to hear your thoughts, so let me remind you what I wrote. “After spending a day with you in Italy, I saw a whole new dimension to your character. You are what people make of you: you are there, as you say, to be used. In my view, you try to represent what’s best inside of them. So there’s one big question here. Since you are such a flexible and pliable person putting yourself out to be used, some people may try to take advantage of that, with a different agenda in mind. A violent or fanatical one, maybe. My hunch is that you are well able to defend yourself against such people. But that, in a way, is an interesting question. I have this impression—I don’t know why—but I wouldn’t want to see you crossed. I mean, why do I feel that way about this man of peace? I’m sure you’ve been through situations in your life when you could have turned into a monster.” Now what would you say?

  Well, I despise violence, but violence is something I know a little bit about. [long pause] I’m sorry, that last question’s taken me aback for a second, but you’re not way off. I think the time that I knew that I was capable of all the things that I disliked the most in other people was, oddly enough, one of the most joyful moments: when our first child was born. And I just felt this love for this beautiful little girl who was so fragile and so vulnerable. Some point around that week, I started to understand why wars were fought. I started to understand why people were capable of cruelty in order to protect themselves and their own. And I was very humbled to realize that.

  But what happened exactly?

  I can see it in your eyes.

  I can’t recall. This is one of the great and bewildering things to me: the more you experience love, the more full of it you should be. But the opposite sometimes happens, because you fear the loss of life. You fear the vulnerability that can take the goodness of it away. This might have happened because when I was just a kid, I had the sense that your whole life can change with a death in the family. It’s like they say—at least I say—it’s the loss of money that leads to the love of it. You know, the people who care about money are ne
ver the people who just made a lot. They’re the people who have lost a lot. And I think that might be true in relationships, when if you’ve lost somebody important to you early on, you live in fear of that the rest of your life. I suppose that’s one of the things that I would fear, and that might explain the rage that you referred to earlier, which is real in me, at some point, it really is. An odd thing to own up to, but I do know it’s true. I’ve not entered any period of analysis. I haven’t questioned myself enough.

  Were you ever tempted to go into analysis or therapy?

  Maybe that’s why I’m doing this. Seriously, you enter a conversation with somebody whom you trust, whom you can talk to about your motives. [laughs] I would have to think that it was part of some creative work, before I’d ever do it. Because if I was sitting there and talking to a psychiatrist or something, I would be thinking: “God, I could do other things with that hour. I could take my kids for a walk.” But if I’m sitting down with you, an old friend, in doing something that my kids might someday read, then I can excuse it. So, here we are, Michka. These questions are big buttons to press, and I don’t know the answer to all of them. Where that rage comes from? Partly, I would say it’s a sense that a life can be taken away from you, quickly, in a dumb second for the dumbest reason. That makes me mad, defensive and protective.

  Actually, that leads me to another question. You have often evoked the idea of suicide in your lyrics. One of the first songs that you recorded with U2, “A Day Without Me,” was about a friend’s suicide. One of your most popular recent songs, “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of,” deals with your friend Michael Hutchence’s suicide. Is taking your own life and turning that violence against yourself, like Ian Curtis from Joy Division or Kurt Cobain did, something that you may have considered at some point in your life?

  I think everybody, in their teenage years, plays with that thought, and I certainly did. But I was very distressed in my teenage years. I was kind of all over the shop. I didn’t know who or where I was. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become very intolerant of those thoughts. I am tempted to see it as self-indulgence. That was very hard when Michael took his life, because you understand that people can get to a black hole and they just can’t climb out of that. In fact, the more they try—as they say, if you’re in a hole, stop digging—the more they examine the process, getting lost in their own life, the bigger the hole. And Michael. I often think: Gosh, if he’d just put it off for half an hour, so that despair left him, he’d still be here. But the thing that finally I’ve got a low tolerance for, is that having seen so many people struggle for their breath and for sustenance in Africa, where I do a lot of work, and watching people beg for their life, it makes me very angry when I think of people throwing theirs away.

  Sure, but if someone feels hopeless and despairing, and you tell him: “Yes, but put this in perspective with the real pain and the real suffering that people have in Africa,” it doesn’t . . .

  [interrupting] Well, I do think perspective is a cure. [laughs]

  But very often, it simply doesn’t work at all. People may be aware and have access to plenty of information through the media, but knowing that people suffer from hunger or AIDS in Africa will not help them solve their problems.

  It’s a very real illness, depression. I understand chemical imbalance and all that. But I do think its prevalence has a lot to do with a lack of perspective on your life and a lack of empathy of what’s going on in other lives. This may seem hard, but I read a story of a mental hospital that was next to a school, that burnt down. So the headmaster of the school was visiting in this hospital, and, after the incident, decided to recruit patients who were recovering well to get them involved in a community project, and sought out for volunteers to help clean up their next door. And nobody put up their hand. Was this shyness? He was confused. And one of the doctors said: that’s why a lot of these people are here, they’re pickled in themselves. That was the expression I remember from the story, and it stuck with me.

  That’s a very good phrase.

  It is. And of course you’re gonna be careful, especially if you’re undergoing that kind of analysis, Michka, my friend. [laughs] We must be careful not to stew in our own juices. See, if I look at depression from another angle, I could be more positive. If you look at it as a nerve end. A leper would love to feel pain in their hands, as he catches in a door or as he falls into a fire. So perhaps we should see depression as a nerve end, as a thing that reminds us that everything isn’t OK. Because, really, everything isn’t. There are reasons to be uncomfortable in the world, and we’re not gonna take them on 24/7. Occasionally, it is worth asking some very hard questions about yourself and the world that you live in, the inequalities of it, and I think that that’s a way to put depression to use—as a nerve end to remind you of what’s not right and get about fixing it. But there’s another image I could use about analysis, which I’ve heard, which is “the rusty nail that sits at the bottom of the glass of water.” You take it up through analysis, you take it out of the glass of water and you’re staring at it, and go: “Gosh, look what I found in my subconscious—or unconscious—I found a rusty bent nail . . .” You look at it, and you stare at it, and go: “Wow. I didn’t know that it was there.” Then you put it back in the glass of water. [laughs] The only difference is: now you know it’s there, and the water’s been disturbed and discolored. But you didn’t take it out and get rid of it. So I think, if you’re gonna listen to yourself in these moments, and you discover stuff about yourself that you don’t like, that you have a duty to fix them. Because if you don’t, then it’s either the thing that I said earlier, the “pickled” thing, where it’s just self-indulgence, or you just end up disturbing the waters, and it doesn’t lead you anywhere. I’m all for it if it leads you somewhere. So I hope this conversation will lead me [pause] to the pub!

  [laughs] You mean to a positive place.

  Yeah.

  I was thinking about that phrase you just used: “We must be careful not to stew in our own juices.” I feel it applied to me at some point in my life, so I went through therapy for three years, because I thought I was too self-centered, and it was not interesting at all. Contrary to popular belief, you go through therapy to stop stewing in your own juice.

  And this therapy brought you out of yourself. Did it, eventually?

  Eventually, it did. Also, it helped me understand that being depressed, and feeling that you’re a failure at some point in your life, is quite positive, actually. It’s very good. [laughs]

  Yeah, but if it brings you somewhere. And it obviously did with you. Yeah. Now, that’s positive. I’ve a couple of friends that have been down that road, and I’m amazed at them. I’ve one particular friend who’s been through that, and he’s really practical about the fact that he fucked up as a kid, and just messed around with people, and had never dealt with it. So he kind of went, and it was like taking a car for a service.

  Exactly. I was extremely down to earth about it. It’s just like: I have a flat tire, I have to fix it. Because I’m not going anywhere with a flat tire. [laughs]

  Yeah, well, that’s it. I’m not against it if I had the time. I think it’d be a good thing to check your thought process. Unless you have a plumb line, the wall can be built crooked. So I think, for me, that is prayer, and my life worshipping God through music.

  It’s funny, you know, because when I discovered U2’s music, way back in 1980, I could feel the faith that emanated from it. Still, your music seemed based on a very depressing view of life. Your sound had that heavy, gloomy thing to it. I mean, you made it a matter of principle to record your first single with Martin Hannett, who was Joy Division’s producer.

  You’re absolutely right about the color of the period: purple turns black. That industrial stuff was just gray. But I think our music, even though working with Martin Hannett, was always shot through with light. Even if some of the subjects were dark, the music had within it the antidote for the subject
matter. It was strange. But, you see. You’re in your teens, or you’re coming out of your teens. This is what people want to read: the great novel, with the moral subjects that matter, because you want to understand life and the forces that make you. So inevitably, in a teenage way, you grapple with the big questions. And I love that about youth. I don’t know if I told you this—this is self-indulgent—but Anton Corbijn had an exhibition in an important museum in his native Holland, and he asked me to open it for him. He warned me there was one room just filled with pictures of me. “Giant Bonos,” he laughed. “Isn’t that how you see yourself? Ha! Ha!” Well, I’m a huge fan of his, and his hugeness—he’s a very tall man. So I went along to introduce one of the great photographers of the age and ended up in this room full of Bonos standing and looking at me over twenty years. And I saw this picture. I must have been twenty-two or something, getting into a helicopter for a video. I think it was “New Year’s Day.” I just saw this face, and it was my first face. The eyes were so clear, and so fearless, and I looked at it. A journalist walked up beside me and said: “What would you say to that person now? You’ve got one thing you can say to him. What is it?” I was going to be funny, but then I thought I shouldn’t. I told him: “I would tell my younger self: ‘You’re right. Don’t second-guess yourself.’ ” I felt it so strongly. I wish I knew then how right I was. I wasn’t wrong. You’re supposed to go: “Oh, I was foolish then. I’ve grown up, and I laugh.” I do laugh at some of the music, some of the statements I’ve made. Some of the image problems do leave me a little embarrassed, a little red-faced. But there’s a strength to that naiveté. I wasn’t wrong about the world. The world is more malleable than you think. We can bend it into a better shape. Ask big questions, demand big answers.