We thought they were trampling all over the most precious thing of all: the concept that God is love. These televangelists, they were the traders inside the temple, that story where Jesus turned over their tables. They were putting people off God, especially young people who didn’t want to admit to being Christians anymore. Because in clubs, on campuses, everywhere, people would say: “You’re part of that. They’re nuts!” So it was very interesting to be in America at that time. We were fans and critics, getting ready to tell them the best and the worst on The Joshua Tree.
But I presume what they caught on to was the best. I mean, on The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum, you told them it was OK to listen to roots music, to the blues, the gospel and country music. At that time, did you ask yourself: “Why us? Why did they pick us to remind them of how great their country is?” I mean, they already had Bruce Springsteen.
Well, I think, Bruce Springsteen influenced us a lot in the eighties. It was also significant. His music had a similar mythology at its heart. Again, that was one of the things that was “against the law”: playing music in those bigger halls that they call arenas, basketball arenas. We went to see him in an arena, and he changed our life. He really communicated. For the first time, U2 realized that a bigger venue doesn’t have to dilute the power of our music. We realized it could add to the experience: a bigger crowd, a bigger electrical charge. But we’d never seen an audience as engaged on that scale. There were twenty thousand people and you could hear a pin drop if he wanted you to. Now, I went to see the Rolling Stones in Madison Square Garden at the same time, and I had fallen asleep. The sound was so bad . . .
A little while ago, I took care of a huge music encyclopedia. Going through the stories of all these bands and performers, I came to a tentative conclusion. I think that the mystique that was born out of rock music comes in a main part from the performers who utterly reinvented themselves. See, Robert Zimmerman, the son of an electrical appliances retailer in the mountains of Minnesota, reinvents himself as Bob Dylan, tells people that a blues musician gave him his guitar, or that Sioux blood runs through his veins. He invents a mythology of his own. I think that in the minds of our generation, you invented yourself as Bono and fascinated us in the same way. Do you know who Bono is?
I’m trying. It’s the hardest thing . . . to be yourself. Maybe I haven’t been able to pull it off [laughs] . . . yet.
Lots of people wouldn’t let you begin to.
Why?
I think they’re enjoying your personality crisis. It’s a spectator sport, watching you figure this stuff out, reinventing yourself constantly.
That’s the great thing about America. It is the land of reinvention. It was never about where you come from, it’s always about where you’re going. And people accept that beginning again is at the heart of the American Dream. The Irish came over from a death culture, of famine, and of colonization, which of course was emasculation. They found a new virility in America. They began a new life in America. And this of course is at the heart of the idea of redemption: to begin again. This is at the heart of religious fundamentalism too: to be born again. I wish to begin again on a daily basis. To be born again every day is something that I try to do. And I’m deadly serious about that.
One of the most important things you did in America—and I’m talking about the continent, as opposed to the United States—was making a stand about the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua. That was your first public involvement in U.S. politics, right?
Let me think. Well, the first thing of a political nature in America was dealing with Provisional IRA sympathizers in America: the sponsors of the mayhem back home. We only discovered we were Irish when we went to America, in the sense of what being Irish meant. Bobby Sands* was dying on hunger strike in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland. It was heartbreaking, but it was also rabble-rousing. It was all over the news every night in America. The tin-cuppers were going to raise a fortune out of his sacrifice. Remember, there are 45 million Americans who consider themselves Irish. The younger generation would come and see us play. Second-generation and third-generation Irish were throwing money up onstage for the revolutionaries who were giving up their lives. But when we’d meet these people afterwards, they didn’t really know anything about what was going on.
Did they have much support at home?
Few realized that these revolutionaries were not representing the will of any significant majority. Whatever way you drew Ireland, with or without the border, they were a minority. Even if they were amongst the Catholics in Northern Ireland, they were a minority. Yet these people felt they had the right to form an army and destroy lives. So they were the enemy, as far as we were concerned. Fascists, brown shirts—in this case, green shirts. There had to be a better way.
Did you have any big ideas?
Well, maybe understandably, this began our interest in nonviolence. And here, the U.S. played a role. America had had its own troubles with race relations in the sixties. We started to see similarities with the civil rights movement. We became students of nonviolence, of Martin Luther King’s thinking. That all started happening around that time. Then we wrote “Sunday Bloody Sunday” as a way of refuting the armed struggle. So America had brought us to that place. America had made us question about being Irish. The irony was that a lot of people thought “Sunday Bloody Sunday” was a call to arms, a rebel song for a united Ireland. It was about unity, but not in the geographical sense.
Don’t you believe in a united Ireland?
Only by consensus. The border was drawn by threat of war, but we have to accept it won’t be removed by force. Real division, as the great John Hume says, is in the people’s hearts and minds.
Did the Provisional Army in Ireland threaten you at some point?
We were deliberately trying to dry up funds for the IRA in America. I know we annoyed them, but they didn’t respond in any organized ugly way, no. We must have pissed them off. We were huge with the Irish-American community. Some small amount of well-organized people were the culprits, passing the hat around raising money for the Irish cause—which really meant putting bombs in English pubs and killing innocents. So we were not very popular, no, with the Provos. And we were let know that back in Ireland in subtle ways.
How subtle were they?
Actually, not at all. After having denounced the IRA from a stage in Ireland in the early eighties, I remember a few incidents. Once, our car was surrounded by a bunch of Provo supporters. One had wrapped the tricolor around his fist trying to smash the windows of the car with his bare hands, screaming “Brits! Traitors!” However real or not, there was one threat of kidnapping, which the head of the Special Branch was taking very seriously. I remember we all had to have our toeprints taken as well as our fingerprints. That set the imagination off . . . [laughs] Were they gonna break our legs or post them? I don’t want to exaggerate the effect this stuff had on our life. But still, for the rest of the eighties, within some quarters where we used to be welcome, we became personae non grata. In certain pubs and certain places, people would look at you, and think you’d let them down. But, after a while, people realized that it wasn’t that we weren’t nationalists, or that we weren’t supporters of their grievances.
There were very real grievances, weren’t there?
Yes. There had been great abuses taken of the Catholic minority, but we, like most Northern Catholics, believed in a peaceful solution. We hated the Irish ambivalence to violence. You know, there’d be a bombing somewhere, some atrocity in a supermarket in the middle of England. Women and children would be slaughtered. Everyone would be shocked by the news, everyone. In Ireland, people would stare at their shoes for a few days. People would be saying: “Oh, they’ve gone too far, now this is all too much.” But then, you know, a couple of months later, somebody would be singing in a pub some folk song, some battle hymn, “A Nation Once Again,” or something like that, and the hats would be passed around, and everyone would put in for the Provos. I hated
that about us Irish, our duplicity. I just felt that we had to take a position, which was clear—that this violent route was not making the lives of anyone any better. It would not lead to anywhere other than despair, and would make the job of integration for both communities more difficult.
So no direct threats?
No direct threats. Just a sense that you pissed them off. I heard Gerry Adams took down a U2 poster from the Sinn Fein office. He certainly referred to me as “a little shit” in a major press interview. It’s not helpful when the leader of an armed struggle who has support in every working-class neighborhood, and a lot of maniacs on his side, calls you a “little shit.” It doesn’t make your life easier.
Do either of you hold a grudge now that peace is in the air?
Not at all. Since then, Gerry Adams has put out his hand to me. He went to the offices of Jubilee 2000 to learn about the Drop the Debt campaign. He is a very brilliant man. He already knew his way around a lot of our issues. If he and his party deliver disarmament of the paramilitaries, they will be a force in politics. I hope he feels remorseful for the damage the armed struggle caused to Ireland. He would believe that it got us to the place where there is an Irish peace agreement. I don’t believe that. But he put his hand out to me, and I respected that. I shook it. In Ireland, there is an expression: “Keep your hands in your pockets when you’re talking to these people.” Well, I took mine out, and he took his hand over.
So you’re optimistic about an end to “the Troubles”?
Yes. Years later, I would have the greatest honor of my life in Ireland when U2 played in support of the Good Friday Peace Agreement in the Waterfront Hall in Belfast in 1998. We got John Hume and David Trimble, the two opposing leaders in the conflict, to shake hands onstage in front of a U2 and Ash audience. People tell me that rock concert and that staged photograph pushed the people into ratifying the peace agreement. I’d like to think that’s true. I’d like to think that the extreme Unionists and the extreme Republicans now have the courage to put down their guns. Because it takes courage to trust in the peace process and to return to civilian life. Both sides have suffered too much. It’s easy for me to proffer my opinions. I’m not living next door or across the road or across the town from a painful memory. I live in Dublin in a house beside the sea.
10. MY LIFE AS A DISASTER GROUPIE
This conversation happened on the phone, only ten days after the previous one, in mid-February. The man was still in his home in the south of France with family, most of them gathered in the bedroom.
[jocular] Michka!
Oui, c’est moi!
[conscientiously articulating in French] Comment allez-vous?
Fort bien et vous-même? First lesson. [laughs]
Very good . . .
Got a better voice than last time.
Really?
Did you get a good night’s sleep? Now I’m really playing it like a doctor . . .
[laughing] I wrote this thing this morning about Elvis Presley for Rolling Stone magazine. They’re doing a special issue on pop stars, I guess. So, mine’s called “Elvis Ate America Before America Ate Him.” So I’ve been up and out, and I’m trying to get rid of those two punk rockers and their mother, lying on the bed here beside me. But they’re slowly getting up. Jojo [his elder daughter, Jordan] is fighting off revising for her mock junior’s first exams, and Eve is lying down pretending she’s ill.
That sounds like a dysfunctional family.
Yes. Hollywood and Holly-weird.
You mean like the Osbournes.
It’s very Osbourne in our house. The girls, if I’m very tired, if I had a very late night, they see me shuffling. They say: “You’re shuffling like Ozzy.” And I say [Ozzy’s voice]: “Fuck off! Fuck off!” No, I don’t swear at my children in my own voice, only in Ozzy’s. That’s what’s great about Ozzy. I get to swear at my children in his voice.
That’s a good excuse.
I love the Osbournes. They’re a very rare thing: they’re a family that loves each other. Also I like his voice when he sings “Iron Man,” because he has a voice, in a way, like a machine. It doesn’t sound human at all.
Have you ever met him?
I met him once in a lift. It wasn’t much of a conversation. “Going up?” was, I think, the remark. [laughs] He was getting out at the fifth, and I was getting out at the seventh floor. I didn’t have time to explain that I had bought Paranoid. And I think it’s one of the greatest rock records. He invented heavy metal. God-like genius . . . Paranoid is heavy in the nuclear sense.
It’s so funny that Black Sabbath came back into style with Nirvana. I thought that heavy metal had been wiped off the map once and for all in the eighties. And then it came back with a vengeance with those grunge bands.
It’s visceral. It’s boys’ music, but it’s for a time when being male is a lot more elusive than you think. In your teenage years, music has a lot to do with who you want to be and how your hormones are describing that. And I think that’s why hip-hop—[getting interrupted] Oh God, that’s Elijah now who’s coming. Out, you little dwarf! No, that’s me.
Now, that’s your real personality showing. Not the nice guy I know.
Isn’t that true that hip-hop and hard rock, it’s very male music? What are you listening to these days, Michka?
Presently? You . . . And on that subject, you know, these phone calls are great, because for me it’s like expecting the next installment of a serial. [Bono keeps on laughing his devilish laugh] So let me go back to what you said last time. I’m quoting you here: “We only discovered we were Irish when we went to America.” You took your first political stand against the Provisional IRA and the armed struggle. Isn’t it strange that you somehow got involved in the civil war in El Salvador and Nicaragua after that? How did you find out about what was going on those countries, which to a lot of people didn’t mean more than a T-shirt or the name of a Clash album?*
Well, the difference between the Sandinistas and the Provisional IRA was that the Sandinistas represented a majority of their country. And so, as ugly an armed struggle as it was, it at least had that behind it. It’s true, I heard about the Sandinistas from the Clash. But the more I read about the Sandinistas, the more I became fascinated by their modus operandi, because here was liberation theology in action. When I visited Nicaragua, I was shocked to see how much the people’s religion had inspired their revolt. Here was revolution rooted in something other than materialism. There was a spiritual coefficient. The reason the Nicaraguan revolution had to be put down was because it had caught fire. That was terrifying for the Americas. It could have spread all through Mexico, and up north. There was one church I remember going to, where they had these murals all around the walls of the church, of scenes from the Holy Scriptures, like “The Children of Israel escaping from Pharaoh.” But Pharaoh would have Ronald Reagan’s head on him! [laughs]
Really? Where did you see that?
In Managua. I remember just being amazed at how the populace were being taught revolution through Bible stories. All over they were being taught that Jesus preached the Gospels for the poor, which he did. But Jesus did not take up arms.
Exactly, that was my point. I mean, you had just made very clear that you did not want to support the armed struggle in Ireland.
I wasn’t writing a love song for the armed struggle. I saw it as a disappoint-
ing outcome of the reading of the Scriptures. But I was inspired by the application of the Scriptures into people’s real life. I remember I had a meeting with the minister of culture, Ernesto Cardenal. I remember him saying that the poetry of their revolution—and indeed a lot of the Sandinista ideologies—were inspired by the Irish uprising in 1916 and Irish poets like Patrick Pearse. He himself had been taught by Irish Jesuit priests, expert in sowing the seeds of revolt. It’s true. I’m telling you: wherever you go in the developing world, you’ll find the Irish nuns and priests jumping out from behind bushes! It’s amazing: we exported revolution th
rough the clergy. We were very good at it, and it traveled very well. I remember saying to the minister: “But there’s nothing glorious about people losing their lives, and bloodletting.” You may be able to argue for it, facing no other escape route, but it’s never glorious. In Irish folklore, even Yeats talked about “the rose that is made red by the blood of the martyrs, that’s dripped to the ground.” I hate all that stuff.
I think it’s nineteenth-century Europe, actually. As a teenager in France in the seventies, I was marked by that mythology. We had the insurrection of May 1968 and what they called the “Leftist movement” thereafter: a fanatical bunch of young people, often the bravest and most ambitious of their generation, who devoted themselves to the idea of revolution. It certainly was glamorous. It went back to the glorious army of the French Revolution, the nineteenth-century insurrections, and then, of course, the Bolsheviks, the Trotskyist uprising, the Maoist Guerrilla, up to the guerrillas in Cuba and Vietnam. It occurred at a sort of junction of Romanticism and Revolution. I realized that the so-called heroic People’s Guerrillas were mostly glorified on an aesthetic and idealistic basis, that their supporters had deliberately turned a blind eye to planned starvation and concentration camps in Russia and China, not to mention the massacres in Kampuchea by Pol Pot. The whole point was anti-Americanism, which made perfect sense in Europe. But those causes were excuses and fantasies. Dismal fantasies, actually.
It’s not that I couldn’t understand where the Provisional Army were coming from, and it’s not that I don’t understand violence myself, personally. I was just trying to figure out: was there ever any reason to take up arms? On the one hand, you had Martin Luther King saying “Never,” Gandhi saying “Never,” Jesus Christ, both their inspirations in this, saying “Never.” On the other hand, here were the Sandinistas saying “We have to look after the poor, we have to defend the poor.” That position had to be studied from my point of view, even if I didn’t buy it. I wanted to know more about liberation theology and the Sandinistas. I was very moved by them when I was there. They suffered a lot. Their revolution was very costly, and it didn’t turn out their way in the end. Same with the French Revolution. Ironically, it was the French Revolution that inspired America.
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