You’ve just spent five minutes describing your own funeral, so I think you’re up for this question. At forty-four, you probably have more years behind you than in front of you. [Bono laughs in sardonic tones] How do you face your own mortality? On the one hand, rock stars have this Peter Pan complex. And on the other hand, you have Keith Richards saying, “The older you get, the older you want to get.” So which side are you on?
I’m with Keith.
One hundred percent?
Yeah. For all my heroes are old men, you know. And I’ve always sought the blessing of older men, from Frank Sinatra to Willie Nelson, to Bob Dylan, to Johnny Cash, to my friend the painter Louis Le Brocquy. In the Scriptures, the blessing of an older man is a powerful thing. Think of Jacob, who cheated his blessing out of his father Abraham, and dressed up as his brother. He wasn’t the eldest, and he put the pigskin on his arm, because his brother had hairy arms. He went in to his old blind father, just before his father died. And his father was giving out the blessing to the eldest. He stole the blessing. The extraordinary thing about the story is that God honored the blessing of the blind father. I’ve often wondered why. It puzzled me. And Jacob continued to be a bit of a cheater, right up until he wrestled an angel, running away from his responsibilities. That finally slowed him down [laughs], and he became the father of a great nation. But I was always amazed by that. For example, why would God honor this cheater, this man who stole his brother’s blessing? And the only answer that I could come up with was, and it might not be unsatisfactory, that he wanted it more. [laughs] And I think God was moved by that. He knew that blessings were very important, and he wanted his father’s blessing, and he knew that God operated through that line. Whenever there is a blessing going, I’ll be out there trying to catch it. Frank Sinatra, Willie Nelson. I have shocked and surprised people by asking them for blessings.
Really? Like what?
I asked Archbishop Tutu for a blessing. I knelt down—and he gave me one. [laughs] He’s one of the men I most admire in my life, and I’ve a blessing from him that’s gonna get me through a lot.
Anyone else?
Loads of people. Billy Graham would have to be at the top of the list. He offered me a blessing and then laid his hands on me. A beautiful man who could turn the Scriptures to poetry with his lilting Southern accent.
Isn’t it surprising that when I mention aging, the word blessing is the first one to cross your mind? Whereas most people cringe at the idea. Look at the way we are sold the idea of eternal youth. No wrinkles, no extra weight. I mean, most people would consider the greatest blessing in life to be eternal youth.
I just don’t see it that way anymore. I think that’s a hangover from the sixties, the obsession with youth. Some people die at seventeen and put their funeral off until they’re seventy-seven. And I see a lot of dead young people, I see a lot of alive old people. It doesn’t matter to me. I mean, voice is an amazing thing. Like Frank Sinatra, I love his voice. When I was getting ready to record “Two Shots of Happy, One Shot of Sad,” I was listening to him all the time. I don’t know if I spoke to you about his gift of interpretation, of reinterpreting. Have you heard “My Way” with Luciano Pavarotti? Because this song was written as a boast, and he first sang it as a boast. But you listen to his version recorded for the Duets album [eventually released on Sinatra 80th: Live in Concert], when everybody says he can’t sing, and it sounds like an apology—same lyrics, same melody. No one understands singing. For instance, Pavarotti, who duets on this piece, when people say: “Oh, when he was younger, he had this extraordinary muscle, this acrobatic voice.” I listen to him and I hear the same gift, but it’s the life experiences in his voice that make it so rich. I hear every tear that he spilled, every row, every compromise. People just don’t understand opera if they miss that. That’s what it’s about. And the idea that you have to sing it like some kind of Olympic sport, like ice-skating, it’s missing the point that this is art, it’s an interpretive art. So I love what age does to a voice. Look at how beautiful Willie Nelson looks and sings. I’m finally gonna be cool when I’m in my sixties.
You like what age does to a voice. But do you like what it does to you?
Yeah.
Definitely?
I think so. I mean, not everything.
That was my point.
By and large, I’m enjoying it. I’ve never been closer to my gift. I’ve never been closer to my friends. In so many important areas in my life, I’m finding my voice, not losing it.
You may be romantically attracted to twilight in your youth. But when it comes to your own, it is a different story. I mean, twilight, getting closer as you age. At forty-four, forty-five, you begin to think: OK, this, I won’t do anymore. I don’t have the strength to do certain things.
[interrupting] Maybe you, mate. [laughs] I’m stronger. I can run for longer. I bite harder. Maybe you’re clapped out.
So you have a webcam set up in my house too! [Bono laughs]
[Without warning, sets about singing the whole lyric to a song I must admit I had no knowledge of. It started like this: “Let’s put the key in the ignition / Hot and fresh from the kitchen . . .” I found out on the Internet it was R. Kelly’s “Ignition,” which he knew by heart and quoted without hesitation. Hearing Bono mentioning “Honeys to my left” and “Honeys to my right” sounded really weird. It seemed to me that the Prince obsessive that always lurks inside him kept defying the imaginary po-faced U2 devotee who thought his idea of fun, after a hard day’s work, might be to watch a TV documentary about World War II or to browse through a book about religious architecture. Bono then put forward his own exegesis of the song] Come on! I mean, let’s put the key in the ignition, start the car, and I’m just ready. I’m down the road. No driver. It’s like, I’m excited about the future.
But don’t tell me death is something you’ve never thought about. Or maybe you’re just repressing it.
No. I’ve thought about it more than most. I’ve had to.
You mean your own?
My own? Yeah, I did in my thirties. I had a couple of scares, and I think my sense of my mortality, my sense of everyone’s mortality, being in your thirties, I think that’s the first time you feel it, because in your twenties, you’re immortal. But I have so many questions to ask God. You know, there’s two inches missing off the bottom of my leg, for a start. [laughs] I want an explanation!
Are you sure that is the first question that you’re going to ask God?
I’ve many questions to ask God about the universe. There’s some explaining too, not just by me, but by Him. [laughs] I’m sure He’ll have a lot better answers than I will for my bad behavior.
What do you think will happen to you after you die? Do you have a vision?
You know, in this area, I don’t. I close my eyes and I try to imagine Heaven. But I think, rather like Hell, Heaven is on Earth. That’s my prayer. It was Christ’s prayer, which was: “Thy Kingdom come / Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.” I mean, that’s where Heaven for me is, and we’ve got to start bringing Heaven down to Earth now. So what I imagine Heaven looks like is this present life without this present evil, which just scratches and bites and bullies people. So that’s how I think about it. But I don’t know. I can’t imagine. When I try to think of, “What age would you be in Heaven?,” I don’t know. My brain is kind of too small for these kinds of glimpses.
But once you said to me that you heard voices when you wrote songs.
I hear melodies, yeah.
Have you ever imagined that you might be picking up words from the dead? People you knew, who come back and haunt you.
No. I never have. I think when you die, you’re dead. Next up, judgment.
Do you dream about people who have died? Most people do. I mean, I dreamt about my father yesterday. He’s been dead for twenty-three years.
Wow. And how did you feel when you woke up?
It’s hard to explain. I think I still dream about him becau
se I was so young when he died. I think I still want to talk to him, and I still want him to talk to me.
Yeah, you’ll see him again. I mean, you see, it’s just a moment. That’s the thing. It’s the blink of an eye, isn’t it? What’s the difference? Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, a hundred? In comparison to eternity, it’s only a split second. We live in a world that’s obsessed about our temporal selves. We focus too much on that, and it makes us very unhappy, because the body is getting weaker, and it’s difficult. But actually, the journey of the spirit is very important. We should think a little bit more about that.
Right. But you must feel a lot of pressure to stay young and fit because of your job. I mean, you need to work out more than the average Joe.
Oh, yeah. That area is one thing I’ve noticed. I have to fight harder for fitness. I can’t drink the same amounts, I can’t eat the same amounts. I can’t. I don’t stay on for as long as I used to. I’m not afraid of that. On death, I fear other people’s. I would miss my friends.
But there are two ends of the spectrum. On one end, you have Mick Jagger, who at sixty still runs like an athlete. And on the other, you have Bob Dylan, who always was a man of his age. And you seem to be floating somewhere in between.
We’ll have to see when I get there. I think my hero here is probably Johnny Cash. I’ve always been more mannish than boyish. The effete rock ’n’ roll figure has never been mine. I’ve always looked more like a boxer than a singer, or a thug. [laughs] I’ve never felt that need to be of fashion. I enjoy playing with it a little bit. But the film that Mark Romanek made of Johnny Cash singing “Hurt” is one of the greatest things popular culture has ever offered. It’s the end of rock ’n’ roll as juvenilia. And there is a man with a dignity to let us into his death and its “empire of dirt,” in Trent Reznor’s line. It’s the most remarkable song. And, wow! Think about India. Go to India and you’ll find respect for age way above respect for youth. Respect for youth arrived at the same moment as in-built obsolescence. They discovered with this sort of production line and manufacturing in the twentieth century that if cars lasted for twenty-five years, people wouldn’t buy other ones. So that’s in-built obsolescence. Rock ’n’ roll is the finest example of that, and the culture that came with it. We expect our rock stars to set fire to themselves. We’re disappointed if they don’t. If they don’t die on a cross, age thirty-three, we want our money back.
I’m not so sure that rock ’n’ roll invented the cult of youth. Yesterday, I was in Basel, Switzerland, where I saw an exhibition of Tutankhamon. It was the first time in my life that I could see everything that had been excavated from the tomb. So celebrating a fit, young body, and exalting youth is something that you can find in the remotest antiquity. And just look back on pre–World War Two Europe, at the Mussolinian imagery, or Hitler Youth, or even the Communist laborer as a young hero. The cult of youth wasn’t born yesterday.
I think that’s part of rock ’n’ roll, but it’s more to do with homoeroticism. The worship of boys, or girls who look like boys in fashion—that’s never gonna work for me. I am never gonna fit Tutankhamon’s coffin! [laughs] You’re gonna have to dig up the Buddha.
I saw a thirty-meter Buddha in Hong Kong, a very fat one. We could take some measurements.
Me, if I wasn’t so vain, I’d be living in Marlon Brando’s house in Tahiti. Just me and Marlon, drinking fine wines and swimming naked in the sea.
So why don’t you?
I wouldn’t expect that from you. I thought you’d be going off to some monastery, or some cave in India.
How do you know I’m not planning my exit? That’s what we should be talking about. Not my actual death—my fake death, Michka. I have to set it up: airplane crash, then up to Marlon Brando. I can be Marlon Bono. I can just lie on the sand, putting flowers into the hairs of my friends and the locals.*No, no. That’s my kind of monastery. Look, I worship God at sunrise, whether I see it going to bed or getting up. I’ve seen some of the most extraordinary sunrises anyone’s ever seen, all over the world. From the top of skyscrapers in Tokyo, or, with Liam and Noel Gallagher in San Francisco Bay, looking at the Golden Gate Bridge, or, in Africa, seeing through the mists of loss at a food station. I mean, crushing hangovers, and begging God for forgiveness. Sunrises, I love them. And as I told you, I get up early now. I don’t stay up late, because I’m in a work mode rather than a carnival mode. These days, I meet the muse on her way home. [laughs] When I haven’t been out with her, it’s still nice to see her with clarity rather than with a sore head. I have an advantage.
15. FROM THE TENTS OF AMHARA TO SLEEPING IN BREZHNEV’S BED
There was something uncanny about Bono’s route to Africa. Each time he had the opportunity, Bono would lay Africa on the table, whether I’d asked him about clinical depression or his impression of President Bush. My view was that since 1985, when he and Ali had spent three weeks in that refugee camp in the north of Ethiopia, Africa had more or less vanished from his field of vision. He certainly didn’t set foot on that continent until the day the U2 PopMart tour stopped in Cape Town, i.e., March 16, 1998. The truth is, for twelve years, before he received a phone call from someone trying to find a worthy champion for the Jubilee 2000 campaign, Bono had very little to say or do about Africa publicly.
It’s not really true in private,he said when we discussed that.I just hadn’t found an innovating or inspirational solution to some of these problems, i.e., I didn’t want to be a bore. I didn’t want to go on and on, be a bleeding heart without a strategy.But what was he ready to do in private?My definition of charity is the old idea that the right hand should not knowwhat the left hand is doing. If it’s public, it’s not charity. It’s PR. Unless it’s taking a stand. And at that time, I hadn’t a stand to take other than the sort of “Rock against bad things,” which is so banal. In the end, justice is more poignant than charity, which is so patronizing.So when did he get a strategy?1997–98 is when I re-entered the fray. Jubilee 2000 had a great strategy for canceling the debts of the poorest countries to the richest as part of the millennium celebrations.
In mid-2002, Bono accompanied former U.S. secretary of treasury Paul O’Neill for a tour of several African countries. I wanted to ask him how he accounted for all those “lost years” regarding Africa. Most of all, I thought I had to challenge his ideas about aid, which often contradicted some recent reports I’d read. Since I had no firsthand knowledge of any kind, I leaned on the work of Paul Theroux, whoseDark Star SafariI had just finished reading. The book is an account of his crossing the African continent, from Cairo to Cape Town. Rather dauntlessly, he’d traveled only either by bus or train, or on the back of a Jeep or a truck. About forty years later, he was revisiting the places and the people he knew as a young member of the U.S. Peace Corps. His conclusions were devastating: Africa is worse off at the beginning of the twenty-first century than it had been in the early sixties, when fledgling countries started to free themselves from the colonial powers, and that is the case not in spite of Western aid, butbecauseof it, he stressed. Theroux’s judgment on various aid organizations and representatives is a very harsh one. I wondered what Bono would make of it. The result turned out to be one of our most revealing conversations.
I’m afraid I’m going to be making some snide remarks this morning.
Oh boy!
Maybe what you said to me about your father’s negative attitude encouraged me somehow.
OK. Go for it. I’m terrified.
I’m going to read out to you a few lines from a book called Dark Star Safari, by Paul Theroux.*
Yeah, yeah. I’ve read it.
So you’ve read it. Then you know the story. There is a passage I wanted to discuss with you. Maybe you remember that part where Theroux is in Ethiopia in a place called Shashemene, which serves as a sort of haven for Rastafarians. There he meets with this seventy-one-year-old bona fide Rastafarian and a young zealot called Patrick, who tells him that the millennium is about to come to Ethiopia, b
ut it’s going to be slightly behind schedule because the Ethiopian calendar runs seven years and eight months late. And this guy tells him it’s not going to be water this time, but fire. And that—luckily—the Rift Valley will be spared. So Patrick invites the author to join him: that way he and his family will be saved. This is how Theroux concludes his piece: I thanked him and walking out to the main road I reflected on how Africa, being incomplete and so empty, was a place for people to create personal myths and indulge themselves in fantasies of atonement and redemption, melodramas of suffering, of strength—binding up wounds, feeding the hungry, looking after refugees, driving expensive Land Rovers, even living out a whole cosmology of creation and destruction, rewriting the Bible as an African epic of survival. I wonder how you reacted to that passage. You know that Theroux was very critical of the work of a lot of humanitarian workers.
Yeah. It’s a beautifully written book. There are passages I will never forget. A real love for Africa comes through as well as his frustration. But some of his comments since it has been published about humanitarian relief efforts have been extremely unhelpful. He figured the debate could do with some brutal truths. He was right there, but some of his comments were not true. He wasn’t really aware of the details of some of the proposals that were coming at the time. He was critical of aid propping up governments that should be let turn to dust. This has been true, and in some cases, it might still be. But to make that as an argument against aid per se is not credible. I think he’s just being a crank. And I love cranks! I mean, my country is filled with them, and people should voice off. But when your lives are depending on those drugs, when the communities are depending on help to build schools, such comments are not helpful.
He gives specific examples of humanitarian projects turning to ruin, such as a school in Uganda financed by Canada or a flourmill financed by the U.S.
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