Bono (14 page)

Were there people you admired in Dublin back then? Colorful characters who influenced you?

Who's Maeve O'Regan?

No, I didn't have the sense. The people that were really big influences on me were my friend Guggi. He was a kind of a genius. He was not put into the same school as I. He went to technical school, because he could draw, right? And he had a very unique point of view, from very early on. And Gavin Friday—Fionan Hanvey—he was very aesthetic. He made decisions on your character based on your record collection. He was into Brian Eno and Roxy Music. These were the people that I felt normal around. And I had no other people I looked up to. On a level of pure friendship, Reggie Manuel, who was the nattiest dresser, and Maeve O'Regan, who brought me a love of books.
I've always had girls who are friends, as opposed to girlfriends. Even when I started going out with Ali. Maeve O'Regan and I were very close. She too had a boyfriend, a smart lanky long-haired American basketball-playing Neil Young fan who made me feel very inadequate. I felt so square next to my bra-burning brown rice hippie pal. She was ahead of me. Girls of the same age are always much more advanced.

Your friends Gavin and Guggi went on to become serious artists: one is a painter, the other an avant-garde conceptual artist. Whereas you chose to do something much more popular. It seems like you took two different paths.

It seemed to them at the same time that it was two different paths. But I don't agree. I just think it's all about communication. And it's just a freak that the thing that I do, a lot of people are in. It is the currency. To sing and write and be in a rock band is the route to pop culture, whereas to paint and to do performance art has a very limited audience.

Come on, you must have known even then . . . These things don't happen by chance.

Yes. Nothing happens by chance. You don't end up in front of twenty thousand people on a stage by accident.

So how did you end up making a fool out of yourself in front of twenty thousand people?

I had a bigger hole to fill.

What do you mean?

A rock star is someone with a hole in his heart almost the size of his ego.

Yesterday, for an hour and a half after rehearsal, clusters of people surrounded you. When we had dinner at Pavarotti's restaurant, people kept approaching you. And it felt almost like harassment. And I thought: when is this guy ever left alone? Your life is certainly different from the life of a solitary artist like your friend Guggi.

He spends so much time on his own. I'm envious.

That ego must sometimes be a very heavy load to carry. Weren't you ever tempted to get rid of it?

Oh, I think I can just about bear it. Just about . . .
[laughs]

You have always been in a band, you have always relied on others. Maybe you're missing out on the kind of truth you can only find in solitude.

But maybe I know it. Maybe I'm looking for the other half of the story. Maybe I have the first half instinctively, so therefore I don't need to spend hours. And maybe I had a glimpse of that when I was younger. I think, when I spend time on my own, a few things happen. After some hours, I start to laugh out loud. I do. After a few days, I'm having a great time. I go for a walk, and I read, because it's so fresh for me. Then, I'm brought back not to any new insight on the world, but to what I already knew. The noise separates me from my instincts. See, I always believed in instinct over intellect. The instinct is what you always knew; intellect is what you figure out. So for me it's not really a question of sitting and figuring it out. You know what I mean? That's not really gonna help me. What I need is silence in order to find my own voice again. I kind of know what I want to say, I just need the time. Not that I know what I want to say in terms of “I know what I've got to say, now I'm gonna write it,” but I know that when I start writing, it's going to come out anyway, so my intellectual life is simply as
editor, sorting through the debris. It's not that I'm trying to figure anything out. That's the difference. A novelist is just trying to figure things out.

I don't think so . . . I think a novelist has no clue about what he's grasping. There is that fantastic phrase that I always quote, by the Franco-American writer Julian Green: “I write my books because I need to know what's inside of them.” It's not that you draw out a map, make a big plan, and then fill in the gaps. That's what I would say bad writers would do.

Yeah. But you're talking about the discovery there, you're talking of trying to discover what is the truth. Whereas I'm not really looking for that. If I'm considering anything, all I'm on is the obstacles to truth.

I think that's the reason why you are a “community artist.” Why did you choose this path, the one where you are never alone? I mean, you never even considered becoming a solo singer.

Here's what happens to me: pretty much everything. You know, the way people who are searching for water, they have one of these forked sticks, wooden branches from a tree, that are called diviners? They hold the two branches and they walk to find water. When they're near the water, the branch starts to tremble. Have you heard about this? Divining. Well, for me, I just go where the thing's going off. I choose that pretty much in anything I'm doing. So wherever I feel more myself, wherever I feel the inspiration is, I want to be. So, in my case, being in a band, I feel completely freed. That's where I dig the well. But it's the same on anything. It's like that game that kids play, hide-and-seek. When they find it “warm,” “very warm,” “cold,” there you go, and then you put your finger in your brother's eye!
[laughs]
But it's blind man's bluff. That's what it's like for me. I just kind of go “there.” It's the same when I'm writing, it's like a very strong instinct. That's the answer to why I end up there. I didn't figure it out, I just did better work there. Why didn't I go on my own? I spent a lot of time on
my own as a kid. Maybe that's another reason for wanting to be in a band. I didn't like being on my own as a kid, because I would have liked a bigger family. I was always envious of the families on the street. Like, Guggi had a big family. And Gavin, all my friends had a big family. I'd be kind of sitting there, and I'm sure it's the same for you. Did you have a very busy life as a kid?

Well, not really. I was raised by an old Hungarian nanny in the countryside near Paris. I had glasses, I was clumsy, I was quiet. My older brother was better-looking. He was very popular, artistic, had lots of friends, and I worshipped him. So I thought I really had to find a trick of my own.

[laughing]
I like that phrase, “trick of my own.”

What I always admired in people like you, who are in bands and do community work, constantly relying on other people, is their patience. Whereas I would rather spend moments looking through the window, or rather the modern equivalent: spending time on the Internet, doing nothing, really . . . Getting bored is what fires me with the spark, eventually. I always wonder: what does it take to deal with bureaucracy as much as you do?

Well, you certainly need a lot of humility to depend on others. You need to put yourself second a lot of the time, or third, or fourth. The way we function as a band is a real phenomenon, in some ways more than the music. It's not an organization; it is, as they say, an organism. But that's family. Family makes people very strong. I didn't feel like I had one. I mean I've always envied people with a strong sense of family and community. They're always very strong.

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.