Bono (20 page)

Funny, I was thinking about the Virgin Prunes, the group that your friends Gavin and Guggi were in. They were very much into theatrics, bringing out the feminine side, cross-dressing.

. . . which was probably why I was wearing a fur coat . . .

You worked with Brian Eno, who was part of the early seventies glam-rock scene. I don't know if you remember that gatefold sleeve from the second Roxy Music album.

Yes, I remember he wore the ostrich feathers.

That's the one. And you didn't look like him or Guggi, but you didn't look like Bruce Springsteen either . . .

Artiness, arty-fartiness is around the corner from sissy, isn't it? But in a way we were an art group, even if we didn't look like one. Our joke was: we didn't go to art school, we went to Brian Eno. Because every other rock band in the British invasion, they were all “art school.” Brian Jones, Keith Richards, John Lennon, Pete Townshend, the Clash were art school. Sex Pistols weren't art school, but their manager was. You see, before we went to Brian, we had our own sort of avant-garde teenage years, our own surrealist performance art and humor: the giving of names, the arguments
about Andy Warhol's art and films—one major spat about his film
Bad.
The Virgin Prunes had actually taken over an exhibition space in Trinity College, where Guggi had sculpted vaginas out of fresh meat, flies and all. Gavin had one corner called “Sheep,” where a mate of ours crawled around on all fours in a traditional Aran sweater to take the piss out of the folkies. They were running amok. But if you look at those early pictures, the way the Virgin Prunes carried on was extraordinary. I mean this is twenty years before Marilyn Manson. There was a very strong glam cross-dressing aspect. I mean, it is a strange thing. Myself and Guggi, when we were kids, one of the albums we both obsessed on was Lou Reed's
Transformer.

What a title! Now I'm coming to think of it.

[laughs]
Little did we know what the title was about when we were thirteen: transexuals! We were very heterosexual, but that's a different point, isn't it? So were most of the glam-rock bands. It's funny Guggi later found himself in a frock as part of the Prunes. I see I'm macho enough to know that creativity is from the feminine side, and . . . there you go.

Let's go back to your coming to America for the first time. So you arrived when the Reagan era was just beginning.

That's right. But to go back to what we were talking about earlier, U2 would appeal to the ports in that Catholic sense, but we'd also appeal to the Midwest in that Protestant sense.

You were Protestant
and
Catholic. A country obsessed with religion must have got you going.

Yes, it's true. The Bible-bashing televangelists that you would turn on in a hotel—these knock-off salesmen for God—whereas most reasonable sensible people would just change the channel, I was fascinated.

Who was the first televangelist you saw on TV?

It was a preacher who was asking his audience in TV land to put their hand against the screen to be healed. So there were people, old ladies with bronchitis, old ladies with broken hips, and probably people with cancer, all over America, getting out of their armchairs and putting their hands on the TV. It broke my heart. But remember I was a believer. Though I understood the power of the Scriptures they were quoting from, and I did believe in the healing powers of faith, I was seeing it debased and demeaned. But unlike a lot of people, I understood the language. What's always bothered me about the fundamentalists is that they seem preoccupied with the most obvious sins. If those sins, sexual immorality and drug addiction, come out of unhappiness, then I'm sure God wants to set people free of that unhappiness. But I couldn't figure out why the same people were never questioning the deeper, slyer problems of the human spirit like self-righteousness, judg-mentalism, institutional greed, corporate greed. You only have to look to unfair trade agreements that keep the developing world in the Dark Ages to see the hypocrisy I'm talking about. These people talk about the debasing of culture. What about the debasing of hundreds of thousands of real lives?

Right. These people go to church on Sunday. I guess they're very generous when the plate comes around. So were you angry with those fundamentalists?

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.