Bono (27 page)

These experiences have clearly altered the course of your life. Everything you've been talking with me about, all the presidents, all the Popes, all the arguments, I finally realize that it all comes down to this.

I don't think I can talk about this anymore. Let's change the subject.

OK, OK. Coming back to music, has your perception of African music changed after that?

I had a kind of epiphany, but it was a couple of years later, just sitting outside the Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles, when we were working on
Rattle and Hum.
The studio was way down east on Sunset Strip. And on a Saturday night, I would watch the parade of Mexican hot wheels, jumping trucks, muscle cars, and people cruising by, listening to rap breaking in America. Nineteen eighty-eight was incredible: incredible sound systems, deep sub-low bass, a cacophony of rhythm, chanting, disconnected voices, hip-hop coming from all directions. Amazingly sophisticated pop music.
[suddenly imitates human beat box and syncopated rhythms]
And I'm thinking: “I know this music. It's African music.” The epiphany was realizing that technology had brought African music to the descendants of Africa in America. People who had no memory of their continent of origin, and no direct experience of the call-and-response music that is Africa. Yet through technology, through digital samplers, scratching old vinyl, their music was swimming back up the river through swing, rock 'n' roll, soul, electronica, to its birthplace, which sounds to my ears so like hip-hop. How did that happen? Pure African music arriving through the DNA, through the genes of those people. That blew my mind. It still blows my
mind because of what it suggests of a kind of folk memory, of what we all might carry with us from our ancestors. And not just music, gifts, maybe even prejudices.

What about your ancestors?

Oddly enough, Irish music has more than a little in common with African music or Middle Eastern music. It comes from a completely different place than the rest of Europe, well, Northern Europe. Its musical scale is pentatonic, not chromatic, i.e., quarter notes, bent notes. The Shanos singers, for example, their melodies they sing unaccompanied can be traced to Northwest Africa. I visited a musicologist in Cairo once who backed up the theory of professor Bob Quinn of University College Galway, who said the sea routes from Africa had brought much more connection even in the pre-Christian era between the west of Ireland, west of France, west of Spain and West Africa. If you look at Ireland's most famous religious manuscript, the Book of Kells, it's like Coptic manuscripts of the same era. Now you'd tell that to my old man, Bob Hewson, and you'd get more than a hairy eyeball. You'd get a clip on the ear. Blackfellows, the Book of Kells. Feck off! You see, a sneaky racism plays a part in everything. The Irish, and I'm guilty of this, think they invented everything.

“All the presidents, all the Popes . . . I finally realize it all comes down to this,” I had just said to Bono when he told me about his experience in a refugee camp in Ethiopia in 1985. Since he started to work for DATA in the late nineties, he'd banged on many doors and met quite a few heads of state. Hence these mental snapshots of a few Elvises of the late twentieth, early twenty-first century—Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin, Gerhard Shröder, John Paul II, Jacques Chirac. Did all of those world leaders have an ear for the melody Bono sang to them? “Annoying question,” as he would put it.

It seems to me that you and Tony Blair are jealous of each other's job.

In one of our cases, maybe.
[laughs]
He's a pretty good guitar player—plays every day, his missus told me. I checked his guitar case to see if it was in tune. It was, perfectly. He had a band in college—Ugly Rumours, I believe it was called. Little did he know that might be his nemesis. But
seriously, he and Gordon Brown could really change the world if they keep up their work in Africa. They can be the Lennon-McCartney of global development.

You mean continual arguing?

I mean their best work is when they work together.

And what about your arguing with Blair?

Well, there are very few things I would disagree with Tony Blair about. Going to war, when he did, with Iraq would be one of them. But I believe he was sincere—sincerely wrong, in my point of view. But I think the extraordinary thing about Tony Blair was: it was clear, when he went to war, that he was doing the unpopular thing in his own country and with his own party. It wasn't a move to make himself popular. Fairly unusual behavior for a politician. We need more of this. Mind you, less of that.

You didn't answer the second part of my question. When does Bono want his seat in government? Does Bono want to be president?

[laughs]
I wouldn't move to a smaller house.

OK, so now, you've visited smaller houses. I mean, you've gone backstage.

Having gone backstage, yes, and seeing the laundry room and how a few live wires are sticking out of the odd wall. It's what politics has in common with sausage-making: if you knew what they threw in there, you wouldn't eat the end product.

What is the most surprising thing that you have discovered about politics?

[pondering]
How immense shifts in position begin instinctively rather than intellectually. And how great alliances are made because of a shared sense of humor or a spontaneous comment.

That reminds me of a funny thing I heard once. Someone told me he had spoken to an ex–Cabinet officer who said to him: when you're in school, there tends to be approximately three groups of people. Some are just obnoxious; some are clever and quite able; but most are just dull and wait till it's over. He said that when he joined the Cabinet, the distribution was exactly the same.

[laughs]
That's right. This is the thing: they start in the most unbelievable way to resemble people you know, in every good way and in every bad way.

Power is often very petty stuff. Have you read that book by the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski,
The Emperor?
I know you've read the one about his years as a war correspondent in Africa,
The Shadow of the Sun,
but
The Emperor
is about the last years in power of Ethiopia's last emperor, Haile Selassie. It is an extraordinary account of how power was organized there: an incredibly refined structure totally centered on itself, blind to the devastation happening in the country. Now that's quite an extreme example, but I'm pretty sure that half of President Chirac's day—or any president's—is the same: they deal with who is going to be invited to such and such ceremony, or how to prepare for the next election. Power is often more about itself than about actually doing useful things for the country or the rest of the world.

Yes, I have read
The Emperor,
and it's true. Red tape, whether they're cutting it to open hospitals on the same day as they are cutting the health budget, or the red tape of bureaucracy tying their hands behind their back, the machine of politics makes it hard for change. A good leader needs big scissors to get things moving. Actually, I think a great leader has to have a
great ear for melody. By this, I mean clarity of ideas. What I think they might all have in common, the ones that I've met—if they're any good—is an ability to see through the din and clangor of ideas and conversations and points of view, and hear the melody line, and realize: this is the thing we've got to do; this is more important than the others. They're like talent scouts in the music business. They're A & R men for ideas. Bill Clinton was incredible at spotting an idea.

Did you witness that talent of his in action?

Oh yeah! Like, I had to pitch him one.

You mean Clinton caught on to it immediately?

Well, his administration was full of people our own age. I mean, they were people in their thirties. He didn't just have an ear for a melody, he had his ear to the ground to pick up fresh insights, new ideas for the economy, for everything. He had a brain that could remember them all. I had met him a few times, but I remember, as I told you before, having to go to pitch him the Drop the Debt idea for the millennium, Jubilee 2000 stuff.

Describe the scene.

I remember it was a hot day in D.C., and I hadn't expected it to be. I was wearing like a blue cashmere coat, which I thought was pretty smart. I had some big boots on, but I thought the cashmere coat would be a compromise for the salubrious quarters of the White House. But because it was so hot, I had to take it off, leaving me with a T-shirt, combat pants, and boots in the Oval Office. So I looked like a member of our road crew. Our road crew are pretty stylish, but maybe not for the Oval Office.

How were you introduced to him?

He was waiting, sitting in his chair, in this historic office.

Behind his desk?

No. Smoking a cigar. Not behind his big desk, though he talked about his desk. It was President Kennedy's desk. Now every president gets to choose the desk of one of his predecessors.

What sort of vibe did you get when you saw him for the first time? I know you're very instinctive and you have this ability for tuning in to people.

I thought . . .
[laughs]
that he looked more like a pop star than I did. And I thought: he might be thinking that too, because I really did look like I'd come out from under a car. He looked very sharp, as he always does, and he just smiled. His staff and he himself just burst out laughing. I think they thought I was there . . .

. . . to do the plumbing?

I prefer carpentry.

What was the first thing that he said to you?

I can't remember. “Have a cigar,” probably. But he was very busy. He was good to see me. We had pleasantries, and a bit of a laugh about probably the first time we'd met, which was very funny. We were going to a Chicago Bears game, and he had offered us to jump a ride with him in his motorcade. But I noticed his concentration was on medium, which is to say he was listening, but not intently, to these pleasantries. It was only when I asked him, did he have any good ideas regarding the millennium? After all, he was going to make the big speech. Being leader of the Free World, it's a
historic moment. What did he have planned? Then I noticed his concentration sharpening. “Because,” as I explained, “I have a really great idea.” I said to him: “The dumb parade and the fanfare, is that all we're going to remember? Or could it really feel like History? Could it really be a new beginning for the people who needed a new beginning most, i.e., the poorest of the poor?” He got on that idea after a lot of questions in and around it, told me that he was already supporting the HIPC [Heavily Indebted Poor Countries] initiative, which was a World Bank initiative. It was a process where they were trying to ease the debt burden, but it wasn't going far enough or quick enough. I was saying that the millennium was the hook to hang this on and to getting the Bretton Woods people, i.e., the IMF, the banks, et cetera, farther down the road. He was very interested and very supportive, but he knew he would have trouble in his treasury, because Robert Rubin, who was the secretary of the treasury at that time, was not a fan of debt cancellation. He, it turns out, was a fan of Alexander Hamilton, the very first secretary of the treasury for the United States, who, when given a choice about whether the United States after Independence should refute its old debts with Great Britain, decided to pay them, and with that, gain credibility.

But did Clinton click on anything in particular that you said?

It wasn't a new concept to him. What might have been new was how popular a melody it could be, that somebody like myself was interested, and that it might actually be one he could sing on New Year's Eve 1999.

So you'd been trying to achieve a precise goal, there. You wanted him to mention it in his speech.

I wanted him not to just mention it. I wanted him to follow through on it, to raid the bank, the World Bank, as it happens!
[laughs]
Because it was going to cost taxpayers' money to cancel those debts. I didn't realize how
much he supported the idea. We wrote many letters, we corresponded, we talked. But until after he left office, I never knew how hard he had to fight. I remember his chief economic adviser, a wonderful man called Gene Sperling, told me just how frustrated the president was at not being able to further my proposal. At one point I had sent him a letter. Gene was called up to the top cabin in Air Force One, and the president was screaming at him at the top of his voice, pointing at my letter, going: “Why aren't we doing this?” So, you know, that would give you faith that a person with so much on his mind and plate had not just an ear for the melody, but a heart for the world's poor—to be in that position and have a heart for it, and be banging the table in frustration at his own civil service's inability to work it through. So, if anyone has any doubt as to the character who sat behind that desk, which was, by the way, Irish oak . . .

How could you tell it was Irish oak?

I told you I was a carpenter. No, because he told me. It was Kennedy's desk. I just wanted to put that on the record.
[laughs]

Let's fast-forward a few years. You're entering the Oval Office, and this time, it's George W. Bush. What are your feelings? Are you nervous?

Err . . . I'm never nervous when I go to meet heads of state. I feel they should be nervous, because they are the ones who'll be held accountable for the lives that their decisions will impact the most.

What was your gut feeling the first time you came face-to-face with President Bush?

I'm trying to remember the first time in there. I always give a gift when I have to ask or, in his case, have been asking somebody for a lot of money.
[laughs]
They can't accept expensive gifts, but I give them, you know, something small: a book of Seamus Heaney's poetry. He was much more amusing than I expected. Like, he was very funny and quick. Just quick-witted. With him, I got pretty quickly to the point, and the point was an unarguable one—that, you know, 6,500 people dying every day of a preventable and treatable disease would not be acceptable anywhere else in the world other than Africa, and that before God and history this was a kind of racism that was unacceptable. And he agreed: “Yeah, it's unacceptable.” He said: “In fact, it's a kind of genocide.”

Did he use that very word?

He used the word “genocide,” which I took to imply our complicity in this, which I absolutely agree with. Later, his staff tried to take the edge off the word. But in the Rose Garden, there was press, and I already had used the word.

It was too late to stop you.

Right.
[laughs]
He really helped us in using that word. He knew it was hyperbole, but it was effective. You know, we had corresponded before this, and I had to get through many doors before I got to President Bush. He was very formal, and I was wearing a suit. No tie, mind you.
[laughs]
I'm just remembering now. He commented on my glasses—that's right!—and he says: “Wow! They're kind of flashy.” And I said: “Are you envious? You want a pair?” It was that kind of easy banter. As I told you before, he was just about to write a check for ten billion dollars, new money to the world's poor. So he'd done the right thing. It was all very good-humored, because I wasn't pitching him on that. On the Millennium Challenge, he was delivering. He was agreeing to the pitch, so it was a different mood. I was laying the ground for the next pitch, a historic AIDS initiative, but I didn't want
to be too overt. Now, getting a politician to sign a check and cash a check are two completely different things. Our organization, DATA, and other NGOs have to work very hard to make everyone keep their commitments. Every year there's a budget, and our money could end up on the cutting-room floor.

So have they come through?

Not as much as I'd like, but yes, they have. If he makes good on his promises, President Bush will have doubled foreign assistance to Africa, the single biggest increase in forty years. Because of the deficit, though, it's like pulling teeth getting to the right numbers. I have to say the person who has put the most time into all of this and the person who, if they deliver, deserves a place in the history books along with the President is Condoleezza Rice. Condi gave the keys to her office to a bunch of English activists, Jamie Drummond and Lucy Mathew from DATA—not just the rock star and the Kennedy.

When Bush went to Africa, we advised on some of the sights, organized some of the people for him to meet, made sure he got to meet some of the real stars of this struggle. There's a nurse called Agnes Nymura from Uganda. I know her testimony brought him to tears. He put his arms around her after hearing how AIDS had devastated her family. In the embrace, she whispered in his ear: “I know you've done a lot for us, but what about putting some more money in Kofi Annan's Global Health Fund for TB, AIDS, and malaria?” She's amazing, a powerful woman in such a quiet way, but . . . maybe someone whispered something in her ear.