Bono (29 page)

Oh, hello, Ali.

[Ali speaking]
It was a marquee, a circus, and there were cellos. Hello, Michka.

I had no idea you were in the room. I was just about to say: now, censorship is happening . . .

[Ali continuing]
I know, it's very bad. There was a marquee in the bottom of the pool. It is twelve feet deeper at one end. So we put a marquee up and we put a red carpet all the way down to the center of the pool. Because the band were away, we had fixed in the garden giant heads of Adam, Larry, and Edge, very
Achtung, Baby,
and some big fires. And then we had a four-piece string quartet playing as we walked down. It was a really very interesting night, very operatic, very Bono. But I'll put you back on with him, because I don't talk to journalists.

Well, you just did. So all of you are there. First, I thought he was by himself. Then I hear Jordan, and now it's you. Next thing you're going to tell me there are fifty people in the room.

[Ali laughs, continuing]
Just hang on one second. He's right here, OK? Take care. Bye.
[Bono takes back the phone]
Analyzing? Now I'm taking a pee. No, I'm not.

No need to explain. I can see everything on my monitor.

Don't you think I look well? I've lost weight.

I think you could do better with your hair color.

No. Actually, I'm gonna have a red head soon.

You mean like Annie Lennox?

No, I wish. I'll look like a traveling person from the West of Ireland. I'm closer in many ways and instincts. Yes, I'm out of my fat-Elvis period. I was just enjoying the year when we're not on tour, and just having the life with my family, drinking the wine, eating the pasta. Next thing you know, you're on stage in Vegas with the big brass band and you can't close your belt buckle.

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 because 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.