Bono (32 page)

That's what you felt, but he probably didn't mean it that way.

Yeah, maybe. He is a comedian. When he laughs, the sky, the trees, the room change shape. For a saint, he's quite wily. He said: “I've some people that I'd like you to meet, who work in this Truth and Reconciliation program. Would you be up for meeting them?” So we said: “OK. Yeah, sure . . .” We walked up, and there was a room with six hundred people. And he ushered us in.
[impersonating]
“Ladies and gentlemen, I have brought to you the group from Ireland, they're going to play for you . . . U2!” We just looked at each other. It was like: there's not even an acoustic guitar, what are we gonna play? We thought it was a photo op, you know, pressing the flesh, shaking hands.

So what did you do?

We sang a cappella.

What did you sing?

Err . . . “Amazing Grace.”

The four of you? Even Adam?

[laughs]
I wouldn't call it singing! They joined in, they've got much better voices. But his is a story of Grace in action. It's Grace interrupting Karma again, that's what Truth and Reconciliation's about. So actually it felt like the right song. And then I think we sang “I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For.”

Did the crowd know the words?

To “I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For”? They knew the chorus, though, pop life being what it is. Elevators, Holiday Inn bands, they probably never heard us singing it. Actually, the band is pretty popular in South Africa. I hope they'll figure it out.

What kind of feeling did you get from the crowd in South Africa? Did they react in the same way a crowd in Europe or America would react, or was it something completely different?

Well, you know, whenever you're playing big events in South Africa, you're excited about integration and what they've been through and survived—apartheid. But now having survived that, they have to face the AIDS emergency. You just think: these people are so resilient and so amazing. You go and you play a gig, it's like “Spot the black people.”
[laughs]
You're looking out at a sort of Irish audience. They look Irish . . . OK, maybe it's ten percent, but it's just that culturally they're not into rock music. That's no big deal, but it's funny. The end of apartheid is everywhere but in music.
[laughs]

What was it like when you met Nelson Mandela for the first time?

We didn't see him on the first trip. I met him in his house outside Cape Town. One of the houses, I'm not sure where. It was a beautiful house on a sunny day. He was sitting with some of his family near him. Big beautiful trees outside the window. He's just a very beautiful man in his demeanor as well as his spirit. He says to me
[impersonating]:
“What would you be coming to see an old man like me for?” Immediately turning it right around . . . It makes you burst out laughing! He always does that.

Was it easy for you to make a connection? I mean, he's such a monument.

Well, he doesn't behave like one. He's a lesson in humility. If Tutu is “grace in action,” he's “forgiveness in action,” bears no malice. Within six months of leaving prison after twenty-three years, he had befriended a lot of his one-time enemies. His re-entry into the real world of politics and compromise was supersonic. Having once proclaimed he would nationalize the diamond industry, he quickly copped on that maybe they were not the best people to be in charge of South Africa's great national resources and employment centers. He made friends with commerce. Diamonds, as it turns out, are more to do with show business than you think. There are far more diamonds in the ground than any jeweler would like you to know. It's by very careful manipulation of the market that they keep their value. It's not a cartel, but the diamond industry is very shrewd: one false move, and a happy couple's wedding ring would not be such a family treasure. Things like that say a lot about him and his Cabinet when they took power. How they avoided bloodshed and bile in the transition is one of the great miracles of the age.

What makes Mandela so different?

His imagination. His ability to see, taste, and almost touch a future that wasn't yet there. Most people in his situation would have focused on what
they had lost—the past. He's only thinking about the future. I read an article about his amateur painting. He was eighty years old at the time, telling the journalist that this love of painting would come in handy when he retires. That's hardcore.

You've appeared onstage with Mandela. When was the first time?

I went to an event with him we both agreed to in Barcelona. The event had not a great name, but memorably so—it was called “Frock and Roll”! It was fashion and music coming to the aid of the Nelson Mandela Fund. My friend Naomi Campbell was organizing it. We had agreed to go, but there had been all kinds of confusion with the promoter, and the city had turned on the event, and nobody knew whether it was happening or not happening. People, right up to the last day, were just pulling out. In the end, I think it was myself, Wyclef Jean, Alexander McQueen, Galliano, and a couple of other people. But at seven o'clock, there were about 500 people in the 20,000-seater arena. At eight o'clock there was about 2,000. Mandela was supposed to walk on at eight o'clock. So they held him back. There had been confusion. People thought the gig was canceled or whatever. And we waited until eight-thirty. There were about 4,000. People must have gone home to get their sisters and brothers. The organizers didn't want to worry him, so they turned the lights down.

You mean they tried to fool him into thinking that there were lots of people at the event.

Not to mention you, I suppose.

Yeah, in a nice way. But this is a man who can't be fooled very easily. And I walked out with him, me on the left and Naomi on the other side. We stood there, the small crowd clapped and cheered him as they should, and he just took the microphone and he said, looking out with his wise eyes
[impersonating]:
“It is a dangerous thing to have high expectations. And I'll admit to you I had high expectations coming to Barcelona.” The crowd grew a little restless.
I start staring at my shoes. He leaves a long pause that has everyone sweating, and with perfect dramatic timing continues: “I want you people to know this is a welcome I could never ever deserve or expect. Thank you for coming out to see me and for supporting the Nelson Mandela Foundation. It is a matter of great honor and pride that you have all come!” I looked out at the crowd . . . and suddenly it looks full! It is the same amount of people, it just didn't look empty anymore. Because that's the way he sees the world. If you spent twenty-odd years in the slammer, every day you're out is a good day. As I say, his modesty is overpowering. He taught me a real lesson there about our way of seeing the world. I remember when we were kids, looking out, asking our manager: “How many people are in the hall?” He'd say: “Well, there's 120. Capacity is 500, but it looks fine, it looks OK . . .” I remember feeling sick, or playing to eleven people in Bristol. It was just wonderful. We always tried to play our best, whoever turns up. But, Nelson Mandela teaching, it was a just a great way of seeing the world—that what you have in your hands is more than enough sometimes.

You just brought up the topic of performance. Something just crossed my mind. Haven't you ever had a weird feeling while onstage in front of adoring people, worshipping you whatever you do?

[interrupting]
But they're not worshipping us . . .

OK, they're not worshipping you. But I mean, they're ready to have the time of their life whatever you do, even if you're on a bad day, even if the sound is shit, and I've certainly experienced this kind of night. Isn't that weird for you?

Well, you see, I don't think they will. As I've told you before, I think the screaming and those deep roars are for themselves. That's the thing that's
going on in a U2 show, in fact a lot of rock shows. People are screaming their souls out, they're screaming for themselves, because their lives are wrapped up in those songs. So one starts, and then they go off. You see, it's not about us—it's about them. If we weren't great, they wouldn't be there the next time. That's just the way it is. People are discerning, and tickets cost money. The reason people are there is because we really give a lot of ourselves in our live shows. So I don't see it as that sort of adoring crowd thing. I think that's almost a Hollywood idea. What's going on is much more complex than that. They're not really adoring.

Really? Are you serious?

An amazing thing happened in Chile—it has happened more than a few times. I think you might call it dissent. Whatever you call it, I think it disproves your theory of adoration.

I'm all ears.

In Chile, we played our song “Mothers of the Disappeared,” a very controversial song in that country. Lots of families had children “disappeared” while in the custody of “government police.” We asked for the show to be televised that night. Most of the population couldn't afford tickets and be able to see it. I brought the
madres
out on to the stage, and they said the names of the missing children into the microphone. Then I spoke to Pinochet as if he was there, as if he was watching television, which I'm sure he wasn't. I just said: “Mister Pinochet, God will be your judge, but at the very least, tell these women where the bones of their children are buried, because years later they still don't know where their loved ones are, you see . . .” They reckon that he does, or some general does. And this crowd divided quickly into two halves. One half cheered, and one half booed, because there are still mixed feelings about what went on. I thought: “Wow! This is not all just people who are on our side. They don't agree with us,
they're letting us know, here . . .” Two songs later, they were back cheering again. People are smart. They don't have to agree with you all the time. The rock audience, the U2 audience, does tend to be smarter than your average bear. They're not like a bunch of arty-farty types, they're not intellectuals, but they're thinking people.

I guess music isn't about what you think. It's much more about what you feel. And U2's music is no exception.

That's absolutely right. A feeling is much stronger than a thought.

But U2 has always been about ideas as well. Maybe there's a contradiction here.

Well, I don't see it is a contradiction. I think they work side by side. Anyway, I'm gonna have to run.

In June 2004, I went back to Killiney for the first time in eighteen months. My ambition to “sit down together and read through the manuscript” with Bono had been conjured up several times, but always postponed. So it was looking good. After a quick cup of coffee in the kitchen, Ali left and the house seemed deserted. Before we got started, Bono was anxious for me to listen to a few songs the band had just completed. One of them was “Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own,” which he'd previously sung at his father's funeral. Neither CD system, either in the kitchen or in the study, seemed to work. So we eventually listened to the unfinished studio CD through his daughter Eve's ghetto blaster. I made the predictable joke about the shoemaker's children who always go barefoot. It had been the same at Elton John's place, Bono revealed.

I remember Bono telling me that U2 fans knew him better than his best friends, because he sings through his fans' headphones directly into their ears. Well, may I contradict him? He
does
sing in the ears of his friends. As the song was playing and I was sitting next to him, he kept on
interrupting, singing over his own lines like an annoying passenger in a car. Except, it was not annoying—it was moving. The three songs I heard made a huge impression, especially “City of Blinding Lights”: here was the original sadness and pounding melancholy of old U2, shot through with the same desperate craving. The band sounded twenty-five years old but at the same time reborn.

Anyway, things—and that didn't exactly come as a surprise—didn't go according to the plan. Sure, Bono was available for a couple of hours, but the idea of “reading through” the manuscript was out of the question. I was the only one to bring a text all scribbled through with question marks and incidental questions. Bono had no idea where his copy was and did not seem to really care. I found one of the chapters lying next to the phone, one of his answers covered with a cryptic circle in the middle (no, not a coffee-cup ring). I needed him to talk more about his father and his childhood. It felt like he'd been a bit reticent about it. You already know the result; it found its way inside chapters 1, 2, and 4 of this book.

I remember that just as the gates opened to let his new Maserati get through (“We shouldn't leave everything to the Germans,” he pronounced), he sang along to “Vertigo,” the new U2 single, which sounded like an undiscovered punk-rock stroke of genius from 1979. I noticed an unexpected pair standing there by the gates, waiting to get a glimpse of Bono: a dignified father and his young son, waving with a kind of humble pride at King Bono driving his own coach. It seemed to me they were paying their respects to a nineteenth-century poet and national hero, not a rock star.

Just a couple of weeks later, we talked again on the phone. It turned out we had the same topic in mind. The news had just been announced in the
Wall Street Journal
that Bono was joining the board of Elevation Partners, a new venture capital firm. This is how Robert A. Guth's report read:

Bono, lead singer for rock band U2 and antipoverty activist, is starting a new gig: media and entertainment investing. The 44-year-old
rock star is joining Elevation Partners, a new Silicon Valley fund set up earlier this year by veteran technology investor Roger McNamee and John Riccitiello, who in April left his post as president of videogame maker Electronic Arts Inc. for Elevation. Fred Anderson, 60, who retired earlier this month as Apple Computer Inc.'s finance chief, also will join Elevation. The participation of Bono should sharply raise the profile of Elevation, which people familiar with the fund say initially will raise $1 billion for buyouts and investments in media and entertainment companies, seeking to profit from turmoil in those sectors. Elevation is expected to look for investment opportunities in media and entertainment companies disrupted by the advent of the Internet and other digital technologies. Music, movies, publishing and other traditional media industries are grappling with how to exploit new distribution means—including the Internet or cellular phones—while stemming piracy that such technologies enable.

Once again, Bono found a way to bring up the subject of Africa as he was answering my third question. But I guess I found a deft way too to maneuver that devil.

I think I'm going to address the businessperson today.

Sure. Have you seen the
Wall Street Journal
piece this week?

Yes, I'll be getting to that. But I was wondering how I should address you now that you are a co-chairman of that board: “Mister President,” maybe? That reminds me of a silly yet funny story that my father used to tell me. He was raised in Milan. You're aware that Italians love grand-sounding titles, to such a degree that calling someone “Sir”—
“Signore”—
may be close to insulting him. There is a man crossing some street in Milan, quite absentmindedly, and a car is just ten seconds away
from hitting him. Someone is desperately trying to call for his attention:
“Attenzione, dottore!”
No reaction. Then he calls out louder:
“Avvocato, attenzione!”
Still no reaction. Then, he goes at the top of his voice, wringing his hands:
“Commendatore! Attenzione!”
But the man wouldn't turn round. And nobody in that street dares to say
Signore!
So bang, the car crashes into the unfortunate man, and he's lying dead on the road, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers with their mouths wide open. So after I read about this
Wall Street Journal
thing, I was thinking: Now, how shall I address Bono in his new capacity? I mean, it might be dangerous for you if people dare not address you as Bono anymore. How about: “You dirty capitalist pig”? Will that do the trick?
[Bono laughs heartily]

Guilty, your honor! Yeah, that's a high compliment, pretty good for me. Pigs are useful. They're the cleanest animal in the farmyard, and they bring home the bacon.

I'd like to get into the details of your glorious life as a pig. Did you really want to be that pig in the first place? In U2, are you the born businessman of the group?

Well, the first time we went to get a record deal, I went as the band's manager
[laughs],
which was interesting, because Paul [McGuinness] had, rather wisely perhaps, said: “You're not ready for a record deal.” He didn't want to go around the record labels until we had better songs. But I thought our songs had something. So I went to London with Ali. We were eighteen and seventeen years old in 1978. I'd never been before. It was a very special trip for us. We stayed in a guesthouse. I brought the demo tape around to record companies, and then to the
NME, Sounds,
and
The Record Mirror.
So I remember I would drop in with the tape, I'd give it to a journalist I had read and wanted to meet, and ask them to listen. Usually they
would say: “Look, if I like it, I'll give you a call back.” And I would interrupt:

“Well, then I'll call you in an hour.”
[laughs]
And they were going: “What?”

It's true. That's the way it happened, in those days. You'd push the door open into the editorial office of a rock mag. It wasn't guarded, or anything, and you'd propose your stuff, be it a tape or an article.

They were all so very kind to me, those writers. After hawking the music around, two record companies were interested in offering us a deal. Now this was before we'd had a management contract with Paul. So he got a bit of a fright when I came home. We had two record companies wanting to make a deal, and he wasn't even signed up as a manager. He quickly signed us up. Look, we never did close those deals. But the point is I always felt that with the gift comes the urge to bodyguard it. I never bought into the cliché “I'm the artist. Keep me away from the filthy lucre and the tawdry music-business world.” It's just complete horseshit. It's horseshit! It's been going on for years. I just want to say: “Stop that!” Because I know I've grown up with a lot of these bands. Some of them are the most awful, selfish, darkest individuals you could find. And some of the people in the record company who go home to their wives at night might be people you'd rather go on vacation with. I know some incredibly inspired business people, and ethical, and I know some real assholes with a golden voice. So I just don't have that picture of the world.

So what was the first important business decision that you made?

Within our band, we started a kind of cooperative where we published everything equally amongst us. That quickly got all those arguments that normally happen in bands about whose song is going on the album and whose song isn't. This was at the behest of Paul, and established a pattern of extraordinarily smart advice over the years. It was Paul who felt that it
would be a great thing if we could keep ownership of our songs and our copyrights, and even our master tapes. So at one point, I think it was, like, 1985, we renegotiated our deal with Island Records, took lower royalties, but at the end of the day, meaning after the contracts concluded, as I think I already told you, all the master tapes and the copyright would return to us. Another thing I will be forever grateful to Chris Blackwell for.

So very soon, U2 was tainted by the filthy lucre and the tawdry music-business world.

U2 were never dumb in business. We just had a strong sense of survival in us. We essentially became our own record company, living in Dublin, not in London, or New York, or Los Angeles. We don't sit around wondering about world peace all day long. We're not sitting around like a bunch of hippies. We're from punk rock, and we're on top of it. I wish we were more on top of it, but that's an important part of that story. I've just been out, speaking to various people in business. They are completely bewildered when I tell them my story. I mean, they have no idea. They think that the record company came up with the name U2! Or they think that our manager was the person who planned our pathway to success. It couldn't be further from the truth. Paul McGuinness mentored us in principles that proved to be the best there were, and the record company helped us in our journey. But we are very much in charge of our own destiny, and have been always. I think that's really important.

I remember you described yourself as a “traveling salesman.”
[Bono laughs]
I mean, many artists would rather hide their business-savvy side.

Yeah. No! Particularly, I've had an epiphany in recent years about commerce, for my work in Africa. It has upended everything for me. You start to see that Africans are looking for a commercial way out. One of Africa's big problems is trying to foster an entrepreneurial culture. And so you
start to see that they get the thin end of the capitalist wedge. But there is a wide end. Globalization has become a pejorative term, but it's meaningless. Globalization is like saying communication. Globalization has happened formally since deregulating international flow of money, going back to the eighties. But before that, you could say that globalization started with the sail and trade. And it turns out that the sail has done more good . . .

. . .than evil . . .

. . . than evil. Africa needs more globalization now than less. I think it's really funny. “Globalization! What's it doing to Africa?” And Africans are saying: “What do you mean? We can't get any!” What critics mean is the abuse of globalization.

I think that you're dodging the topic.

What I'm saying is: I've started to set up a few companies. I started to see commerce—conscious commerce—as the way forward for Africa. As an example, I've set up a company with my wife and the designer Rogun, called Edun. It's a clothing line. We're launching this in the spring of this year [2005]. We've invested a lot of time, energy, and capital in it. It's an amazing thing. I want it to work as a business, I want it to make profit, but I also want it to contribute something to all the people in the chain. We have this concept of “four respects” at the heart of our company: One, respect for where the clothes are made. We want them eventually to be all made in Africa, but certainly the developing world. Two, respect for who makes them. Three, respect for the materials that they are made of. We're trying to use organic cotton when we can. Four, respect for the people who are going to buy them—the consumer. We want to do business with Africa, because that's what they want. I want to facilitate that. And I want to say: you can make profit without ripping people off, consumer or
manufacturer. We want our clothes to tell their story, and the story to be a great one. Because when you buy a pair of jeans, the story of those jeans, where the cotton was grown, who grew it, how the sewers in the factory were treated, those stories are all woven into your jeans, like it or not. If there is a happy beginning, middle, and end, I mean if everyone in the process was treated fairly, well, then
[laughs]
when you put on those clothes, you're going to feel better about them and yourself. There's going to be some good Karma. But not if they were made by children. Ali said to me: “I want to buy children's clothes that aren't made by children.” So I am getting very excited by these ideas of commerce now.

Is Edun anything like your other company, Nude?

“Edun” is “Nude” in reverse. Nude, my brother and I started as a good-for-you fast-food chain. At the moment, it's turning into a line of body-conscious products that will be made, like chocolate and coffee, in Africa, and makeup products from India. It's just exciting, creating a product range, where again, the story of the products, and how they got there, is something you want to buy into as well as the product itself.

But, Bono, you are a performer in a band. That's your first job. You've turned into a part-time humanitarian crusader. And now you're on the verge of becoming an almost full-time businessman. Aren't you afraid that this is all going to carry you farther away from the U2 mystique? Or, to quote a word that you used in Bologna, from the “sexiness” of being in a rock band?