Bono (6 page)

Are you implying that you saw a few of your peers getting out of touch?

I'm just saying you don't need all the accoutrements that a lot of my friends have.

But why do they have to have them in the first place?

I don't know. I think it's the status. It's a very hierarchical business. What table you get in the restaurant tells how your career is doing. It's happened to me many times, where you turn up at a restaurant or a club and they haven't got the booking right and you have to queue or get turned away. The paparazzi are taking your photograph as they see you looking a little embarrassed and taking your guest by the hand and retreating. That could have been sorted out by security or an advance party calling ahead, but it's not my style. So maybe there are good reasons, sometimes, for having an entourage. But I don't want to stray too far from the street. I'm not saying I'm not good at the penthouse life—but I'm also good at the pavement. That's a source of pride for me, that I'm good at both. I'm good at the high life, I'm good at the low life. It's the middle where I lose it.

So you don't see yourself as a celebrity, then.

No, I'm not a celebrity.

Who the hell are you, then?

I'm a scribbling, cigar-smoking, wine-drinking, Bible-reading band man. A show-off
[laughs]
 . . . who loves to paint pictures of what I can't see. A husband, father, friend of the poor and sometimes the rich. An activist traveling salesman of ideas. Chess player, part-time rock star, opera singer, in the loudest folk group in the world. How's that?

Mmmh . . . I'll let you off just this once.

It took me some time to ask Bono about his closest friends: his fellow musicians in U2 and their manager, Paul McGuinness. I thought Bono and I had to get closer in order for him to talk about them, which he eventually did in a very revealing way. It was a Saturday afternoon in his study, and the mood was very relaxed.

Have you heard the story about how Mick Jagger and Keith Richards met up for the first time? I guess they were about sixteen, waiting for a train to London. Richards actually approached Jagger because he had seen him walking with these ultra-rare records from the Chess catalog. Can you remember a similar encounter between you and Edge, something you'd refer to as the founding scene of your friendship, both personal and artistic?

Which albums?

Well, Edge was in Ali's class at high school. They were a year behind me. I'd seen him hanging around the corridors of school with albums under his arm.
I remember there was a group called Taste.

Oh yes, of course. They were Rory Gallagher's first band.

And then I remember Edge picking the guitar, sitting down in a corridor, once. He was playing Neil Young's “The Needle and the Damage Done.” I was trying to play it as well. I was envious because I could tell that he could play a little better than I could.
[laughs]
What I didn't realize at that time is that he could play a lot better than I could. He always had that thing about him, that he wouldn't nominate himself to run in the race. But if he was put in the race, he would want to win it. It's a strange thing, and I don't know where it comes from. He has a healthy disrespect—and respect—for his own ego.

What do you mean?

He knows what he's capable of, and he would not push himself forward. He would rather hang back in the shadows and be discovered.

So what you're implying . . .

[laughs, interrupting]
What I'm implying is I'm his manager. Whereas Larry was different. Larry, who started the band, would tell you that he has no interest in being a rock star. But he's the one who started the rock band. So that's a little disingenuous, because he's the guy that loved T. Rex, Bowie, and the great pop stars. It's a strange thing. So he, in a way, though he didn't hang around in the shadows like Edge, once he was discovered certainly made attempts to run back there. But “Me thinks he doth protest too much,” because I think Larry's really great at being in a rock 'n' roll band, but he doesn't think he is. Has all the instincts, but the way it appears is that myself and Adam were the showmen of the group.

Adam was already the “cool guy” in your school, right? He was more of a hip dresser than the three of you, which maybe was not such an outstanding achievement.

Yes, but he, like myself, has got it wrong.

You mean more wrong than you?

No, it was both. In terms of sartorial elegance and expertise, as the two showmen of the group we have proved ourselves inept over the years. Whereas the two supposed shy men of rock 'n' roll are very good at it. They always look good, they never put a foot wrong, and they never want to lose their cool. My only excuse is I never wanted to be cool, I always wanted to be . . . hot.
[laughs]

You probably were more impressed by Adam than he was by you. Wouldn't you say?

Yeah, I think that might have been true. I was fascinated by him. I'd never met anyone quite like him.

What do you mean? What was he like?

Well, he had been expelled from an upper-class public school in Ireland, and arrived at this free school with a posh accent, wearing a caftan that he had picked up on his holidays at age sixteen, hitching through Afghanistan. He'd had “Afghanistan '76” written on his T-shirt, and his hair was corkscrew blond hair, but in an Afro. He looked like a negative of Michael Jackson.

Maybe he wanted to look like Jimi Hendrix, the way Eric Clapton did when he was in Cream.

That's right, Hendrix was a big hero in Ireland. And he has a lot in common, in a certain sense. Adam has a very unique sense of where the one is, in terms of where the beat is in the bar. His timing is very unique. Most rock 'n' roll is made by people who love 4/4, but his timing is much more 5/8, much more of a jazzman. I heard somebody saying, when Jimi Hendrix was taught guitar, he couldn't keep 4/4 time, the simplest time. Now Adam can, but it's not really where he wants to be.
[laughs]
I think it's probably because he listened to a lot of jazz, to Jimi Hendrix. That's where he was coming from.

Ever since I met you, I've always heard you address Edge as “Edge,” but do you remember a time when you called him Dave?

Yeah, I think probably for the first year. By '78, I think he was The Edge.

And did he call you Bono first or Paul?

He would have called me Paul up until, maybe '76. I was known as Bono by my friends in Lypton Village.
*
Edge and Adam and Larry weren't really a part of Lypton Village until later.

Was it easy for them to start calling you that? Maybe a few people found it irritating and kept calling you by your given name?

The thing about these kinds of nicknames is they're contagious. You don't have to ask people, they just start doing it. I can't remember when Ali started calling me Bono. I was sixteen, I'd say. Edge had another name from Lypton Village.

And what was that?

“Inchicore.” It's the name of a small town on the outskirts of Dublin City.

So who had this preposterous idea to call him The Edge?

I do preposterous in this band. It had something to do with the shape of his head, his jaw, and an insane love he had for walking on the edges of very high walls, bridges, or buildings. Before Bono, I was “Steinvic von Huyseman,” and then just “Huyseman,” and then “Houseman,” then “Bon Murray,” “Bono Vox of O'Connell Street,” and then just “Bono.”

“Bono Vox of O'Connell Street”—now that's an aristocrat's name. There's nobility in it.

Well, yes.
[laughs]

Weren't you a baron or a count?

What my friends had in mind is close to count.
[laughs]

When he started the band, Larry was not even fifteen, and you were sixteen and a half. Didn't you feel like a grown-up amused by the nerve of this kid?

It was his band. I think, for a minute, he wanted to call it the Larry Mullen Band.

What sort of music did he want to play?

He loved glam rock. That was his thing. The Larry Mullen Band wasn't really a very glam-rock kind of a name.

It sounds like a jazz-blues band from the mid-seventies.

He was the star. When he sat behind the kit, definitely, the room changed temperature. There was something going on. He played the drums like his life depended on it. And I think, in some very real way, that was true.

And by the way, why didn't Larry and Adam get a nickname, like you and Edge did?

I think the “Junior” [Larry Mullen, Jr.] certainly added the jazz-blues band bit. I convinced him to do that. Adam Clayton just sounds black anyway. But they had unofficial names: Larry was “Jamjar,” and Adam was “Sparky.”

So would you say Larry was the most dedicated musician of the bunch?

Edge was pretty good—I mean, no, Edge was more than good. But Larry was really impressive, I thought. Just the drum playing, the way the sound just fills the room, and the silver and the gold of the cymbals. His kit was a bright crimson. We'd never seen anything like that. I mean, we'd been playing shitty guitars.

And he had a perfect kit.

I mean, his kit was like a cheap copy.

But it looked great.

It looked great. It was bright and shiny. And he looked great behind the kit. Adam knew all the right words. He knew what to say; he had the lingo; he was
[adopting ghetto voice]
“down with his big bad self.” He had all the musician talk. But what we didn't know, until a few practices, is that he could
not play a note. He arrived with a bass guitar and a bass amp, and he looked incredible. He had all the gear, had all the right terminology. He looked funky, he acted funky. We didn't realize at the time he couldn't play a note. And so big was his bluff that we looked pretty much everywhere else to why we were sounding so shit. Him!

You mean you didn't realize it in the first place.

Well, he was the oldest, and he looked the most professional.

On a more personal level, I have this feeling that the one you had to feel the closest to was Larry, because you shared some difficult experiences in your teenage years. He lost his sister and then his mother in those years. Was it something that helped you get closer to him?

We always kind of hit it off, actually. Then, as now, Larry does not let many people in. But when you're in, he's a very loyal and reliable friend. I'm a kind of a loyal and unreliable friend. But there's nothing he would not do for you. The thing that stuck us together was that I had this experience of bereavement. I had lost my mother when I was fourteen and he had lost his when he was sixteen, and we both had to deal with fairly authoritarian fathers. As Larry would tell you himself, we both ran away with the circus. So, while the tent was being put up on the outskirts of Europe, we were still outside, and would look at the elephants, and talk a lot. We still do, on occasions.

What did you discuss the most with Larry—and wouldn't as readily with Edge or Adam?

The moment, the
now
that we wouldn't miss out on, the moment we were in, because of the place we wanted to get to in the future. Because Larry wasn't sure about where we were going, and I wasn't sure about where we were.

So Larry's the first one you really got close to?

I'd say Larry and I were pretty close friends. We shared a room on tour. We were the odd couple, really, because he's completely meticulous.

And you're not?

I'm just not. My suitcase would just blow up, and there'd be stuff all over the floor. Larry used to bring his own sleeping bag, because he didn't like to sleep in the sheets of these really cheap hotels. He would actually sleep in his sleeping bag up on the bed.

So he wouldn't catch any fleas or lice?

I remember one time I slagged him off so much that he said: “OK.” He threw away the sleeping bag, and he left the sleeping bag at the bottom of the bed. He slept in the sheets. When he woke up, he was head to toe in this rose-colored rash. So people used to laugh at the two of us.

Insiders have written accounts about the tacit division from the very beginning between you, Edge and Larry, the Irish Christians, and then, on the other side, Adam and Paul McGuinness, the English skeptics, with business sense and posh backgrounds, raised by military fathers. Is this real or an invention?

Well, Adam and Edge were friends. They came from the same suburbs. They were kind of middle-class and they both had British passports. But in terms of fun and frolics, going out, drinking wine, looking sharp, and living the life, I think Paul and Adam had a lot in common. They became friends. Myself, Edge, and Larry were kind of zealots. And we were determined that the world, in all its finagling attempt to corrupt you, to take you away from where you should be going, would not get us. But it's like that
old story of the guy who's hiding from the world by climbing up the mountain backwards. He gets halfway up the mountain. He finds a cave. He just looks left and he looks right, he looks up and he looks down, to make sure the world hasn't followed him. Then he looks back into the cave, that's dark and that's quiet. Then he hears something. What's that? It's the world!
[laughs]
There's no escape. We just didn't know that, then. But it turns out that that's a much more subtle threat than sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Self-righteousness, self-flagellation, these things are as dangerous as what you might call the worship of the self. At that time, we were determined that we would never change. The music business would never change us, success would never change us. But if you think about it, that's a terrible thing. That would be awful, not to change. And of course you should be changing. Paul and Adam just wanted to have fun, and get out there, and see what the world had to offer. We knew what the world had to offer—we didn't want to buy it. So we went in a completely different direction. But there was a lot of respect from us to them, and from them to us.

But have Paul and Adam tried to talk you out of this zealot attitude over the years? Or did they remain silent and respectful?

No, they were very respectful. I remember Paul saying, when we put out our second album,
October
[1981], which was a kind of religious experience of an album to make, very un–rock 'n' roll: “Look, these are not questions I'm asking, but they're questions I'm interested in. Anyone with a brain should be interested in these questions. And though you won't find many people in rock 'n' roll who are prepared to be so open like you are on this album, you look to black music, it's full of songs like this. Look to Marvin Gaye, look to Bob Marley.”

That's a case you're often making. You're presenting ideas of what U2 did or what you yourself are doing now by pointing to black artists. It's
interesting, because very few black artists have had a big impact on the rock audience, apart from Bob Marley or Prince.

Yeah, it's the Irish, we are the white niggers. Paul had the overview, because he was a few years older than us. Chris Blackwell, who had founded our record company, Island Records, also discovered Bob Marley. So he was very supportive. So you have your manager and your record company who are totally supportive of what looks like completely eccentric behavior in white rock 'n' roll. But if you look to writers and painters and poets, then you'll often find the search for the ecstatic, the trauma of religious experience.