Bono (9 page)

Oh, I see. Because I think he was on a road to perdition.
[laughs]
And extradition, and re-ignition—any other “ition” you can find—long before he
met her. He had gone out into the world, and was taking the biggest slice of the pizza he could find. He was young, he was in a great rock band, and he was the only rock star in the band.
[laughs]
He had four people's portion for himself. So that's a lot of pizza to eat!
[laughs]
He got sick after a while. He couldn't do a gig because of the size of the bellyache. The real betrayal in Sydney was not between Adam and the band. The real betrayal was between Adam and himself, because there is no more pro a person in the band than Adam. He found it very hard to live with that, and indeed he couldn't live with that. He realized that he had gotten himself quite sick, and he wanted to be better. It took him a few years, but that was a real turning point. As I say, he's a real pro.

A pro who didn't turn up for work.

Yes. We were filming, which made it even harder. It was the first night of Zoo TV live from Sydney. Twenty cameras in the house, steadycams and cranes, extra lighting—lights, action. Or in this case, lights, no action. We went ahead with the show out of respect for the people who turned up and the size of the bills we were going to have to pay if we didn't roll cameras. Adam's bass tech, Stuart Morgan, understudied that night, it was a heroic performance from him, and in fairness a performance deserving to be lit, which he wasn't. He was left in the shadows.
[laughs]
In fact, some people who were there thought it was Adam, which probably hurt him the most, though I might say, if I could, something about Adam's bass playing, and why in the end, it is irreplaceable. The bass can be the blandest of instruments in a rock quartet. Most concerts I go to, and not even rock—jazz, pop, blues—I don't notice the bass. Nobody does. Nobody knows what the guy who gets the girl is doing. In U2 that is not the case. I felt an enormous void that night and I felt I was falling down it. I felt we all were.

But had you seen it coming?

Yeah, yeah, we had seen it coming. But what can you do? He's so fun, he was so good at it.
[laughs]
He was very, very good at it. But it takes a long time to recover from that stuff. You can lose the spring in your step for a few years. I think separation from drink and drugs is probably very like separation from your wife. They say it takes about half the length of time that you've put in it to get over it. So if you've been married for ten years, it'll take you five. If you've been married for twenty, it'll take you ten for you to be really over it. I think if Adam was at it for ten hard years, it probably took him five years to get over it.

What sort of impact did it have on the band?

Whenever Adam got into trouble, we were always there for him. And no matter what scandal was happening, no one cared about the band in those moments. Everyone just cared about him.

Were there moments when you thought it was putting the band in danger?

Oh yeah, for sure, I was always concerned. Because, for us, it wasn't a win until everybody had scored. Everybody had to make it through this alive, to misquote Jim Morrison. Our motto was: “
Everybody
gets out of here alive.”

So Adam was dating Naomi Campbell and you had come face-to-face with the paparazzi and the celebrity business. It must have been traumatic for that zealot still breathing, from time to time, inside yourself.

No, no, no. Because you remember celebrity was on the list. It was part of the subject matter. Sliding down the surface of things was the energy of that period. I was the one who agreed to do the cover of
Vogue
with Christy [Turlington], and I had had enough of these po-faced U2ers. We were travelling the same routes as these girls, staying in the same hotels, though we weren't walking in the same shoes.
[laughs]

Who knows? Maybe in private.

I'm sure Adam tried them on, occasionally, as a great connoisseur of the shoe that he is. But he certainly poured champagne into a few. There was a certain fascination with their power with the populace. It goes back to the silent movie stars. Because in the thirties, Hollywood was never as powerful as it was in the silent age, and there's great power in not opening your mouth.

It's a power you haven't relied very much on during your career.

Which is why I so respected it in the likes of Christy Turlington, who, when she chooses to open her mouth, has a lot to say, thoughtful, considered, and intelligent as she is.

People say there were no bigger stars than Rudolph Valentino and Greta Garbo.

None bigger. And these super models [Christy, Naomi, and company] were the silent movie stars of our age. Blank faces and stares that on one level suggest a kind of erotic acquiescence, and on the other a kind of spitting at the cameras, a kind of annoyance seasoned with mischief.
[laughs]
There was something very powerful. When you got to meet those who were at the top of that particular tree, they turned out to be very clever, very smart managers of their own brand and, in the case of Christy, Helena [Christensen], Naomi, and Kate [Moss], people you'd want to hang out with.

Really?

Hmm . . . They were much more interesting than most musicians. We had a lot of fun, a lot of laughs. We spent summers together. It was great, but it was anathema for a lot of our fans.

Some thought you had lost it completely, or betrayed some sort of sacred cause. You were living the rock-star life.

The funny thing is, those girls, all of them, love and know music more than most musicians. Kate and Christy are brilliant DJs, and always know what's coming round the corner musically. Helena the same, and one of the great conversationalists, hungry for ideas—what can we make happen that night, that year. They can see potential, where others might miss it. And Christy just doesn't miss a thing. Our summers in the mid-nineties were a little heady, a little hedonistic, but Edge and myself fell back in love with music in a way that was largely inspired by those girls and some of our other friends, like Michael Hutchence: great house parties, dancing, swimming in the Mediterranean, night-swimming—there was a great REM song—Michael Stipe, a true poet. Frivolity, exactly the time when we needed some.

There's a word you're not using, which is
decadence
.

I'm not using it because it wasn't decadent, it was just the opposite. Decadence is when you have it all in front of you and don't notice. I noticed everything. And I appreciated it.

What about the rest of your family?

It was a great time for them also. We were all at home, Ali was now closer to the “big girls,” as they were known, than myself and Edge. There were young kids to look after, so we kept it somehow grounded.

But living the rock star's life was not what we expected from U2. Isn't it a cliché: here you are now, with a villa in the south of France. Didn't the Rolling Stones have a villa up the road where they recorded
Exile On Main Street
in 1971?

They should have stayed there; that's a great album. I'm one of the people who believes there's more in them. The music has to come out of a life. If there's no life, there's no music. But I think, again, as much as we were playing with clichés, we were also trying to crack them open. You've gotta remember the context here, the context of grunge, the sort of Seattle sound that was dominant at the time. I loved Seattle and I loved the sound, in fact the sound in the sense of a river, as it comes into the delta, the mouth of the river. It's industrial, it's gray, there's rainy skies, there's a plaid shirt, there's ripped jeans, there's thrift-shop jumpers with holes in them, and this kind of umbilical roar from Kurt Cobain. And there arrive in the harbor, plastic pants on a giant cruise ship with a satellite dish at the top going the wrong way up the river.
[laughs]
On Zoo TV, I suppose we were against the obvious definitions of authenticity. Authenticity is about an honest discourse between heart and mind, body, soul. It's nothing to do with the clothes you wear. These white rock stars, they think they're authentic, and that Prince is just some sort of show business Christmas tree. But he has more soul in his little finger than a whole harbor full of those rock bands. Kraftwerk . . . There's another example of cosmic soul.

The grunge movement was very much anti-eighties. It was aimed against the pretension to glamour of the eighties.

But the eighties weren't glamorous. The eighties were ugly: big hair, shoulder pads. I see the eighties as very ugly and very unglamorous. I think U2 are one of the few things you can recommend from the eighties.

The eighties were the reign of fun, fashion, style over substance, the love of money, all those things that people thought U2 were standing against.

We were, and still were in the nineties, challenging them, we just took a different route. The nineties were much sexier.

The nineties were sexier for you, because you had been a zealot during the eighties. Others hadn't been. I mean, look at Madonna. I think the funniest thing about the nineties is that pop artists wanted to go dark and introspective, and acts like U2 wanted to go pop and fight for their right to party. They sort of changed sides and crossed each other's paths. Would you agree?

But
Achtung, Baby
and
Zooropa
are hardly pop. They are as intense and dense as it gets. In fact I remember telling this to a German journalist before the album came out. But he misunderstood “dense” for “dance.” The remixes put the confusion to work.

That was in Europe. What about America?

I loved Pearl Jam. Eddie Vedder had an authenticity in that voice of his. They had and they still have commitment as a band. There wasn't much of that in the eighties. In fact, at the end of the nineties, when the PopMart show eventually got to Seattle, the city was really good to us. It was the best show of the tour, outside of Chicago. All the Seattle musicians came down to show support for what we were doing. You know, even Kurt Cobain, before he died, was dressing up in a silver shirt.

Who says
no
the most often in the band? I'm guessing it's Larry.

[laughs]
Well, I wouldn't have thought that needed much private detective work. Yeah, he's by far the most cautious person in the band, and does not want to set out on the journey until he has a clear idea of where we're going and how we might get there. How old-fashioned!
[laughs]
You know, he's the most sensible man in the band in that sense.

I remember, when
The Joshua Tree
was released, way before it turned out to be your biggest success, Larry was the one, in the interviews, who was supposed to have convinced you that the duty of U2 was to write and perform timeless pop songs.

Yeah. He and Paul McGuinness are the two people around us who are the most intolerant of what we might call the
artiste
, which is to say they're suspicious of art.
[laughs]
But that's all about control. If I were an artist, I'd want to be in advertising, because I would find it very difficult—and Larry would find it impossible—to hand over judgment of the quality of your work to critics. That's the problem with art: what is and what isn't art is decided by very few people. So those people, because there's less of them, become very powerful. Whereas with a song, it goes on the radio: people hear it, they like it, they put it at the top of the charts. It's not mediated the same way. So I think Larry's always had a suspicion of art, because, then, we're depending on the critics. Any band that has ever depended on the critics is usually broken up by the critics.

Because there's too much pressure on them? Is that what you mean?

Well, that's just no way to live. So he was always looking for the clearer idea, the clearer melody line with the least pretension.

But was he happy while you were recording
Achtung, Baby
?

Well, no. That's what I'm saying. So, therefore, the only way Larry was going to like
Achtung, Baby
is if the songs were great. He couldn't care less about the fact that we were working with technology. And the art project, that was just Bono and Edge being self-indulgent. Whereas the songs—are they any good? If not, let's go home, this place is freezing.

What was his opinion of Brian Eno?

Well, there again, there is a perfect example. Larry would have the least amount of time for process as an essential ingredient. Brian's all about process. The first thing Brian does when he arrives at a session is he redecorates the room—I'm not kidding. He tidies up the place, gets rid of instruments, amplifiers and . . . people
[laughs]
who are not integral. Then he asks about our approach, what approach are we taking. So there's a lot of time spent on the process. So Larry would have his eyes up to heaven. But then, when a great song arrives at the end of the day, Larry would walk up to Brian and go: “That was a great day.” But if the song didn't arrive, Larry would try to stop him being paid.
[laughs]
He'd want Brian to be writing the check for the privilege of being in the room with the band.
[laughs]
It's all about results. If the song arrives at the end of it, that must have been worth it; if the song didn't, he'd rather be home playing with his kids.

How was he showing his impatience?

I think on
Achtung, Baby,
there were a couple of occasions he was nearly at the airport. There was one occasion when he was left behind at what we called “the Brown Hotel” in East Berlin, where everything was brown. At a very tense time, when we had been in Berlin for three weeks, and had produced not one note of any real worth, when things were really tense, Larry was left in the hotel lobby by mistake when everyone else was taken to the studio. I mean, I think the comedy in the situation was eventually spotted by him. But Larry wouldn't mind being left behind if he later had to catch up to something great. He couldn't handle being left behind if he would later catch up with something as brown as the hotel. And there was a lot of brown on that record, before it finally became Day-Glo.