Rock and Hard Places (53 page)

“I think you’re trying a bit hard, there, but . . . for us, revenge is getting better. I don’t think John Lennon ever got over the fact that he was in a pop group, that The Beatles were the girls’ group and The Rolling Stones were the boys’ one. And that was the greatest gift, in a way, because he was constantly trying to recover from that. So I think that maybe when we were younger we didn’t have the brains to say fuck off, what we’re doing is more interesting than what you are. Today, to some degree, I can back that up. Back then, we just wondered did people hate our haircuts this much? The answer was yes, of course—and the haircuts were terrible, awful—but it was that very lack of style in this group that led us to soul.”

Bono borrows another cigarette from another autograph-hunter. The sun is beginning to set now, and South Beach is enjoying its daily hour of visual harmony between ground and sky. Rankin is making wind-up gestures in the distance, worried that the light will vanish before he gets his photo session, so I ask Bono if he can imagine a life beyond being the singer in U2, the only job he’s ever had.

“Yeah . . . I’d like to be alive. I’d like to chase little children across the street with a big stick. I am curious about. . . I love people like Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash, there’s something about their voices
as they get older. Bob Dylan’s voice on his new album is just . . . I love to write, and I think that’s what I’d do if I couldn’t sing, or perform. The deadlines that you have to deal with as a journalist are something I’d obviously have a problem with, but I like people who write. Where I’d be writing from, or where I’d be living I don’t know, but it’s something I’m getting more interested in, and you don’t get to do much of it when you’re in a band, because the lyrics are your attempt to put the feelings of the music into words.”

As we wander down the beach to do the photos, I comment that it can hardly have escaped his notice that, back home in Ireland, there might be more exciting career opportunities awaiting someone with his credentials. After all, if Dana can give the Presidency a shake on the strength of one long-past Eurovision appearance . . .

“Naw,” Bono says, and rubs one eye under his silver shades. “I wouldn’t move to a smaller house.”

 

FOUR MONTHS OR so later, after another
PopMart
show, I’m in a big room full of free drink and freeloading people somewhere underneath Waverley Park, an Australian Rules football stadium in an inconvenient suburb of Melbourne. I’m in Australia on holiday, reminding my parents what I look like. I’m about to get a fine demonstration of the famous law devised by another great Irish thinker, Murphy. By which I mean that if I ever take someone to a U2 concert whom I’m actually trying to impress, I just know I’ll be lucky to sneak in to the one-beer-and-a-hundred-straws C-list wing-ding for local radio drones, record company deadwood and spotty competition winners. But the night I take my mother . . .

“Andrew? Bono wants to say hello. Follow me.”

Mum, fair play to her, is very cool about the whole thing. She bows her head just slightly when Bono swoops low and kisses her hand, and when he asks her whether she liked the show, she just says she thought it was amazing how much of a racket four young men could make. Someone else I know waves at me, so I go and say hello to them, leaving Mum and Bono to it.

I’ve seen some weird stuff. But when I look over from the other side of the room at the pair of them still yammering away to each other, I wonder if it gets stranger than this.

 

 

 

I
T IS AXIOMATIC that all music journalists are frustrated musicians. It is also untrue. By early 2006, I had been writing about music for some or all of my living for nearly twenty years, since a Sydney street paper saw fit to print, and pay me for, a 300-word assessment of the merits of a show by Ed Kuepper & The Yard Goes On Forever at the Mosman Hotel (don’t look for it—it isn’t there anymore). I had also, during all that time, generally had a guitar about the place. Despite being equipped, therefore, with everything one might need to write songs—an ability to place words next to each other, and a musical instrument—the idea of doing so had never occurred to me, much less the desire to then perform such things in public. Until, for reasons outlined below, it did.

It is important, however, that my decision—or, really, in the circumstances, somewhat demented instinct—to mount a stage relatively late in proceedings should not be interpreted as an expression of any sort of inferiority complex attached to being a rock journalist. The idea that rock journalism is by definition inferior to rock music is curiously commonplace, and often expressed by the deployment of that annoyingly quotable quip, usually—though I’d prefer to be believe erroneously—attributed to Elvis Costello, to the effect that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. This assessment is wholly correct, though not for the reasons believed by the lackwitted dullards who
generally cite it. Rather, it acknowledges, explicitly, that rock writing and rock music are discrete and uncomparable means of expression—as different, indeed, as ballet and building. Just because rock writing is about rock music doesn’t invalidate it as an arena in which great things can be created—any more than rock music counts for anything less than whatever it was the rock musician in question was making rock music about. And, you know, like dancing about architecture would be a bad thing to do.

Great writing is great writing, whatever the subject—even a subject as dominated by mediocrities, chancers, scoundrels and buffoons as rock music. The works of the finest rock writers—an echelon, incidentally, of which I do not claim membership, being a dilettante in this as in all other realms of my trade—are, by any sensible measure, of greater worth than the output of 99 percent of all rock artists. This is a less provocative assertion than it might sound, once it is considered that 99 percent of all the CDs I’ve ever been sent have been useful only as emergency shaving mirrors—and that recent technological advances have made it easier and cheaper than ever for utterly talentless acts to inflict their hapless racket upon the commonweal.

By the time this volume appears, my own band, The Blazing Zoos, whose unlikely gestation is detailed below, will have done exactly that—our debut waxing, “I’ll Leave Quietly,” should be generally available for virtual or physical purchase. To those who ostentatiously sneer at the scrawlings of even the best rock writers while reflexively genuflecting to the creations of even the worst musicians, I will concede this much: that attempting, after nearly two decades of writing about other people’s albums, to make one of your own, is an instructive experience. Though it didn’t cause me to regret any of the harsh—or, indeed, downright abusive—judgements I have passed upon various recordings over the years, it did inspire some previously un-thought thoughts, which is always a useful blessing. I observed—and, during some longeurs in the final mix stages, slept through—the lonely diligence of the producer, in our case Mark Wallis, who has worked with everybody ever, but most humblingly from my perspective, had made several albums with my favourite band of all time, The Go-Betweens. I marvelled at the process by which colossally gifted musicians—that is, everyone in the band except me—can take a half-baked, barely-composed, ill-considered notion and turn it into something with a tune you can whistle. Most importantly, I laughed quite a lot.

Whether or not what we did is any good is a decision for others to make (I remember, during my time at
Melody Maker
, how we used to groan, and
subsequently mock, whenever some gormless indie wastrel mumbled, “We just do it for ourselves, and if anyone else likes it that’s a bonus,” but I kind of understand, now, what they meant). What I can say for certain is this. If, especially as a consequence of finding yourself unhorsed by some or other caprice of fate, you should find yourself entertaining ideas that you would normal consider unworkable, ridiculous or palpably insane, don’t dismiss them instantly (as long as, of course, they don’t involve taking automatic weapons to your school or workplace). Let your id run wild for a spell. You never know where you’ll end up.

WE’RE BARRELLING DOWN the mountain in the dark when I start to worry that the wheels are coming off, certainly metaphorically and perhaps literally. For most of the day-long run south along the coast from Tirana, the driver piloting our minibus has, by Albanian standards, been reassuringly decorous—more or less slowing down for red lights, parking at less than thirty miles an hour, that kind of thing. Not now, though. Something has spooked him, sufficiently that planting his accelerator foot seems a reasonable course of action in circumstances which are more suited to proceeding gingerly in first gear, possibly with a chap bearing a red flag and a torch walking ahead of the vehicle. There are no streetlights up here, and the only mercy of this absence is that it’s impossible to gauge how far we’ll fall, and onto how many jagged rocks, if we part company with the poor and unfenced road. And we’re going faster and faster and faster and faster.

The driver speaks no English. I don’t speak much Albanian, beyond the phrase “Nuk flas shume Shqip,” which means “I don’t speak much Albanian.” From my perch at the back of the van, I yell towards the only duoglot aboard, an emissary of Albanian youth activist organisation Mjaft!, who is clinging to the passenger seat up front. My enquiry, the essence of which is the expression of ardent desire for some sort of explanation of our sudden and potentially fatal haste, prompts a response as uncertain as it is unwelcome.

“There are bandits. . . he thinks.”

A tersely worded request for further elucidation yields little.

“There was a car...”

The narrative is punctuated by sharp intakes of breath and whimpers, some from him, others from the members of my band, The Blazing Zoos, who are all probably wondering, like me, if the bizarre and glorious pageant of rock’n’roll history contains an example of a group wiped out in a calamitous accident on the way to their first gig. If not, we may accomplish something this weekend.

“. . . he thinks it might be following us.”

This strikes me as unlikely, which I don’t believe is just wishful thinking on my part. We’re coming off the back of a vertiginous range overhanging our intended destination, the small resort town of Himare, where The Blazing Zoos are due to play at a festival on the beach. This part of Albania is generally reckoned relatively civilised (or so I’d assured my bandmates prior to embarkation). If we were negotiating the proper hillbilly country in the north, I’d concede that that driver had a case, but as things stand, it seems that the person most likely to get us all killed in the near future is in this minibus, not any of the other cars on the road—which might, after all, just be heading to the same event we are.

“He thought he saw guns.”

We’re in Albania, I mutter to myself. This is probably the only unarmed vehicle in a three-country radius.

“I am going to make some calls,” yells our translator, shakily prodding the buttons on his phone.

There’s clearly nothing for it but to hang on, hope and direct the same sort of water-testing entreaties to the God one usually disdains that one usually pleas when on an aircraft stricken by turbulence. Against this hypocrisy I offer upward the mitigation that my prayers are all on behalf of my bandmates, decent and reasonable people who have, unlike myself, sensibly chosen lives that usually necessitate little of being chauffeured at knuckle-whitening velocity by paranoid kamikazes and/or pursued by Kalashnikov-slinging ne’er-do-wells. Take me if you must, Lord, but. . .

“They’re sending some people up from Himare to meet us,” informs the latest yelped bulletin.

An all but two-wheeled lurch right, another one left, another one right again and we come to a rest in an impressively thick cloud of tyre
smoke in a happily brightly lit service station forecourt on the outskirts of some species of settlement. The white sedan that was either carting malevolent brigands or blameless motorists sallies blithely past. Our driver recuperates. My bandmates dismount, swig water, swat aside the mosquitoes, and engage in conversation that amounts to variations on the question “What the fuck was that about?” Heart rates are beginning to return to normal when a black car, with ominously tinted windows, roars up the hill from town, screeches to a halt in front of us and emits, with all the exuberance and none of the panache of a showgirl erupting from a cake, a sweaty, bald apparition brandishing a pistol. His black t-shirt declares “Security,” so I assume that he’s nominally on our side (even in the Balkans, it would be surprising to discover that the local highwaymen have their own bodyguard service). I thank him for his concern, and make what I hope are gestures placatory enough to encourage him to holster his weapon. He misunderstands me.