During the winter of 2003, Bono did a lot of what he called “footwork” on behalf of DATA in the United States. That occurred during the very period when the U.S. and their allies cast no doubt on their intention to invade Iraq. From what I grasped from Principle Management’s camp, Bono was reminded, somewhat firmly, by his colleagues that he still held a job as singer and writer in U2, and that an album was due for production that year. I got the information that Bono was due to give a performance on May 25, 2003, at the Pavarotti and Friends concert, a TV charity event that the maestro stages every year in his hometown of Modena (in Emilia-Romagna) for the benefit of his foundation for ill children. Other guests included the three remaining members of Queen, as well as Deep Purple, Eric Clapton, Lionel Richie, and local soul singer Zucchero. Bono had a duet programmed with the tenor. This was no Lollapalooza. I proposed to come over. Bono thought that was a good idea, and that maybe we could spend some time together. So I flew there. Bono rehearsed with what seemed to me a full orchestra. You could see Pavarotti sitting on a chair at a close distance, covered in a sort of flashy red smock of a light fabric round his neck, the kind I remember the barber would make me wear as a child in the mid-sixties. It was hanging loose on his massive features, so it made the impression of a big red balloon with a bearded smiling head on the top of it. Bono was wearing his usual Fidel Castro khaki cap. He rehearsed two songs: the first was a version of “One,” accompanied by his acoustic guitar and the orchestra. But the important number was the duet of Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” for which he had written new lyrics. He sang:Ave Maria / Where is the justice in this world? / The wicked make so much noise, Ma / The righteous stay oddly still / With no wisdom, all of the riches in the world leave us poor tonight / And strength is not without humility / It’s weakness, an untreatable disease / And war is always the choice / Of the chosen who will not have to fight.The day after the performance, the lyrics to Bono’s revised “Ave Maria” were reproduced in every national paper in Italy.
As soon as Bono and team set foot outside the dressing room, it looked as if every possible media person in Italy was in the place. Bono stopped every two yards, speaking in front of a camera. Then there was a press conference held in a tent. Here, Bono seemed more like royalty than a celebrity, as everyone politely guffawed each time he made a joke. It was an impression that was confirmed later that evening. A dinner was set up at the restaurant owned by Pavarotti in the countryside. There, it turned to Beatlemania, except that it wasn’t girls but women cooing over Bono. I swear I saw a few of them twisting their high heels on the gravel driveway, in order to catch a fleeting glimpse of him.
At the second floor of the restaurant, which had been reserved for our crowd, media people kept queuing, thirsting for the great man’s words of wisdom. All of a sudden I was sitting next to Gandhi: not a bad promotion, I thought, for a guy who used to climb on piles of speakers at his own concerts. After an amazing round of desserts and grappa, we went down the stairs again. We passed in front of the resident band. They were performing “Unchain My Heart.” Grappa-inspired, Bono picked up the mike. I’m not sure he knew the song. The diners cheered. When we left, grown-ups still seemed to chase after us. And it was not over. When the motorcade stopped in front of Bono’s hotel in Bologna, he was greeted by a crowd of a hundred youths who cheered ecstatically. One of them brandished an acoustic guitar; another one waved the cover ofWar.Bono seemed more to be sucked into the hotel lobby than to actually enter it. Then I was left to walk to my own hotel. The sudden quietness and solitude felt weird, on the brink of being eerie. I felt I had been thrown out of an interstellar spaceship, let loose in an arbitrary spot.
The next day was a different story. I was meeting Bono in the lobby of the Grand Hotel Baglioni at midday, whence we were scheduled to leave by car and have lunch together. A crowd was still hanging around, kept away by crowd barriers and the usual guy in a black suit. In five minutes Bono was down in the lobby with Sheila Roche and his tour manager Dennis Sheehan, who said we had to use the other exit, as there was no way we could break through that crowd. On the double again. Then, as we went down the stairs, Bono muttered something to himself and said it was not OK, that this behavior was too much of “a pop star thing.” So up we went again. We tried for the main door. Bad idea. The cheering crowd massed ever more tightly, traffic was blocked, and we could not take the smallest step forward. So Bono had to settle for the pop star thing and use the back entrance.
We quickly arrived in a quiet and narrow street in Bologna’s Centro Storico. The empty restaurant that had been booked was so dark I first thought they were out of business for the day. Bono decided to settle for the café next door instead, a nondescript place, equally empty, where he chose to sit at a table outside. We ordered some pasta and a plate of local ham and salami. It was a brave choice of venue on Bono’s part, and one that eventually got on my nerves (though I didn’t show it), since we were interrupted every two minutes. A girl on a bike approached us and took Bono’s arm, glowing, crying“Che fortuna!”(“What luck!”). Then two policewomen asked for autographs. At one point a local resident thought it was a good idea to put on “Pride (In the Name of Love)” at the highest possible volume. I must admit I was the nervous one. Throughout, Bono was as quiet as if he were sitting in his own garden. I think that reflects on the conversation, where the mood got more and more—dare I say it—“spiritual.”
Remember what you told me back in Killiney? “You should ask me to draw a tree at some point.” [Bono laughs out loud] Maybe you should have thought twice before saying that, because I want you to draw a map of the route you took to get from home to school.
It’s a long one, though, because I went into the center of the city, and back out. [proceeds to draw a map on the back of a scribbled sheet] This is all the North Side, OK? I was at a place called Ballymun, a mile from the Tower Blocks. Actually, the Seven Towers. I’ll put them in. [draws with unconcealed pleasure] It was an incredibly long journey: five miles into Dublin city center. And then I’d take another bus all the way, because you couldn’t get to Mount Temple [his school]. That’s very important, because most kids are not in the city. They’re out there in the suburbs. At twelve or thirteen, I WAS A TOWNIE [writes the phrase in capital letters]. So I used to hang out in record shops.
Do you remember the names of the stores?
Yeah, Golden Discs. And that’s a great one: Pat Egan’s, in a basement. UV light. Punk rock lived there later. [scribbles them on the sheet]
Lots of things seemed to happen there.
Lots of things. Gambling. [keeps on drawing] Very important thing in here. One of the biggest institutions in my life: “Lost and Found.” CIE, bus company. They knew me by name in there, because I lost something every week. I lost all my books. I lost everything I had, all the time. And I still do. Like, I lose my phone every week now. I don’t seem to have a very good short-term memory. For instance, especially now, from traveling around the globe and having people driving you in taxis, chauffeurs, and so forth, I know not to store this information, because it’s not my hometown. So I have no idea of directions. Even now, in my own city that I grew up in, I’m starting to forget where I’m going. [resumes drawing] Now, along the road—Glasnevin—was the Ink Bottle primary school. First kiss. And botanic gardens, beautiful botanic gardens. River Tolka. I used to lie along the banks of the river Tolka, among the flowers—poppies, they were—and just dream. It was a Protestant school. There weren’t many Protestants in the area, so I had to go out of the area to visit the place. It was a tiny little thing with a tiny little yard. The headmaster was very good to me, to all of us. We used to kick the soccer ball over the railings into the river, and then we’d have to call school off and we’d all climb over the railings and chase the ball all the way along the river to get it back, so we’d spend miles going. On a sunny day, he kind of turned his back and waited for us to kick the ball over the railings and into the river, because I think he liked it too. It was very good memories for me, that school. Though, my first day at school, somebody bit my friend. So I banged his head off the railings. So I remember very quickly getting to a place where people wouldn’t want to bite me. [laughs]
The first thing you drew on this map was these Tower Blocks.
I had very strong feelings about it at the time, because I remember when they pulled down the trees and fields, and started to develop the housing estate. This was to be the first high-rise experiment in Ireland. We used to play in the foundations. Then we heard they had lifts in them. We thought: Oh, this is gonna be great, this is like being modern, and Dublin’s going like everyone else. Just as everywhere else in Europe was discovering that high-rise doesn’t work, in Ireland we were just starting. They moved inner city communities away from their own self-managing, and policing, and real community spirit, put them in high-rise buildings. It started very quickly to descend into a dangerous place. Lifts would break down. People’d get very upset that you’d have to walk up the stairs. I remember walking up the stairs to see my friends, it was piss coming down the stairs, and stink. These were really nice families, good families, living next to people who were sociophobes, who were feeling freaked out about their new address. So when we used to go for a walk in the fields, we could come across the gangs from the Seven Towers, and that was the jungle. Violence, as I told you, is the thing I remember the most from my teenage years and earlier. This was like a working-class area that we lived in, fairly—maybe working-class, lower middle-class—but, you know, the difference between the incomes of people who lived here and people who lived there might be very little. It might be like a car. My old man had a car, so we were rich. And that was a reason to be tortured.
So the other kids who lived there resented you?
Oh yeah. Dublin was very violent. Then, the drugs came in, round 1978. There was very cheap heroin. The people who were smoking dope ended up smoking heroin, as they gave it to them for nothing. And then when people were really strung out, that became an unbelievably violent place.
Teenagers at that time seemed to feel like the old world was being destroyed. Don’t you feel as well that punk rock was a way of responding to that?
I think what punk rock gave to us was that you could knock everything down and start again, either decide who you wanted to be: a new name, a new pair of shoes, a new way to see the world. Everything was possible, and the only limit was your imagination. That became further true with DJ culture. You didn’t even have to play an instrument—you just had to have the imagination.
Maybe punk rock happened in reaction to the ugly new architectural landscape that was springing up, which was close to a nihilistic statement in and of itself.
Oh yeah. The violence of suburbia starts with its ugliness. The inner city communities, those redbrick houses, they actually had something attractive in texture and tone, those tiny houses my grandparents grew up in. There was more to them than this new suburbia. You know, in Ireland, in the seventies, a lot of these places were built by corrupt builders. They didn’t put in plans for shops and amenities. It was just cookie-cutter housing schemes. In a way they defaced Dublin, these property developers. And the violence that returned to them, a generation later, we all had to live with it. Because in housing schemes like Tallaght, I think it’s 27,000 young people between the ages of twelve and eighteen walking the streets every night. It’s like an army. There was nowhere for people to go, nothing. Women used to push their prams for miles. This is a violence done to them. It’s a great place now in comparison.
I once read an interview with Mick Jagger, where he said: “When I was twelve, I loved to play the fool in front of my friends.” I figured you weren’t like that, I presume your mood would have been more somber. Is that so?
Well, no. I was full of mischief and fun. Probably until I was fourteen. And I think everything changed when my mother died, and our home became an empty house, with all the aggression between my father, my brother, and myself. But up to that, I was full of fun and mischief.
Yeah, you mentioned that.
I mean, I had all of that. Then, later, I found that fun and mischief again with my friends and the Village, as we used to call ourselves. We invented a Village, which was an alternative community, called Lypton Village, and we used to put on arts installations, when we were sixteen, seventeen, with manic drills and stepladders. See, the alcohol level in our neighborhood was so high, people going to the pubs a lot, and we were young, arrogant, and probably very annoying kids, but we didn’t wanna go that route. The pub looked like a trapdoor to somewhere very predictable, so we wouldn’t drink. We used to watch Monty Python. We invented our own language, gave each other names, and we’d dress differently. We would put on these performance-art things, and in the end we formed two bands, the Virgin Prunes and U2. But I did have what you French would call joie de vivre, I was fun. You know what Ali said to me ten years ago? She said: “You know, I fell in love with you because there was mischief in your eyes. You were bold as brass, and you were fearless, but you made me laugh. You’ve gotten very serious.” That was true towards the end of the eighties. I started at this point to dismantle my earnestness, and set fire to my . . . [pause] self!
Were there people you admired in Dublin back then? Colorful characters who influenced you?
Who’s Maeve O’Regan?
No, I didn’t have the sense. The people that were really big influences on me were my friend Guggi. He was a kind of a genius. He was not put into the same school as I. He went to technical school, because he could draw, right? And he had a very unique point of view, from very early on. And Gavin Friday—Fionan Hanvey—he was very aesthetic. He made decisions on your character based on your record collection. He was into Brian Eno and Roxy Music. These were the people that I felt normal around. And I had no other people I looked up to. On a level of pure friendship, Reggie Manuel, who was the nattiest dresser, and Maeve O’Regan, who brought me a love of books. I’ve always had girls who are friends, as opposed to girlfriends. Even when I started going out with Ali. Maeve O’Regan and I were very close. She too had a boyfriend, a smart lanky long-haired American basketball-playing Neil Young fan who made me feel very inadequate. I felt so square next to my bra-burning brown rice hippie pal. She was ahead of me. Girls of the same age are always much more advanced.
Your friends Gavin and Guggi went on to become serious artists: one is a painter, the other an avant-garde conceptual artist. Whereas you chose to do something much more popular. It seems like you took two different paths.
It seemed to them at the same time that it was two different paths. But I don’t agree. I just think it’s all about communication. And it’s just a freak that the thing that I do, a lot of people are in. It is the currency. To sing and write and be in a rock band is the route to pop culture, whereas to paint and to do performance art has a very limited audience.
Come on, you must have known even then . . . These things don’t happen by chance.
Yes. Nothing happens by chance. You don’t end up in front of twenty thousand people on a stage by accident.
So how did you end up making a fool out of yourself in front of twenty thousand people?
I had a bigger hole to fill.
What do you mean?
A rock star is someone with a hole in his heart almost the size of his ego.
Yesterday, for an hour and a half after rehearsal, clusters of people surrounded you. When we had dinner at Pavarotti’s restaurant, people kept approaching you. And it felt almost like harassment. And I thought: when is this guy ever left alone? Your life is certainly different from the life of a solitary artist like your friend Guggi.
He spends so much time on his own. I’m envious.
That ego must sometimes be a very heavy load to carry. Weren’t you ever tempted to get rid of it?
Oh, I think I can just about bear it. Just about . . . [laughs]
You have always been in a band, you have always relied on others. Maybe you’re missing out on the kind of truth you can only find in solitude.
But maybe I know it. Maybe I’m looking for the other half of the story. Maybe I have the first half instinctively, so therefore I don’t need to spend hours. And maybe I had a glimpse of that when I was younger. I think, when I spend time on my own, a few things happen. After some hours, I start to laugh out loud. I do. After a few days, I’m having a great time. I go for a walk, and I read, because it’s so fresh for me. Then, I’m brought back not to any new insight on the world, but to what I already knew. The noise separates me from my instincts. See, I always believed in instinct over intellect. The instinct is what you always knew; intellect is what you figure out. So for me it’s not really a question of sitting and figuring it out. You know what I mean? That’s not really gonna help me. What I need is silence in order to find my own voice again. I kind of know what I want to say, I just need the time. Not that I know what I want to say in terms of “I know what I’ve got to say, now I’m gonna write it,” but I know that when I start writing, it’s going to come out anyway, so my intellectual life is simply as editor, sorting through the debris. It’s not that I’m trying to figure anything out. That’s the difference. A novelist is just trying to figure things out.
I don’t think so . . . I think a novelist has no clue about what he’s grasping. There is that fantastic phrase that I always quote, by the Franco-American writer Julian Green: “I write my books because I need to know what’s inside of them.” It’s not that you draw out a map, make a big plan, and then fill in the gaps. That’s what I would say bad writers would do.
Yeah. But you’re talking about the discovery there, you’re talking of trying to discover what is the truth. Whereas I’m not really looking for that. If I’m considering anything, all I’m on is the obstacles to truth.
I think that’s the reason why you are a “community artist.” Why did you choose this path, the one where you are never alone? I mean, you never even considered becoming a solo singer.
Here’s what happens to me: pretty much everything. You know, the way people who are searching for water, they have one of these forked sticks, wooden branches from a tree, that are called diviners? They hold the two branches and they walk to find water. When they’re near the water, the branch starts to tremble. Have you heard about this? Divining. Well, for me, I just go where the thing’s going off. I choose that pretty much in anything I’m doing. So wherever I feel more myself, wherever I feel the inspiration is, I want to be. So, in my case, being in a band, I feel completely freed. That’s where I dig the well. But it’s the same on anything. It’s like that game that kids play, hide-and-seek. When they find it “warm,” “very warm,” “cold,” there you go, and then you put your finger in your brother’s eye! [laughs] But it’s blind man’s bluff. That’s what it’s like for me. I just kind of go “there.” It’s the same when I’m writing, it’s like a very strong instinct. That’s the answer to why I end up there. I didn’t figure it out, I just did better work there. Why didn’t I go on my own? I spent a lot of time on my own as a kid. Maybe that’s another reason for wanting to be in a band. I didn’t like being on my own as a kid, because I would have liked a bigger family. I was always envious of the families on the street. Like, Guggi had a big family. And Gavin, all my friends had a big family. I’d be kind of sitting there, and I’m sure it’s the same for you. Did you have a very busy life as a kid?
Well, not really. I was raised by an old Hungarian nanny in the countryside near Paris. I had glasses, I was clumsy, I was quiet. My older brother was better-looking. He was very popular, artistic, had lots of friends, and I worshipped him. So I thought I really had to find a trick of my own.
[laughing] I like that phrase, “trick of my own.”
What I always admired in people like you, who are in bands and do community work, constantly relying on other people, is their patience. Whereas I would rather spend moments looking through the window, or rather the modern equivalent: spending time on the Internet, doing nothing, really . . . Getting bored is what fires me with the spark, eventually. I always wonder: what does it take to deal with bureaucracy as much as you do?
Well, you certainly need a lot of humility to depend on others. You need to put yourself second a lot of the time, or third, or fourth. The way we function as a band is a real phenomenon, in some ways more than the music. It’s not an organization; it is, as they say, an organism. But that’s family. Family makes people very strong. I didn’t feel like I had one. I mean I’ve always envied people with a strong sense of family and community. They’re always very strong.
There is one thing about your life that I find quite unusual and extraordinary for a rock star. You have been monogamous for twenty-five years.
I wasn’t set up for marriage. I was not the kind of person that any of my friends would say, “He’s the marrying kind.” But I met the most extraordinary woman, and I couldn’t let her go. I have somebody in my life, after a long time, I still feel I don’t know. And we have a real sort of almost creative distance between us, that Ali manages. Relationships need management. She has an incredible respect for my life, and she’s a very independent spirit. So I don’t know how others would have made it through a married life with that length of time, but that’s how I have. I don’t know how you have, or how anyone else does it, but I think that’s what it is. And of course, respect and love. I’m still in love.
But falling in love with another person happens to everybody. I’m sure it happened to you. What is the inner force that has kept you from breaking your marriage?
Breaking my marriage? Maybe a strong sense of survival. I can’t remember his quote exactly, but there is a writing by Jean Cocteau where he says friendship is higher than love. Sometimes, it’s less glamorous, or less passionate, but it’s deeper and kind of wiser, I think. At the heart of my relationship is a great friendship. That’s in fact, in many ways, the key to all the important doors in my life: whether it’s the band, or whether it’s my marriage, or whether it’s the community that I still live in. It’s almost like the two sorts of sacraments are music and friendship.
But you’re the singer and front man in a band, and it’s not just any band. I’m sure you’ve been tempted. Don’t you ever feel that no matter what you have decided, love needs to be incarnated?
That’s not what the Chinese say.
I had never heard you mention your Asian origins.
Yes, for the missing years, I was in China, standing on my head and studying under the Great Noodle Maker.
OK, let me put it another way. To my ears music has always been sexual. It is certainly what happened during the last U2 show I saw, during the Elevation Tour of 2001. Especially the opening song, “Elevation,” that you performed in naked light. A rock show is not only a release from sexual tension. It can also arouse your sex drive. Think of groupies.
We never fostered that environment. If you mean groupie in the sense I know it, which is sexual favors traded for proximity with the band, it sounds like a turnoff to me. When there is no equality in the relationship, it’s less interesting. Taking advantage of a fan, sexual bullying is to be avoided, but the music is sexual, and particularly our music does have this thing. It’s like the lovers’ row, like one ongoing conversation and argument. And the songs being in the first person, it’s quite weird. Sometimes, you can end up fighting with yourself, or the erotic love can turn into something much higher, and bigger notions of love, and God, and family. It seems to segue very easily from me between all those.
But when you’re onstage, do you think of, at some point, one imaginary face, or do you fancy one imaginary body, or one imaginary girl?
Usually, I’m just struggling to hit the note, or concentrating on the song. It’s not like a technique an actor would tell you, a method that you actually go through. But what I will say is when it’s really going off, you have the sense that you’re really in the song, and the song is really in the room: all of you, crowd and performers, disappear into it. It’s an extraordinary thing. I mean it really is. I think people who come to a rock show, especially at one of our shows, just turn into the perfect audience. I don’t know who that audience is. What I’m saying is they’re not an amorphous mass of faces to me. I think a lot of times performers do not play for the crowd. Despite what people think, great performers appear to need a crowd, more than not so great ones. It’s not the twenty thousand people who may be in the arena, or the one hundred and fifty thousand people. I think they all turn into one person, it’s probably the truth. One of the persons turns out to be, in my case, your dad, or your love. But it looks like, and factually is, that you’re being so revelatory and revealing to people you haven’t met before.
People who listen to your music have this impression that they know you, better than your best friend. That’s what you told me once.
One of the great ironies of these concerts is that our songs are very intimate: incredible intimacies shared with people whom you’ve never met. And I wouldn’t trust that. Who would trust that? That’s a very bizarre way to live your life.
What do you mean?
On the surface, people who are so open and raw on a first date, you mightn’t trust that, would you? [laughs] I mean, you’re going to a bar, you meet somebody and they tell you their life story in ten minutes. I generally dodge that. On one level, you can look at these concerts and go: God, this is like Hitler’s night rallies.
The thought has sometimes crossed my mind.
Well, yeah, I suppose we even played upon that. You know, Zoo TV was playing into that whole idea: the night rally. But finally, it turns out that people are much more conscious than you think, and you can’t really influence them. If you tried to get them to turn on the person to their right, they wouldn’t. In fact, people are much smarter than that.
I guess many people attending a rock show have had that. It’s the same for a child when he watches a perilous circus act on TV. When the acrobat is walking on a wire, something inside that child wants him to fall, you see? [Bono laughs] Maybe I shouldn’t tell you that, but during that show I had this appalling fantasy of someone with a gun in the audience. I felt that Mark David Chapman* thing could happen there. Did it ever cross your mind?
Are you hinting that there were times when you were unsure about being in U2?
Yeah, we had that. As you know, I don’t travel with security. I grew up around a low but significant level of violence. We always feel like a row or an argument or a grievance in Ireland or France could end up with a bottle smashed in your face. Guns are not pervasive. In America, any crackpot can get their hands on a gun, and we’ve had a fair share of crackpots over the years. At the end of the eighties, we campaigned for Martin Luther King Day. I remember, in Arizona, we got into trouble, and we had some death threats. Normally, they happen. But occasionally, you get one that the police and the FBI take seriously. There was a specific threat: “Don’t go ahead with the concert. And, if you do, don’t sing ‘Pride (In the Name of Love),’ because, if you do, I am gonna blow your head off, and you won’t be able to stop this from happening.” Of course you go onstage and you put it out of your head. But I do remember actually, in the middle of “Pride,” thinking, for a second: “Gosh! What if somebody was organized, or in the rafters of the building, or somebody, here and there, just had a handgun?” I just closed my eyes and I sang this middle verse, with my eyes closed, trying to concentrate and forget about this ugliness and just keep close to the beauty that’s suggested in the song. I looked up, at the end of that verse, and Adam was standing in front of me. It was one of those moments where you know what it means to be in a band. There was a period in my early twenties when we nearly knocked the group on the head. We nearly called it a day.
When was that?
1982.
Oh, that Shalom Christianity* thing?
I mean, it wasn’t a “thing”! It was a very well-thought-out and finally flawed attempt to wrestle the world to the ground and try to deal with some of its ails and its evils. I nearly became a full-time [laughs] instead of part-time activist at that point. At that point, we were angry. We were agitated by the inequalities in the world and the lack of a spiritual life. It’s not only me, Edge is like that.
Is Edge the same nature of believer as you?
Edge is a wiser man than I am, more meditative. I have total admiration for the way he’s able to keep his feelings, ego, et cetera, under control, and yet, that’s my biggest worry for him.
We say in French “eaten away from the inside.”
No. But I wouldn’t underestimate the level of rage beneath those sweet notes that he plays. He can throw a dig. He nearly knocked me out one night.
Really? What happened?
It was back in the early eighties. Everything had gone horribly wrong onstage with the band fighting, rather than the audience. I threw the drum kit into the audience. I think it was in Newhaven, and Edge hit with a right hook.
What caused the argument?
It was the last in a long line of reasons. Too many miles on the same bus, sore throats, sorer hearts from missing home. When I introduced the song, counting it in, one-two-three-four, the band ignored me. Don’t ask.
So, even way back then, you thought you had to deal with all the evils of the world. Do you think it stemmed from reading the Bible as a child?
You see, I had to find that at the very bottom of that lies the feeling of justice over charity. I mean, charity is OK, I’m interested in charity. Of course, we should all be, especially those of us who are privileged. But I’m much more interested in justice. The Drop the Debt campaign was a justice issue. Holding the children to ransom for the debts of their grandparents, that’s a justice issue. Or not letting the poorest of the poor put their products on our shelves whilst advertising the free market, that’s a justice issue to me. These things are rooted in my study of the Scriptures. I guess, like most people, the world just beats them down into not expecting that things can change or be any better. When you’ve sold a lot of records, [laughs] it’s very easy to be megalomaniac enough to believe that you can change things. If you put your shoulder to the door, it might open. Especially if you’re representing a greater authority than yourself. Call it love, call it justice, call it whatever you want. That’s why I’m never nervous when I meet politicians. I think they should be nervous because I’m representing the poor and wretched in this world. And I promise, history will be hard on this moment. And whatever thoughts you have about God, who He is or if He exists, most will agree that if there is a God, God has a special place for the poor. The poor are where God lives. So these politicians should be nervous, not me.
I’m surprised at how easily religion comes up in your answers, whatever the question is. How come you’re always quoting the Bible? Was it because it was taught at school? Or because your father or mother wanted you to read it?
It’s strange, I couldn’t know. Whenever I hear people talking from the Scriptures, I always manage to be able to see past their sort of personality, to see past the difficulties of the environment I was in listening to them, and the hypocrisy. I always manage to get to the content.
When was the first time something happened when you thought about a line from the Scriptures? When you first said to yourself: yes, I can see beyond that and see how it applies to such and such situation?
Let me try to explain something to you, which I hope will make sense of the whole conversation. But maybe that’s a little optimistic. [laughs] This was not the first time, but I remember coming back from a very long tour. I hadn’t been at home. Got home for Christmas, very excited of being in Dublin. Dublin at Christmas is cold, but it’s lit up, it’s like Carnival in the cold. On Christmas Eve, I went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I had done school there for a year. It’s where Jonathan Swift was dean. Anyway, some of my Church of Ireland friends were going. It’s a kind of a tradition on Christmas Eve to go, but I’d never been. I went to this place, sat. I was given a really bad seat, behind one of the huge pillars. I couldn’t see anything. I was sitting there, having come back from Tokyo, or somewhere like that. I went for the singing, because I love choral singing. Community arts, a specialty! But I was falling asleep, being up for a few days, traveling, because it was a bit boring, the service, and I just started nodding off, I couldn’t see a thing. Then I started to try and keep myself awake studying what was on the page. It dawned on me for the first time, really. It had dawned on me before, but it really sank in: the Christmas story. The idea that God, if there is a force of Love and Logic in the universe, that it would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in straw poverty, in shit and straw . . . a child . . . I just thought: “Wow!” Just the poetry . . . Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable. There it was. I was sitting there, and it’s not that it hadn’t struck me before, but tears came down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this. Because that’s exactly what we were talking about earlier: love needs to find form, intimacy needs to be whispered. To me, it makes sense. It’s actually logical. It’s pure logic. Essence has to manifest itself. It’s inevitable. Love has to become an action or something concrete. It would have to happen. There must be an incarnation. Love must be made flesh. Wasn’t that your point earlier?
Exactly. But you see, I sometimes think that I’m religious without knowing it.
[laughs] But that’s very interesting. You’re like one of the Three Wise Men, the Magi who were studying the stars, with nothing religious on your mind! And you’re looking at your maps, going: [gets into a comedy routine] “Here it is . . . OK, it should be over here . . . There’s something funny going on over there . . . Is it the aurora borealis? No, it’s a single star. My coordinates suggest: we must go this way. OK, something should be happening extraordinary round about . . . [pauses for dramatic effect] there. Oh shit, what’s this? A little baby! Oh, we stepped into the Christmas story, I thought I was reading astronomy.”
I’m going to ask you a very naive question. Why are so many people religious but don’t own up to it? Do you think you have an explanation?
I don’t know. But religious instinct comes out as gambling, as horoscope reading, as yoga, it’s everywhere. It’s supposed to be a secular society, but I look around: everybody’s religious. They’re superstitious, they pray when they think they’ve got cancer. It’s not that far below the surface. We’ve gone two hundred years since the Enlightenment, but science is starting to bow again.
Yes, but some people won’t use the word God.
Yeah. Well, because ever since, you had to prove something, or it didn’t exist. Such thoughts were outlawed by thinking people, post-Enlightenment: “God is dead.” But as I told you once before, I saw a fantastic thing written on a wall, in Dublin. It said: “God is dead. Nietzsche.” And then written underneath, sprayed out, it was: “Nietzsche’s dead. God.” [laughs out loud] It’s so good! I mean, I do think, now, at the start of the twenty-first century, people are beginning that adventure again. We have the Eve gene, we have science talking about the big bang, we have so much in science that was, if you like, contradictory, that has become less and less so to the idea that there is God. Different disciplines work on different parts of the puzzle. I’m not a scientist, mind you, I’m in a band with one. I’m not a monk, that’s obvious, I’m an artist. I’m looking for clues through my music. Am I going off again?
Yes. Actually I was about to wander off myself, but I don’t think I’m straying that far. You said, “Intimacy needs to be whispered.” What about the whispering in “She’s a Mystery to Me,” the song you wrote for Roy Orbison? What’s the inspiration there? Are you whispering, or was someone whispering to you? To me, that song is some form of incarnation of God—one of the few I would believe in anyway. To me, it’s a religious song, a mystical song. The melody is like the one you hear in your head when you’re in a cathedral. You can’t say that of many other U2 songs.
There’s probably some mechanical reasons for this, you know. Like, we’re very attracted to suspended chords to the fifth. Edge has that in his guitar playing. You hear it a lot in religious music: Bach. That happy-sad feeling. Agony and ecstasy. It’s that duality that makes my favorite pop songs.
One of the reasons I’m sitting here today is because you and Edge wrote that song. It’s the song I throw in the face of people who say they don’t “get” U2. And their jaws drop when they listen to it. For me, it’s way up there with the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” in the pantheon of great songs. So I won’t leave this place until you tell me how that song happened.
That’s a funny one, that. Edge’s wife, Aislinn, was the most extraordinary girl, who could surprise you with kindness when you least expected it. She gave me a copy of a soundtrack for David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet. We were in London playing a concert. I left the record on “repeat” and fell asleep. When I woke up, I had a melody and words in my head. I presumed I was singing something from the soundtrack, but then realized I wasn’t. I wrote it down. At sound check that day, I played the song to everybody and started going on and on about Roy Orbison, what a genius he was, et cetera. I told them that this could be a song for Roy Orbison, we should finish it for him. After sound check, I continued working on it. After the show, I was banging on and on about Roy Orbison in this song when a very strange thing happened. There was a knock at the door. John, our security man, was announcing the guests for that evening: Roy Orbison, he told me, is outside. He’d love to say a few words.
What? You mean you had no idea he would be coming over?
I had no idea he was there, I had no idea he was coming over, and neither had the band. They all looked at me like I had two heads. In fact, I was just getting a very large one, [laughs] feeling that somehow, God had agreed with me about Roy Orbison! He walked in, this beautiful humble man. He said: “I really, really loved the show. I couldn’t tell you now why exactly, but I was very moved by the show. I’m wondering: would you fellows have a song for me?”
That story’s even better than the one I would have made up myself.
Later, I got to finish the song with him, got to know his wife, Barbara, his family, and the song became the title of his last album. It was an extraordinary thing to record with him. I was out standing beside him at the microphone, bringing him through the song. I couldn’t hear him singing, because he hardly opened his mouth. We went back into the control room, and it was all there. He not only had an angelic voice, but a kind of way about him too.
But the lyrics are extraordinary as well.
[trying to remember, whispering in a low voice, fumbling his way through the words to a forgotten prayer] I couldn’t tell you what it was about. It was a disturbed sleep. The subject of the song was kind of haunting me, I suppose. I don’t know why, I’m always attracted to subjects like you can’t really get a grip on, like sex or God. [muses for a while] I think I sometimes confuse them both!
“She’s a Mystery to Me” is not just a “very good song.” It seems to come from a different place.
That’s a good question. What’s the difference between a very good song and a great song? Answer: I think, very good songs, you can take the credit for. But great songs, you can’t. They feel like you stumble upon them. Of course, then, there’s the bad songs. I wish you didn’t have to take the blame for them. It’s annoying, really, that you can only learn so much in the way of craft. You know, the muse is wayward. But I think you can put yourself in places where they might happen. For some people, that’s chaos. And that, for some people, is falling in love. That, for some people, is rage. That, for some people, is railing against the world. Or for some people it’s a surrendering to the world.
And what makes it for you?
All of the above. [laughs]
Depends on the different stages of your life, I guess.
Yes. I don’t know if I said that elsewhere, but one thing that it comes down to, I think, is a certain honesty with yourself. Did we mention that before?
No. I guess it’s implicit.
That’s what sets you free. You describe the situation that you’re in. Even if you’ve nothing to say, let that be your first line.
I’m sure that when you heard Roy Orbison sing it, you felt some miracle happened.
I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that he’d ask us for a song, because his songs are the most evolved in the book of pop. “In Dreams” is probably the greatest pop song ever written, in that it has a structure unlike any other. Most pop songs have a structure A-B-A-B-C-D—verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight, et cetera. If you listen to the structure of that song, the sections don’t repeat. It goes: A-B-C-D-E-F-G. It breaks all the rules. Try singing it someday.
God forbid! So what’s your favorite lyric in a song?
Kris Kristofferson, “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”
How does it go?
[sings] I don’t care who’s right or wrong / I don’t try to understand / Let the devil take tomorrow / Lord tonight I need a friend. You know that one? Yesterday’s dead and gone/(Bom/Bo-bo-bom)/And tomorrow’s out of sight/(Bom/Bo-bo-bom)/And it’s sad to be alone./Help me make it through the night. I could say that’s my favorite country song.
And what’s your favorite religious song?
“Amazing Grace.”
And your favorite U2 song?
We haven’t written it yet.
Would it be something obvious like “One”?
“Stay (Faraway, So Close),” that’s one of my favorites. I also like “Please” from the Pop album.
The funny thing is that they’re the most operatic songs that you could pick, the ones that . . .
. . . would take you through a journey, to a place you couldn’t imagine before then.
This one stopped abruptly. Before Bono left, the waiter asked for a special favor: “Mister-ay Bono, can I ask-ay you something? Can you write your name, your wonderful name, on my shirt?”—“Gosh, are you sure?”—“To Paolo!”[Bono complies.]“Thank you. You’re great! You’re the greatest!” Then Bono added, mischievously, “You know, I do tattoos as well . . .”