Christmas and New Year’s Day passed. Progress on the new U2 album was a bit rough. Its release had been moved from spring to autumn 2004. The band had also changed producers: Steve Lillywhite, who had produced U2’s first three albums, and remained close to the band ever since, was summoned back. Given that context, I honestly did not expect Bono to have much time. So I was frankly surprised when I received a spontaneous call from him in late January. He was just back from America and planned to stay put for a few weeks, ready to engage in a series of regular phone calls.
So the following conversation took place only a week after that surprising call. Bono was supposed to call at noon on a Saturday. I just sat on my couch, waiting for the phone to ring, slowly sinking into lethargy. By 12:30 P.M., still no sign of life. Then it rang, and a kind of underwater voice came out, apologizing . . .
I was up earlier, and I was reading. There was silence in the house, and I was just reading and reading, then I just fell asleep at that very time. I’m awake again.
You sound tired.
No, no, no. Not at all. That was amazing, that was a deep sleep. Strange, ’cause I don’t know when the middle of the night is anymore. I guess it’s the middle of the night. [laughs]
You must be working late nights with the recording under way. Each time I read a story about a U2 song, it seemed to happen in the middle of the night, or in the wee hours of dawn.
I generally don’t like working late at night. [yawns] I like the early morning, and when I wake up, I feel excited about the day and the possibilities of it. And it’s downhill from there. [laughs] I mean, I’m full of energy. I wake up, and so I do my reading and my writing in the morning. Then, in the afternoon, I do the kind of solid work in the studio. Then we break at eight o’clock for something to eat. When we come back, it’s either the fun time, there can be some spontaneity in the late sessions. But Edge is much more the spirit in the room the later it gets. There’s a phrase after midnight that puts the fear of God into producers and engineers. It’s when he says: “I have a little idea I’d like to try.” [laughs] Because that might mean that they’re up through six A.M.
I don’t know how it is for you, but my best ideas come when I’m about to go to sleep, or when I feel like I have spent my entire day wasting time, or working without thinking, which may amount to the same thing. I go down to buy a paper, and all of a sudden the idea that I was looking for just happens.
Yeah, the unconscious. Whether it’s a collective unconscious or not, whatever pool you draw out from. That’s why songwriting by accident is so important, and the getting to the place where that can happen or, as we say, getting to the place where God can walk through the room. Because, if you know what great is, you know you’re a long way from it. [laughs]
That is definitely my experience.
If you know what great is, you know you’re not it. So you have to set up the opportunity to bump into it. And it’s a strange thing, because it really might come down to osmosis. It’s not the most romantic explanation, but it might be the truest one. The way I could back up this argument is by pointing to artists who have blown both our minds, Michka, as we grew up, people who suddenly just completely lost their gift and started making rubbish music. We don’t have to name names here, but you know the kind I’m talking about. You think: How did that happen? How did this person who set fire to my imagination end up with no new ideas, and actually, even incapable of their old ones? Here’s my theory: When people are absorbed in the culture, and they’re going out, they’re listening to music, they’re in the clubs, music is just part of their every waking moment, and as a result part of their sleeping times, in their dreams. The life is empty of other lovers. Unless you’re in love with the music, or you stop struggling with it in your unconscious when you’re asleep, you’ve other dreams. You’re dreaming about moving houses, about whatever other ventures you’re involved in. But that’s where you did all your great work: you did it when you were . . . [suspends sentence, searching for the right word]
. . . missing . . .
Yes. Unconscious.
Is that something you worry about? I mean, you have so much on your plate now. Don’t you have the feeling that your dreams are eroding dreams somehow?
A strange thing about all the other work I’m doing is that it’s turned music back to pleasure. It’s my escape from work. It’s where I have the luxury to dream.
Actually, you’re getting quite close to a place where I want to start this conversation. Last time we talked, you mentioned your “journey through America.” And I think that phrase conjures up much more than it seems to in your case. I’m sure that you know the expression your friend Wim Wenders coined.
“Colonization of the unconscious.”
That’s right. “The Americans have colonized our unconscious.” Let’s see how I can get around to this. I am borrowing an idea from the American writer Paul Theroux. This is how he analyzed the Beatles’ success in the U.S. In early 1964, he wrote something about how the Americans were deeply questioning their country and the way its ideals had been lost somehow. JFK had just been shot, the civil rights movement, championed by Martin Luther King, divided the country, and it also was the beginning of the military involvement in Vietnam. It was a period of self-doubt, of confusion. So Theroux says that is why young people in America embraced the Beatles and the other British Invasion bands with such enthusiasm. They loved the image of America these groups from the Old World reflected. The Beatles were saying: your music is the greatest, your movie stars are the best, American girls are the greatest-looking, your cars are the ones we want. And in the process, they helped Americans restore their faith in their own country and what it could achieve. About twenty years later, with The Joshua Tree, U2 became the number-one band in the U.S. It was a record that reflected your fascination with America. Don’t you think that young Americans, at that time, saw you as saviors because you restored their faith in their own country, a faith that was not available anymore elsewhere in the late eighties, when materialism seemed the only option? Don’t you think that U2 somehow sold back the dream of America to the Americans at that particular moment in their history?
In the early eighties, America was very uncool in Europe. American fashion seemed at a low point. It was shoulder pads and big hair. There was punk rock, which had given us hope in the seventies that was faded, and it was a very dull moment indeed for American music, with the exception of Bruce Springsteen. Dylan had seemed like he was asleep. Rap was just about to kick off. It had started, but they weren’t letting it on MTV. Madonna was singing “Material Girl.” Greed was good, from that movie Wall Street. The stock market was flying, but it seemed, outside of making money, there didn’t seem to be many other ideas around on the music map. Now Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring were happening in art. There was the suggestion that something might be under way.
But that was New York . . .
That was New York, exactly. There was an incredible mood in the U.K., of almost like the cultural revolution. Just awful. The U.K. music press had broken up the Clash, and there were these bogus ideas left over from punk rock, stuff we were talking about before, like “street credibility.” One of these sort of handed-down, Little Red Bookish thoughts was: “Thou Shalt Not Go to America.” And kneel at that. But we were Irish. Ireland had a completely different relationship with America, because America was a Promised Land for Irish people. It was the alternative to getting the mail boat to Liverpool or Holyhead, and taking that journey to London on and around the country. But it was much more of a Romantic journey, and in America, Ireland meant something completely different too. Memories of poverty and famine and desperate struggles had been replaced in the sixties and seventies by the Kennedys.
Irish and Catholic.
Irish and Catholic, yes. So Irish people had a completely different attitude. Plus the ballad tradition which was still alive in Ireland was one of the streams that had led into the reservoir of folk music that begat Bob Dylan and so much of American music, country music. These were second cousins of Irish traditional music. So there was a sense that we Irish had more ownership of America. In a way, though Ireland had lost to the British crown its self-esteem and a lot of its land, in America, Irish people were actually in some odd way reversing that. You see, America had been an English colony and, even after Independence, a bastion of Protestantism. The founding fathers of America were as suspicious of Roman Catholicism as the English monarchy. Protestants seemed more able at controlling desires, fleshly, worldly concerns than the Catholics, who were uncouth Irish who had just got off their famine ships and were causing trouble. America was intended to be an outpost of the strictest moralism.
That seems quite at odds with the image that we, as young Europeans, had of America. To me, it looked like the country where everything was possible, where a sixteen-year-old could drive a convertible car.
[laughing] Yeah! But you’re talking about the fifties, sixties on. I’m talking about the 1850s, 1860s.
I don’t know about that. Actually I was talking about my years as a teenager: the 1970s. Life in America seemed easy and glamorous in that period. So the contrast is very hard to accept.
Yeah. But even in the nineteenth century, some people were not having such strict rules. Some people wanted to drink ale and chase women down dirty streets. That’s the Irish for you! After surviving starvation in the hands of the Brits, they weren’t going to have a load of Prods tell them what they could or could not do.
What was your idea of America when you were growing up? Did you hear tales about people who went off to America in your family?
Of course, through television, we came across America: the sort of gritty glamour of cop shows, the noise of it, and the fact that it looked like a sexier place. There were so many different people. Everyone in Ireland looked the same. What I’m trying to say is there was no way that we as a band were going to buy this thing of not going to go to America. We loved the U.K. music scene, but we knew we didn’t quite fit in with the strict rules of the U.K. music press. As I mentioned, we didn’t want to be cool, we wanted to be hot, you see. The music scene in the eighties in London had a lot to do with fashion.
When I first met you, you were banging on about this.
Fashion, really, is what had driven punk rock, not philosophy. People weren’t talking about real revolution. It was Situationism that you can wear on your T-shirt. We just wanted to take our music wherever people wanted to listen. In America, we found people to be much less cynical. Paul McGuinness had an instinct that this would be a good place for us, that we would have to play to what he called “the real America,” not just coastal America. That began my love affair with the Midwest. But all the other groups in competition, they would never do that. They would play one date in Chicago, one date in Texas, and that was that.
Do you remember the very first time you set foot on American soil? You took a plane, went through customs, and left the airport. What did you see? Whom did you talk to? Do you remember the smell of it?
Yeah, I do. In fact, we wrote a song about it. It’s called “Angel of Harlem.” It was December, and we arrived at JFK. I remember from the very first just being in customs, and that Americans spoke louder than anyone else. They were all kind of shouting at each other. But these were just people who loaded the suitcases on the carousel. It was street talk, and it was exciting. Then I noticed that the colors of the paint at the airport, they were not colors you would ever see painted in Europe. They were strange mauves and sort of odd greens and yellows, and there was just a hint of what I now realize was a sort of black influence, and Chinese influence. It was very different. Paul McGuinness had, for a treat, organized a limousine. So here we were, with no money, and he got the record company to do a limousine! Now, we’d never been in a limousine, we’d never been in New York, we’d never been in America. It was mind-blowing. So we all climb into this ridiculous-looking car with Christmas lights around the windows, and we’re sitting there, laughing and giggling. And we’re on a freeway, tuning in to the radio, listening to different stations, and we came across this station called BLS. That’s the very famous soul station in New York, and Billie Holiday was singing. And then we came over the 59th Street Bridge, and see that view of Manhattan. I mean, for us, for kids just turning nineteen, twenty, it was Oz! [laughs] And Paul McGuinness who had organized the limo, he was the Wizard. [laughs] And the tour went so well. I remember we stayed at the Gramercy Park Hotel. The Clash were staying there, the Slits. It was like an American bohemia. I remember the Slits hadn’t got guitar straps. They were so punk. Their guitars, they were around their necks by strings. I think Edge put out his hand to shake one of their hands, and the singer, Ari Up, slapped it. She said: “We don’t do that.”
It’s funny you’d mention the Slits, because they were practically the first band I ever interviewed, even before you. The photographer who was there with me was preparing for a shot as Viv, the guitar player, blew her nose into a handkerchief. So when he snapped, she just showed the snot dripping from the handkerchief to the camera. That was the picture.
We saw the Clash in the lobby. They were just so cool, and we knew we weren’t. I had a fur coat, which was funny. I remember I walked out to the street. It was snowing in America. I just wanted to take it all in, standing at the corner in my fur coat and my crap haircut. And this unusual-looking man just stops on a bicycle beside me and says: “Hey, honey, where are you going? How are you, sweetheart?” And I was like: Urrgggh! [laughs] Not so bohemian after all. I want my mother! Hold on, I don’t have a mother. So Irish boy scuttles back into the lobby. It was funny.
Funny, I was thinking about the Virgin Prunes, the group that your friends Gavin and Guggi were in. They were very much into theatrics, bringing out the feminine side, cross-dressing.
. . . which was probably why I was wearing a fur coat . . .
You worked with Brian Eno, who was part of the early seventies glam-rock scene. I don’t know if you remember that gatefold sleeve from the second Roxy Music album.
Yes, I remember he wore the ostrich feathers.
That’s the one. And you didn’t look like him or Guggi, but you didn’t look like Bruce Springsteen either . . .
Artiness, arty-fartiness is around the corner from sissy, isn’t it? But in a way we were an art group, even if we didn’t look like one. Our joke was: we didn’t go to art school, we went to Brian Eno. Because every other rock band in the British invasion, they were all “art school.” Brian Jones, Keith Richards, John Lennon, Pete Townshend, the Clash were art school. Sex Pistols weren’t art school, but their manager was. You see, before we went to Brian, we had our own sort of avant-garde teenage years, our own surrealist performance art and humor: the giving of names, the arguments about Andy Warhol’s art and films—one major spat about his film Bad. The Virgin Prunes had actually taken over an exhibition space in Trinity College, where Guggi had sculpted vaginas out of fresh meat, flies and all. Gavin had one corner called “Sheep,” where a mate of ours crawled around on all fours in a traditional Aran sweater to take the piss out of the folkies. They were running amok. But if you look at those early pictures, the way the Virgin Prunes carried on was extraordinary. I mean this is twenty years before Marilyn Manson. There was a very strong glam cross-dressing aspect. I mean, it is a strange thing. Myself and Guggi, when we were kids, one of the albums we both obsessed on was Lou Reed’s Transformer.
What a title! Now I’m coming to think of it.
[laughs] Little did we know what the title was about when we were thirteen: transexuals! We were very heterosexual, but that’s a different point, isn’t it? So were most of the glam-rock bands. It’s funny Guggi later found himself in a frock as part of the Prunes. I see I’m macho enough to know that creativity is from the feminine side, and . . . there you go.
Let’s go back to your coming to America for the first time. So you arrived when the Reagan era was just beginning.
That’s right. But to go back to what we were talking about earlier, U2 would appeal to the ports in that Catholic sense, but we’d also appeal to the Midwest in that Protestant sense.
You were Protestant and Catholic. A country obsessed with religion must have got you going.
Yes, it’s true. The Bible-bashing televangelists that you would turn on in a hotel—these knock-off salesmen for God—whereas most reasonable sensible people would just change the channel, I was fascinated.
Who was the first televangelist you saw on TV?
It was a preacher who was asking his audience in TV land to put their hand against the screen to be healed. So there were people, old ladies with bronchitis, old ladies with broken hips, and probably people with cancer, all over America, getting out of their armchairs and putting their hands on the TV. It broke my heart. But remember I was a believer. Though I understood the power of the Scriptures they were quoting from, and I did believe in the healing powers of faith, I was seeing it debased and demeaned. But unlike a lot of people, I understood the language. What’s always bothered me about the fundamentalists is that they seem preoccupied with the most obvious sins. If those sins, sexual immorality and drug addiction, come out of unhappiness, then I’m sure God wants to set people free of that unhappiness. But I couldn’t figure out why the same people were never questioning the deeper, slyer problems of the human spirit like self-righteousness, judg-mentalism, institutional greed, corporate greed. You only have to look to unfair trade agreements that keep the developing world in the Dark Ages to see the hypocrisy I’m talking about. These people talk about the debasing of culture. What about the debasing of hundreds of thousands of real lives?
Right. These people go to church on Sunday. I guess they’re very generous when the plate comes around. So were you angry with those fundamentalists?
We thought they were trampling all over the most precious thing of all: the concept that God is love. These televangelists, they were the traders inside the temple, that story where Jesus turned over their tables. They were putting people off God, especially young people who didn’t want to admit to being Christians anymore. Because in clubs, on campuses, everywhere, people would say: “You’re part of that. They’re nuts!” So it was very interesting to be in America at that time. We were fans and critics, getting ready to tell them the best and the worst on The Joshua Tree.
But I presume what they caught on to was the best. I mean, on The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum, you told them it was OK to listen to roots music, to the blues, the gospel and country music. At that time, did you ask yourself: “Why us? Why did they pick us to remind them of how great their country is?” I mean, they already had Bruce Springsteen.
Well, I think, Bruce Springsteen influenced us a lot in the eighties. It was also significant. His music had a similar mythology at its heart. Again, that was one of the things that was “against the law”: playing music in those bigger halls that they call arenas, basketball arenas. We went to see him in an arena, and he changed our life. He really communicated. For the first time, U2 realized that a bigger venue doesn’t have to dilute the power of our music. We realized it could add to the experience: a bigger crowd, a bigger electrical charge. But we’d never seen an audience as engaged on that scale. There were twenty thousand people and you could hear a pin drop if he wanted you to. Now, I went to see the Rolling Stones in Madison Square Garden at the same time, and I had fallen asleep. The sound was so bad . . .
A little while ago, I took care of a huge music encyclopedia. Going through the stories of all these bands and performers, I came to a tentative conclusion. I think that the mystique that was born out of rock music comes in a main part from the performers who utterly reinvented themselves. See, Robert Zimmerman, the son of an electrical appliances retailer in the mountains of Minnesota, reinvents himself as Bob Dylan, tells people that a blues musician gave him his guitar, or that Sioux blood runs through his veins. He invents a mythology of his own. I think that in the minds of our generation, you invented yourself as Bono and fascinated us in the same way. Do you know who Bono is?
I’m trying. It’s the hardest thing . . . to be yourself. Maybe I haven’t been able to pull it off [laughs] . . . yet.
Lots of people wouldn’t let you begin to.
Why?
I think they’re enjoying your personality crisis. It’s a spectator sport, watching you figure this stuff out, reinventing yourself constantly.
That’s the great thing about America. It is the land of reinvention. It was never about where you come from, it’s always about where you’re going. And people accept that beginning again is at the heart of the American Dream. The Irish came over from a death culture, of famine, and of colonization, which of course was emasculation. They found a new virility in America. They began a new life in America. And this of course is at the heart of the idea of redemption: to begin again. This is at the heart of religious fundamentalism too: to be born again. I wish to begin again on a daily basis. To be born again every day is something that I try to do. And I’m deadly serious about that.
One of the most important things you did in America—and I’m talking about the continent, as opposed to the United States—was making a stand about the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua. That was your first public involvement in U.S. politics, right?
Let me think. Well, the first thing of a political nature in America was dealing with Provisional IRA sympathizers in America: the sponsors of the mayhem back home. We only discovered we were Irish when we went to America, in the sense of what being Irish meant. Bobby Sands* was dying on hunger strike in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland. It was heartbreaking, but it was also rabble-rousing. It was all over the news every night in America. The tin-cuppers were going to raise a fortune out of his sacrifice. Remember, there are 45 million Americans who consider themselves Irish. The younger generation would come and see us play. Second-generation and third-generation Irish were throwing money up onstage for the revolutionaries who were giving up their lives. But when we’d meet these people afterwards, they didn’t really know anything about what was going on.
Did they have much support at home?
Few realized that these revolutionaries were not representing the will of any significant majority. Whatever way you drew Ireland, with or without the border, they were a minority. Even if they were amongst the Catholics in Northern Ireland, they were a minority. Yet these people felt they had the right to form an army and destroy lives. So they were the enemy, as far as we were concerned. Fascists, brown shirts—in this case, green shirts. There had to be a better way.
Did you have any big ideas?
Well, maybe understandably, this began our interest in nonviolence. And here, the U.S. played a role. America had had its own troubles with race relations in the sixties. We started to see similarities with the civil rights movement. We became students of nonviolence, of Martin Luther King’s thinking. That all started happening around that time. Then we wrote “Sunday Bloody Sunday” as a way of refuting the armed struggle. So America had brought us to that place. America had made us question about being Irish. The irony was that a lot of people thought “Sunday Bloody Sunday” was a call to arms, a rebel song for a united Ireland. It was about unity, but not in the geographical sense.
Don’t you believe in a united Ireland?
Only by consensus. The border was drawn by threat of war, but we have to accept it won’t be removed by force. Real division, as the great John Hume says, is in the people’s hearts and minds.
Did the Provisional Army in Ireland threaten you at some point?
We were deliberately trying to dry up funds for the IRA in America. I know we annoyed them, but they didn’t respond in any organized ugly way, no. We must have pissed them off. We were huge with the Irish-American community. Some small amount of well-organized people were the culprits, passing the hat around raising money for the Irish cause—which really meant putting bombs in English pubs and killing innocents. So we were not very popular, no, with the Provos. And we were let know that back in Ireland in subtle ways.
How subtle were they?
Actually, not at all. After having denounced the IRA from a stage in Ireland in the early eighties, I remember a few incidents. Once, our car was surrounded by a bunch of Provo supporters. One had wrapped the tricolor around his fist trying to smash the windows of the car with his bare hands, screaming “Brits! Traitors!” However real or not, there was one threat of kidnapping, which the head of the Special Branch was taking very seriously. I remember we all had to have our toeprints taken as well as our fingerprints. That set the imagination off . . . [laughs] Were they gonna break our legs or post them? I don’t want to exaggerate the effect this stuff had on our life. But still, for the rest of the eighties, within some quarters where we used to be welcome, we became personae non grata. In certain pubs and certain places, people would look at you, and think you’d let them down. But, after a while, people realized that it wasn’t that we weren’t nationalists, or that we weren’t supporters of their grievances.
There were very real grievances, weren’t there?
Yes. There had been great abuses taken of the Catholic minority, but we, like most Northern Catholics, believed in a peaceful solution. We hated the Irish ambivalence to violence. You know, there’d be a bombing somewhere, some atrocity in a supermarket in the middle of England. Women and children would be slaughtered. Everyone would be shocked by the news, everyone. In Ireland, people would stare at their shoes for a few days. People would be saying: “Oh, they’ve gone too far, now this is all too much.” But then, you know, a couple of months later, somebody would be singing in a pub some folk song, some battle hymn, “A Nation Once Again,” or something like that, and the hats would be passed around, and everyone would put in for the Provos. I hated that about us Irish, our duplicity. I just felt that we had to take a position, which was clear—that this violent route was not making the lives of anyone any better. It would not lead to anywhere other than despair, and would make the job of integration for both communities more difficult.
So no direct threats?
No direct threats. Just a sense that you pissed them off. I heard Gerry Adams took down a U2 poster from the Sinn Fein office. He certainly referred to me as “a little shit” in a major press interview. It’s not helpful when the leader of an armed struggle who has support in every working-class neighborhood, and a lot of maniacs on his side, calls you a “little shit.” It doesn’t make your life easier.
Do either of you hold a grudge now that peace is in the air?
Not at all. Since then, Gerry Adams has put out his hand to me. He went to the offices of Jubilee 2000 to learn about the Drop the Debt campaign. He is a very brilliant man. He already knew his way around a lot of our issues. If he and his party deliver disarmament of the paramilitaries, they will be a force in politics. I hope he feels remorseful for the damage the armed struggle caused to Ireland. He would believe that it got us to the place where there is an Irish peace agreement. I don’t believe that. But he put his hand out to me, and I respected that. I shook it. In Ireland, there is an expression: “Keep your hands in your pockets when you’re talking to these people.” Well, I took mine out, and he took his hand over.
So you’re optimistic about an end to “the Troubles”?
Yes. Years later, I would have the greatest honor of my life in Ireland when U2 played in support of the Good Friday Peace Agreement in the Waterfront Hall in Belfast in 1998. We got John Hume and David Trimble, the two opposing leaders in the conflict, to shake hands onstage in front of a U2 and Ash audience. People tell me that rock concert and that staged photograph pushed the people into ratifying the peace agreement. I’d like to think that’s true. I’d like to think that the extreme Unionists and the extreme Republicans now have the courage to put down their guns. Because it takes courage to trust in the peace process and to return to civilian life. Both sides have suffered too much. It’s easy for me to proffer my opinions. I’m not living next door or across the road or across the town from a painful memory. I live in Dublin in a house beside the sea.