Our next telephone call took place a week after the Madrid train bombings that left 191 commuters dead and more than 1,800 wounded on March 11, 2004. Everyone was in shock; it was the biggest terrorist attack to ever occur in Europe. I wrote about it in my weekly column for the French magazineVSD.I wanted to convey how I felt about that act. It was one of those moments I wished I’d been a songwriter.
I wanted to know how Bono reacted to the news—not as a spokesperson or an ambassador for DATA, but as a human being. I mean, how do idealism and goodwill stand in front of that? This is the piece:
Song lyrics may be silly, but they do tell the truth. At the Olympia Theatre in Paris, the Beach Boys’ former songwriter Brian Wilson insisted on dedicating “Love and Mercy” to the people of Spain:
I was lyin’ in my room and the news came on TV / A lotta people there hurtin’ and it really scares me / Love and mercy, that’s what you need tonight / Love and mercy to you and your friends tonight . . .
Rather dull words, you might say, nothing original about them. But then again, unfortunately, there’s nothing original either nowadays about the Massacre of the Innocents as seen live on TV. Maybe you’ll find his words derisory and useless, but that utterance of compassion made me feel good.
As much as anyone, I was caught between subdued anger and a need to cry when the news came on TV. Is there a way to feel intelligent when you see a gymnasium turned into a makeshift mortuary, strewn with stretchers? Some morning, a handful of people board a commuter train, carrying bags filled with charge, all stuffed with bolts and nails. I am refusing to analyze it. Try putting yourself inside the head of a madman, and pretty soon you’ll find yourself feeling like a madman too. Moreover, that is exactly the aim of those delirious political and religious sects: carrying the world away into a collective madness at the end of which, of course, truth will prevail, a truth that only its followers detain.
So, love and mercy, then . . . In a magazine calledCourier International, I have just read about the story of Zarema, a twenty-three-year-old from Chechnya. Armed with an explosive belt, she renounced, just at the last minute, to smash herself to pieces in a pub in Moscow, and turned herself in to the police. A Russian journalist got the opportunity to interview her in her cell. There she told him her appalling life story. Her mother abandons her while she is a ten-month-old baby. Then her father gets murdered on a building site in Siberia. It doesn’t sound like a great start in life. It isn’t. Raised by her grandparents, she is forced into marrying “according to our old customs,” as she puts it, some local dealer. Pretty soon, the man gets shot down by a competing gang. At that time, she is expecting his baby. For want of money, she is not able to raise her baby daughter by herself. So out of hand the husband’s clan places the baby in another family. Zarema is accordingly parted from her child and sent back to her grandparents’ place. They live at the far end of the country.There, she goes out of her mind with grief. So what does she do? She robs the family jewels, which she proceeds to sell to the market, so as to board a plane and to abduct her daughter. But her aunts recapture her just as she is about to do that. They humiliate her and strike her repeatedly, because she has become the disgrace of the family.
So Zarema sees only one solution. To become at last a “decent person”—I’m quoting her words here—she thinks she has to sacrifice herself for Allah and Jihad, so her shame gets washed away and her debt paid off, since the rebels give away a thousand dollars to a martyr’s family. At the rebels’ hideout, she encounters other suicide applicants. One of them, a nineteen-year-old girl, blows herself up during an open-air rock concert in Moscow: fourteen dead. Zarema sees the bodies on television. Something clicks in her head. Above all, she feels compassion for the young girl who died in the operation, the one whom she saw every day—her companion.“She is the one that I pitied the most,”she says. So her eyes open and she gives up the madness. You can say a kind of miracle happened.
Love and mercy: those words do not only make sense for the survivors. In order to fight effectively against the terrorist insanity, perhaps they’re more useful weapons than the infiltration of cells, the shelling of villages and the so-called war on terror. Because the nature of that terror is moral and religious as much as it is political, the answer sometimes has to be of the same nature. In one case, love and mercy simply worked.
[in a sort of growl] Bono-jour!
I’m sorry, it’s not “Bono-jour.” It’s “bonjour”!
“Bono-jour!”
Good morning! I’m very happy to hear your voice.
[with a scowl] And what’s good about it?
It’s been a long time.
I’m a little under the weather today, so I don’t know if I’ll be of any use to you. But here goes. How are you doing yourself?
I’m fine, but in a bit of a shock about the Madrid bombings. I wanted to read out to you the piece I wrote yesterday. [so I carry out my threat] Simple question here: where were you “when the news came on TV”?
[sighing] The news seems to be now on TV every hour of every day. I heard about it on the radio, but it was only when I came in to the studio at lunchtime that I saw the pictures. Heartbreaking.
Do you know that song, “Love and Mercy”?
“Love and Mercy” is one of the great songs ever written. The thing about song lyrics is: with the cadence and the way the melody falls, they can be more articulate than any purely literate response. This is something that any non-English speaker knows. It’s a funny thing, but when U2 songs are written, I don’t write them in English. I write them in what the band call “Bongelese.” [laughs] I just sing melodies and the words form in my mouth, later to be deciphered. I remember Brian Eno saying: “Why put them into English, Bono? They’re so eloquent as they are.” And he had a point. So pop lyrics, in a way, are just a rough direction that you sketch for where the listener must think toward. That’s it, the rest is left up to you. Which is why pop music becomes the folk music of the next era. Feelings travel better than thoughts. I can’t think of a greater song to be sung than Brian Wilson singing “Love and Mercy.” Because, in a way, they’re the two feelings that those terrorists sought to destroy.
What song would have you sung had you been onstage on that day?
“When Will I See You Again?”—the Three Degrees.
How does it go?
[sings] When will I see you again? De-de-de-de-de . . . / When will we share precious moments? It’s a song about loss. That song can bring you to tears. It’s a very strange course of events. We played in Nuremberg on the PopMart Tour in August 1997. There’s a venue there, which is where Hitler was to be buried with his generals. They had marked out an area. There’s a stadium, the Zeppelinfeld, which is associated with the Third Reich. It is an Albert Speer building. There was some controversy about us playing there. I remember thinking: No, we should never be afraid of a building. And if people are so scared of it, paint it pink or something like that. Howie B, my great friend, was deejaying. He has produced U2 and was on tour with us. Jewish. He was very unnerved by playing there. He said to me: “I’m not sure if I want to do this.” I said: “Well, you don’t have to if you don’t want.” But he went on and started his set by playing the Three Degrees’ “When Will I See You Again?” It was just the most remarkable thing to see this joyous jazzman with tears down his face, decades later, mourning people of his own ethnic group that he’d never met, but feeling it. I really felt this song just chase the devil away. [sighs] Because you should never think about these things on a grand scale: these are families, and sisters and brothers and uncles.
That’s how I felt yesterday.
When we played the United States on our last tour, after 9/11, we were among the first bands to go into New York and play a proper show.
Yes. We felt it important to make the same point. These people were not statistics. We used these giant screens to project the names of everyone who’d lost their life. If I turned around and I looked at the screen, I would see “Elvin Romero,” “Efrain Romero,” “Monica Hoffman,” “Stephen Hoffman”—fathers and sons, whatever it was. Everybody in Madison Square Garden could see somebody they knew or somebody who knew somebody, and the whole place wept. And it wasn’t just their own grief—they wept for other people’s grief. When everyone’s dancing and jumping up and down, there’s that deep well of pathos because everybody is connected.
It’s weird that you should mention simultaneously 9/11 and that U2 concert at Madison Square Garden. It seems to imply that the inhabitants of a big city feel connected to each other through only two kinds of events: when a horrible catastrophe happens or when they gather for a rock concert. It’s like the most joyful or the most horrible event both produce a strangely similar effect: to make people feel like they’re all one. On that night, it was apparently an odd combination of both.
[light chuckle] Yeah, a great rock show can be a transcendent event. A crap one on the other hand can feel like a funeral—your own! But it’s an extraordinary thing to get seventy thousand people or seven thousand people to agree on anything. I mean, we’ve all been to really doglike events. [laughs] They just bite your arse and you feel like you’ve got the worst ticket in the world, and that sound is blowing everywhere but by you, and somebody’s pissing up against the fence. Or indoors, it’s the same. I mean, in a club, you can feel as far from the singer as in a stadium, depending on the mentality of the singer. It’s not about physical proximity. But when it comes right, it is the most remarkable thing.
What’s your definition of community?
This is the question that hangs in the sky over our heads at the moment. Through media, we have some strange faces in our backyard whom we weren’t calling family until very recently, and we still don’t really want to. But if you’re going to enjoy having your sneakers and your jeans made by developing communities, you are already involved with those people. You cannot therefore just ignore some of the problems they’re negotiating. They’re living on your street. There was this old definition of generosity, which is at the very least the rich man looks after the poor man on his street. Guess what? [laughs] Now, that street goes round the globe.
So you’re saying invisibility doesn’t work for either end of the street.
That’s why New York never had to deal with race riots in the nineties like L.A. did. The rich and the poor see each other every day, pass each other on the same street, travel the subway. Eye contact is unavoidable. In L.A., you have a mosaic of suburbs very separate from each other, economically, culturally. If they pass each other on the street, it’s on an eight-lane freeway. It’s an environment for the mistrust and the hatred that can come out of that after an incident like Rodney King.
During one of your first visits to Paris, more than twenty years ago, you told me that you were planning to write a screenplay from the point of view of a terrorist. Do you remember that?
Oh, I do remember it very well, yes. I was trying to figure out how one Irishman could take the life of another Irishman in such cold blood. I was obsessed with the thought that these same people had in every other way ordinary lives. They were milkmen, taxi drivers, schoolteachers. I worked with some people on it. What I was intrigued by was what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, her description of the trial of [Adolf] Eichmann, and how he used to walk his dog close to Auschwitz. And he was a lovely man—the sweetest man you could meet while you are walking your dog—and responsible for this kind of evil. It was a subject we were living with here. I don’t know if I told you about my own experience of one of the worst bombings in southern Ireland. I just very nearly escaped.
I don’t remember you mentioning that.
It just left a little bit of a mark. I told you that I used to have to pass through the City Centre to go home. It was two bus trips to school. I told you I used to go and look around the record stores. There was a coffee shop I used to go to called Graham Southern’s, near the bus stop. If I had the money, I’d read a music magazine or have a cup of coffee there. One day, fifteen minutes after I left, the street was blown to pieces. It was a bomb outside. It was a close call—a little street called Marlborough Street.*
Now I understand why that terrorist story was haunting you.
But it haunts everyone who’s lived near or close by. That’s what the terrorists intend.
I see a distinction between two different kinds of terrorists. On the one hand, you have the bombers from the IRA or the Loyalists, or ETA in the Basque country: they don’t look for martyrdom, they fight a war. On the other you have the suicide bombers who want to be martyrs, like that girl Zarema. In modern times, a terrorist’s story is that of someone who thinks that he or she has to die first, so their people or the whole world will be better off, or saved, because others are going to die as well. It’s like The Pied Piper of Hamlin: the idea is to have as many people as possible following them off the cliff. It seems like modern terror is as much about self-hatred as hatred. It is intrinsically suicidal.
Yeah. I guess that’s a psychological truth, that you can’t love anyone else without loving yourself. And I guess you probably can’t hate anyone else without hating yourself. But outside of the perversion and the warped mind, we have to tackle the real problems that fester and turn decent people toward indecent acts. I mean, there are some problems that haven’t been approached in Ireland, in Israel, in the Middle East. They’re not an excuse for this ill harvest we’re reaping, but they have to be approached. Love and mercy . . . Mercy is the outworking of love, but love demands that you try to see things from another person’s point of view.
Terrorists are focused on big ideas. You’re quite aware that there are no greater idealists than terrorists. Most of them revere the notions of God and holy justice. I guess for a person like you, who is deeply religious and idealistic, it must be very disturbing.
I’m a lot of other things as well. But you see, Michka, people who are open spiritually are open to being manipulated more easily, are very vulnerable. The religious instinct is a very pure one in my opinion. But unless it’s met with a lot of rigor, it’s very hard to control.
Correct. But you’ve also never seen a skeptic or an atheist smash himself to pieces in order to kill as many people as possible. I mean, atheists would organize concentration camps or would plan collective starvation, but this kind of terror we are dealing with now is of a spiritual nature. You can’t hide from that.
It’s true. Yeah, smashing other people to pieces doesn’t need the same conviction. Most terrorists want to change the material world. Well, add eternity to that, and people can go a lot further to pursue their ends. It’s a big prize, isn’t it, eternity? It’s not a two-term or a three-term presidency. [laughs] But of course, this is always a corruption of some holy thesis, whether it’s the Koran or the Bible. My understanding of the Scriptures has been made simple by the person of Christ. Christ teaches that God is love. What does that mean? What it means for me: a study of the life of Christ. Love here describes itself as a child born in straw poverty, the most vulnerable situation of all, without honor. I don’t let my religious world get too complicated. I just kind of go: Well, I think I know what God is. God is love, and as much as I respond [sighs] in allowing myself to be transformed by that love and acting in that love, that’s my religion. Where things get complicated for me, is when I try to live this love. Now, that’s not so easy.
What about the God of the Old Testament? He wasn’t so “peace and love.”
There’s nothing hippie about my picture of Christ. The Gospels paint a picture of a very demanding, sometimes divisive love, but love it is. I accept the Old Testament as more of an action movie: blood, car chases, evacuations, a lot of special effects, seas dividing, mass murder, adultery. The children of God are running amok, wayward. Maybe that’s why they’re so relatable. But the way we would see it, those of us who are trying to figure out our Christian conundrum, is that the God of the Old Testament is like the journey from stern father to friend. When you’re a child, you need clear directions and some strict rules. But with Christ, we have access in a one-to-one relationship, for, as in the Old Testament, it was more one of worship and awe, a vertical relationship. The New Testament, on the other hand, we look across at a Jesus who looks familiar, horizontal. The combination is what makes the Cross.
Do you know this passage from the Old Testament? God is addressing Moses. He’s telling him that He is trying to teach the Jews, but they won’t go for it. They keep reverting to their bad habits. And He uses this funny phrase: “Behold, it is a stiff-necked people” (Exodus, 32:9). And I thought, this is the daily experience I have with my children! Sometimes, you’re so mad with your child that you want to throw them out the window.
[laughs thoroughly] Yes. There are moments, and I know they have them about me.
Speaking of bloody action movies, we were talking about South and Central America last time. The Jesuit priests arrived there with the gospel in one hand and a rifle in the other.
I know, I know. Religion can be the enemy of God. It’s often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building. [laughs] A list of instructions where there once was conviction; dogma where once people just did it; a congregation led by a man where once they were led by the Holy Spirit. Discipline replacing discipleship. Why are you chuckling?
I was wondering if you said all of that to the Pope the day you met him.
You know, he loved to play soccer.
Could you please, just for once, spare me the Monty Python digression?
Apparently, he was very good in goal. You’d need to be, in his position.
Do you think you got one of these past him?
Let’s not get too hard on the Holy Roman Church here. The Church has its problems, but the older I get, the more comfort I find there. The physical experience of being in a crowd of largely humble people, heads bowed, murmuring prayers, stories told in stained-glass windows, the colors of Catholicism—purple, mauve, yellow, red—the burning incense . . . [suspends sentence] My friend Gavin Friday says Catholicism is the glam-rock of religion.
No, I can be critical, especially on the topic of contraception. But when I meet someone like Sister Benedicta and see her work with AIDS orphans in Addis Ababa, or Sister Ann doing the same in Malawi, or Father Jack Fenukan and his group Concern all over Africa, when I meet priests and nuns tending to the sick and the poor and giving up much easier lives to do so, I surrender a little easier.
But you met the man himself. Was it a great experience?
I was with a few great people: Jeff Sachs, the great economist; Bob Geldof; Quincy Jones, who’s been a mentor to me, a deadly serious man, but he kept whispering to me to check out the Holy Father’s shoes: ox-blood loafers, as it happens. “These are some funky slippers,” he was saying. There were some nervous giggles, but we all knew why we were there. The Pontiff was about to make an important statement about the inhumanity and injustice of poor countries spending so much of their national income paying back old loans to rich countries. Serious business. He was fighting hard against his Parkinson’s. It was clearly an act of will for him to be there. I was oddly moved . . . by his humility, and then by the incredible speech he made, even if it was in whispers. During the preamble, he seemed to be staring at me. I wondered. Was it the fact that I was wearing my blue fly-shades? So I took them off in case I was causing some offense. When I was introduced to him, he was still staring at them. He kept looking at them in my hand, so I offered them to him as a gift in return for the rosary he had just given me.
Didn’t he put them on?
Not only did he put them on, he smiled the wickedest grin you could ever imagine. He was a comedian. His sense of humor was completely intact. Flashbulbs popped, and I thought: “Wow! The Drop the Debt campaign will have the Pope in my glasses on the front page of every newspaper.”
I don’t remember seeing that photograph anywhere, though.
Nor did we. It seems his courtiers did not have the same sense of humor. Fair enough. I guess they could see the T-shirts.
Did he really help, eventually?
Without his support and his right hand in these matters, Diurmuid Martin, an Irish archbishop, we would not have gotten such a result. They weren’t just platitudinous words out of Castel Gandolfo on that day. Actions followed. They were tactical and strategic, and put the shoulder of the Church to a few doors that had been slammed shut on us.
Just for the last time, I would like to go back to our tour of the dark side of religion. Appalling things seem to happen when people become religious at too early an age or when their experience of life is nonexistent. Don’t you think?
Zealots often have no love for the world. They’re just getting through it to the next one. It’s a favorite topic. It’s the old cliché: “Eat shit now, pie in the sky when you die.” But I take Christ at his word: “On Earth as it is in Heaven.” As to the first part of your question, in my experience, the older you get, the less chance you have to transform your life, the less open you are to love in a challenging way. You tend towards love that’s more comforting and safe.
As I told you, I think I am beginning to understand religion because I have started acting and thinking like a father. What do you make of that?
Yes, I think that’s normal. It’s a mind-blowing concept that the God who created the Universe might be looking for company, a real relationship with people, but the thing that keeps me on my knees is the difference between Grace and Karma.
I haven’t heard you talk about that.
I really believe we’ve moved out of the realm of Karma into one of Grace.
Well, that doesn’t make it clearer for me.
You see, at the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics—in physical laws—every action is met by an equal or an opposite one. It’s clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the Universe. I’m absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that “As you reap, so will you sow” stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff.
I’d be interested to hear that.
That’s between me and God. But I’d be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. I’d be in deep shit. It doesn’t excuse my mistakes, but I’m holding out for Grace. I’m holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don’t have to depend on my own religiosity.
The son of God who takes away the sins of the world. I wish I could believe in that.
But I love the idea of the Sacrificial Lamb. I love the idea that God says: Look, you cretins, there are certain results to the way we are, to selfishness, and there’s mortality as part of your very sinful nature, and, let’s face it, you’re not living a very good life, are you? There are consequences to actions. The point of the death of Christ is that Christ took on the sins of the world, so that what we put out did not come back to us, and that our sinful nature does not reap the obvious death. That’s the point. It should keep us humbled . . . It’s not our own good works that get us through the gates of Heaven.
That’s a great idea, no denying it. Such great hope is wonderful, even though it’s close to lunacy, in my view. Christ has his rank among the world’s great thinkers. But Son of God, isn’t that farfetched?
No, it’s not farfetched to me. Look, the secular response to the Christ story always goes like this: he was a great prophet, obviously a very interesting guy, had a lot to say along the lines of other great prophets, be they Elijah, Muhammad, Buddha, or Confucius. But actually Christ doesn’t allow you that. He doesn’t let you off that hook. Christ says: No. I’m not saying I’m a teacher, don’t call me teacher. I’m not saying I’m a prophet. I’m saying: “I’m the Messiah.” I’m saying: “I am God incarnate.” And people say: No, no, please, just be a prophet. A prophet, we can take. You’re a bit eccentric. We’ve had John the Baptist eating locusts and wild honey, we can handle that. But don’t mention the “M” word! Because, you know, we’re gonna have to crucify you. And he goes: No, no. I know you’re expecting me to come back with an army, and set you free from these creeps, but actually I am the Messiah. At this point, everyone starts staring at their shoes, and says: Oh, my God, he’s gonna keep saying this. So what you’re left with is: either Christ was who He said He was—the Messiah—or a complete nutcase. I mean, we’re talking nutcase on the level of Charles Manson. This man was like some of the people we’ve been talking about earlier. This man was strapping himself to a bomb, and had “King of the Jews” on his head, and, as they were putting him up on the Cross, was going: OK, martyrdom, here we go. Bring on the pain! I can take it. I’m not joking here. The idea that the entire course of civilization for over half of the globe could have its fate changed and turned upside-down by a nutcase, for me, that’s farfetched . . .
But sometimes I’m not far from thinking the world has been shaped by a bunch of nutcases, or one big nutcase hiding somewhere in some big fancy invisible lighthouse. [Bono laughs] Now, that cartoon stuff of yours has taken possession of my brain. What I mean here is that Christ was not the only one to make those kind of claims. There have been other prophets.
That’s right. But they didn’t change anything . . .
Actually, you can look at the history of religion like the history of rock music. Different bands competing for the same market.
Steady on! [laughs]
I’m half serious about that. It’s just that there was something in the air. I don’t think it’s so off the wall to say that. You might take that famous quote by John Lennon—the one that almost got the Beatles burned at the stake in the Sun Belt—in reverse. You might say that in his time, Jesus Christ was as popular as the Beatles.
That’s very funny, Michka. I want to avoid remixing here, but I guess we can say that. You know, Jesus . . . He had a real messianic complex. [laughs]
He was a bit like you, wasn’t He?
No, He only thought He was Bono! [laughs for quite a while] No, but seriously, if we only could be a bit more like Him, the world would be transformed. All I do is get up on the Cross of the Ego: the bad hangover, the bad review. When I look at the Cross of Christ, what I see up there is all my shit and everybody else’s. So I ask myself a question a lot of people have asked: Who is this man? And was He who He said He was, or was He just a religious nut? And there it is, and that’s the question. And no one can talk you into it or out of it.
You said to me: “Nobody goes to church, nobody’s religious anymore.”
But at the same time you’re saying to me religion is everywhere . . .
The religious instinct is everywhere.
The experience I have every day is that people look for magic.
They’re right to look for magic.
I don’t know, really. To us, celebrity is magic, and it’s certainly a new cult. I mean, people try to get close to celebrities, because they think they convey some sort of magic, that they bring them luck, actually. Anyway, if we want to sum this up, someone who becomes a terrorist and someone who goes to a U2 concert have something in common. They both want to escape from the materialistic, dull daily life. You see what I mean? Both are looking for transcendence.
But there are two routes out of town. There always were, there always are. There’s transcendence and there’s the cover version, or the dull copy: junk-food transcendence of drugs, the “easy to digest but finally that’s gonna give you heart disease” religion. But I tend to believe that people who just want a cheap way out of their life can find zealotry in lots of places. The true life of a believer is one of a longer, more hazardous or uphill pilgrimage, and where you uncover slowly the sort of illumination for your next step. Religious people, generally, they freak me out. Honestly, I start twitching when I’m around them. But sometimes, maybe weirdos are the only people who really know they need God.
And what about the other ones? What would they need God for?
I look around at the twentieth century: it’s not a great advertisement for unbelief. Where did communism bring Russia? Look at what more openness is bringing to China. I will say this for the Judeo-Christian tradition: we have at least written into the DNA the idea that God created every man equal, and that love is at the heart of the Universe. I mean, it’s slow. The Greeks may have come up with democracy, but they had no intention of everyone having it. We have to conclude that the most access to equality in the world has come out of these ancient religious ideas. [pause] Michka, are you still there?
I’m still here. This is interesting. But I’m realizing, maybe a bit too late, that it’s quite hard to steer an Irishman banging on about God and religion.
Do you really think other people are going to be interested in this?
No idea.
Right. That was an unexpected diversion into the catacombs. I enjoyed it, but we don’t know if anyone else will. Stop me if I get too self-indulgent. But you know what? I never talk at this length with anybody who’s writing or recording. They’re usually drinking.
Or falling asleep. But that’s OK. I think at some point you tend to forget who you are.
That’s good.
And at some point I forget about your personality and bin the set list.
Well, me too. That’s good. OK. Let’s get lost, as Chet Baker would say. One last thing, though. Can we title this chapter: “For those not interested in God, please pass by”?