We seemed to have found our pace: an hour on the phone every three or four weeks, keeping things sharp and concise. I now think of these conversations as genuine performances on Bono’s part. Once you’ve got him, he is always spot-on.
He was in his villa in Nice and mentioned that he had just gone for a swim and “lain up on a stony beach.” He must have thicker skin than I do. In Paris, the temperature had dipped below freezing the night before.
So even though it’s the day before Easter, I’m vowing that I won’t lecture you like I did last time.
No, I just might need to be.
Well, not always. [laughs] When I think back to how you first got involved in humanitarian action in Africa, I picture that famous moment during the Live Aid concert in the summer of 1985. Many remember it, and now you can even download it online: as you finish one of your songs, you spot a girl in the crowd who is waving at you, pressed against the railings. You signal her to come on the stage, and then, realizing that she can’t get past security, you jump off the stage, pick her up, and then you both abandon yourselves in a sort of slow, languorous dance. Probably more than one billion people witnessed that piece of showcase intimacy. Nineteen years later, may I ask: what the hell were you thinking at that moment?
[clears his throat] Well, you should never trust a performer completely.
Yeah, you already told me that.
As I told you, performers are sort of part con men and, if they’re any good, part shaman. So, in order to do your job, you have to be completely spontaneous and completely conscious. Though it was a spontaneous act to leave the stage, which was rather high and removed from the crowd, and though the time spent in the crowd resulted in us not performing the hit—“Pride (In the Name of Love)”—the other side of me knew what I was doing. I was trying to find an image that would be remembered for the day.
So you’re finally revealing the appalling truth: it was staged.
Partly, in my head, you know. But it’s hard to describe this process, because it’s like when you’re writing: you’re looking all the time for the right image. Or when you’re performing, you’re looking for those moments. As we’ve discussed before, as a performer, I’m not content with the distance between the crowd and the performer. I’m always trying to cross that distance. I’m trying to do it emotionally, mentally, and, where I can, physically. So it wasn’t just about rescuing the girl from the crowd, because I’m not so sure she needed to be rescued, but I was trying to find an image just to communicate how we all felt on that day. That was an overpowering day. It was a day that made tiny everybody that was in it, and the subject was so much bigger than anyone on the stage. I was not happy with just playing our songs and getting out of there. I wanted to find that moment. Of course, afterwards, I got a terrible time from the band. I was almost fired. Because I had climbed on roofs, I had left stages before, I had climbed on PA stacks, I had jumped into the crowds, I had physical confrontations in crowds, but this was the worst one for them, to leave them for what felt like hours, apparently. Larry told me he was going to stop playing. This was a big show for our band, there were a billion people watching, and we didn’t do our big song. Everyone was very annoyed with me, I mean, very annoyed.
But were you convinced at that very moment that it was the right thing to do, the right image? As it turns out, you were correct.
It turned out, but I didn’t know until a week later. It ruined my day. I thought I’d ruined the band’s performance. I went home to the hotel and just watched the end of Live Aid, which was Bob Dylan with Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood as guests. I just put it out of my head. A week later, people came back and said that was one of the moments they remembered. I was hiding out in a small country town in Ireland where Ali’s family live. We called on a sculptor friend of her family. He was pulling a piece of bronze out of a furnace as we walked in. His eyes nearly popped out of his head. “That’s you,” he said, “I’ve just taken out of the fire. It’s a piece inspired by what you did last week on Live Aid. It’s called ‘The Leap.’ You see,” he said, “you made a leap of faith that day.”
Everyone watching discovered that “out of control” aspect of your performance. Did you realize that at the time?
We keep starting these conversations, but the other thing I don’t trust is a performer who’s content on the stage, content with the distance between him or her and the audience. Whether it’s an actor or whether it’s a singer, I want to feel like the person on stage can stop playing a role, jump down, sit on my knee, follow me home, hug me, mug me, borrow money from me, make me breakfast in the morning. I’ve always had that as a performer. I don’t want people to feel comfortable in the relationship. I want to feel like it could snap.
Do you remember that girl’s name? And did you ever talk with her again? Do you know what she’s doing now?
No. Not at all. We both gave ourselves to a moment and a piece of television. And then . . .
. . . no memories.
“I never called, I never wrote.” [laughs] Actually, I’m not even sure if she was pleased that I singled her out.
What did you feel when she was in your arms?
Oh, I felt she was just a gorgeous girl. I felt her sort of shaking a little bit in my arms. But she might well have just been going: “I wish this rock star would stop sweating on me. I wish he washed.”
Maybe she hasn’t been washing ever since . . .
She might have been there to see the Rolling Stones, or whoever else was on, David Bowie.
When you’re in the audience, you want these kinds of moments to be unique, magic, and unrepeatable. You ask yourself: Was that staged? Or is it going to be exactly the same at the next performance, whether in Amsterdam or Houston, Texas?
Sometimes it is. Because what I tend to do as a performer is I remember the happy accident.
And you tend to repeat it.
Not every night, but I will try to find a moment like that again. That’s the kind of story of our live shows. Like, for instance, on Zoo TV, I remember one time I picked the camera out of the hands of someone in the crowd, brought them onstage and then filmed them from their eyes right the way down: their top, their belly button, their belt, their T-shirt, their jeans, right down to their toes. There was something very erotic about this girl standing there that I was filming with her own camera. And then I thought: “Wow! Imagine if we could broadcast that on our giant screens . . .” And so on Zoo TV we did that. I used to bring somebody out from the crowd and film them from their head to their toe. It was an amazing moment. It was a private moment, but then made into a sort of mega-moment.
It was a sort of journalistic statement as well, because that’s what TV is about these days.
That was reality TV: Zoo Television, where people become the zoo. What was the name of the mental institute that the Victorian English used to visit? Bedlam. People would pay in to poke the mentally retarded people with sticks and watch them being mad. That’s what I think the Andy Warhol fifteen minutes has done.
When you think back to those moments, are there any that you regret? Do you ever think: I have no idea why I did that, or who I was back then?
I remember going into a crowd during the War tour with the white flag. And I remember the crowd wouldn’t let me through, and I started fighting with the crowd. That big jock had started to block my way, and I lost it in the crush, throwing digs to protect myself, making my statement about pacifism and nonviolence. [laughs] I don’t know what was going on in my head back then. There are pictures, I think from the same tour, maybe, in Los Angeles, jumping off a balcony into a crowd. Robert Hilburn, the great American critic, said it was one of the most exciting moments he’d seen at a rock ’n’ roll show and one of the dumbest. [laughs]
Well, the two usually belong together. Did you know that James Brown actually started doing this balcony thing in the late fifties?
I didn’t know that. I got it more from Iggy Pop. Iggy Pop was my definition of the greatest performer in music. I was sixteen when I discovered him in the record shops we’ve discussed, in the City Centre of Dublin, seeing the pictures on the Stooges’ albums. They set fire to my imagination. He was combatative, physical, manic. I’d never seen anyone like him. Whereas the punk performers looked like they would leave the stage, but they really wouldn’t. He would.
There’s this story I’ve heard that, for me, sums up the revolution that punk brought to the art of performing. It happened during one of the very few performances that the Sex Pistols gave, way back in 1976 in London. At some point, Johnny Rotten climbed down from the stage, and quietly sat in the theater, watching his own band perform. He became a part of the audience. I would say it was less raw and brutal than Iggy Pop, but just as challenging.
Yeah, not just raw intelligence there, a sophisticated mind at work. Moral outrage is what I got from the Sex Pistols. But as to becoming part of the audience, I remember playing our first tour of the United States. There might be like sixty, seventy, one hundred people in the club. The floor would be empty. I would leave the stage, sit at their tables, drink their drinks and kiss their girlfriends. Fun stuff. I loved that. I loved becoming the audience. U2 came from the audience. I like the idea that you can go back. On the last tour, during “The Fly,” I left the stage and climbed over the crowd, and walked out of the back of the arena and got into a taxi and went home.
You mean you didn’t finish the show?
That was the last song. Maybe there was one more song to go, but I just did it. I did it because I could. In these concerts, I’m always looking for the image. On the last tour, during “Until the End of the World,” I used to reach out and grab a hand, and then bite it. The lovers’ row thing, biting the hand that feeds. It was a great image to see in the newspapers the next morning; “U2 still hungry.” [laughs]
During those early U2 concerts, you could actually sit in the same seats as the crowd. Now you can only pretend to. It’s not the real thing anymore.
That’s right. It’s more difficult now to walk around. We’re up at a very different pitch now, I’m glad to report. [laughs]
No more slobbering into other people’s beer.
I do miss that aspect, but I don’t miss it that much. I used to feel sick, worrying about how many people would turn up. I mean I would feel physically ill, because before we go onstage is a very difficult time anyway. It was made much more difficult if we didn’t know if there was anyone gonna be there. [laughs]
Let me go back to that Live Aid performance in 1985. I think Bob Geldof started the whole thing after he saw a report on the BBC in 1984 about famine in Ethiopia. But how did you get interested?
Well, you know, Ireland has a lot of ties with Africa, because of Catholic missions: nuns, priests. Ireland is very Africa-conscious because, I suppose, as a country, it had its own famine not that long ago. In the mid-nineteenth century, the population of Ireland went from eight million to four million. Two million died and two million went off to become policemen in New York. [laughs] Well, no: in Boston, and London, San Francisco, Birmingham, Sydney. But there are very strong ties there. Maybe it’s folk memory, maybe it’s just a shared colonial past. Those reports from the BBC were extraordinary. I’m sure you had similar in France. It was hard to believe, what was happening. It was really hard. We watched that image of that starving child trying to stand up. You know, it’s still stuck on my mind. In a world where there is so much, in a world where there’s plenty, in a world of unimaginable prosperity, a child can die of starvation! It’s hard to believe. Then later, after Live Aid, when Ali and I went—and the images weren’t pictures, they were children standing in front of me, or at least trying to stand in front of me. I remember deciding that I don’t want to be, I will not be, in a world where that continues to be true. Now, with DATA informing me, I know that we can be the generation that ends extreme poverty, the kind of poverty where a child can die for lack of simple immunization or having food in its belly. Because we can, we must. Yes, there will always be poverty, yes, there will always be people dying of disease, but no, not that stupid poverty.
True. But most musicians who have done work for Africa have also been passionate about African music. Peter Gabriel, for instance. Paul Simon went over to South Africa to record Graceland, and he worked with the famous Zulu choir Ladysmith Black Mambazo. But you didn’t go over there with Edge, Larry, and Adam. You went as a private person, not as a musician.
Well, remember there was a cultural boycott for South Africa. People, many times, offered us to go to Sun City. We turned them down. We were the first band to be invited after the cultural embargo was lifted.* The first band the ANC invited was U2, because we had been part of the anti-apartheid community in Ireland and in Europe. But we hadn’t visited the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. Until that moment, there weren’t many Holiday Inns for a band to play.
But I am sure that your greatest mentor, Brian Eno, had introduced you to African music by the time of Live Aid.
Oh, he talked about it all the time. He had just made Remain in Light with the Talking Heads, and in fact he arrived at the U2 session for The Unforgettable Fire in early 1984 with his head full of Africa.
Knowing the extent of your passion for Africa, I am surprised that it has never spilled over into U2’s music. I mean your music has always been . . .
. . . fairly white.
Actually, yes.
Let’s go further. The Irish aren’t white. We’re more rosy pink. [laughs]
Peter Gabriel was too. But he started collaborating with African musicians early on.
Yes. In Ireland, there were only three black people in the seventies: one of them sang for Thin Lizzy; one of them a best friend, Sharon Blankson, now runs U2’s wardrobe; and the other one ate some people. There was a famous incident in the seventies where a medical student at the College of Surgeons ate a couple of people.
Really?
I’m not messing. I think his name was Mohangi. He ate his girlfriend and served her up in a restaurant where he was working. Mohangi entered the language at the time.
You’re pulling my leg?
It’s better than eating it! But you know, there were very few immigrants who wanted to come to Ireland at the time.
I can understand African music wasn’t on Irish radio, but why should that have prevented you from trying if you wanted to?
We’d listen to the music, but it wasn’t really what we were into at that time. You’re trying to find your own voice. I like African music, as it happens, an awful lot. But the concept of world music didn’t really do it for me. I felt lifted by Youssou n’Dour and Angélique Kidjo. My favorite African singer is that Egyptian singer Oum Kalthoum. And then Salif Keita, King Sunny Ade: these were all on our record label—Island Records. I loved them. But it turns out that the groove-based music isn’t our strength. My voice doesn’t sound great singing over a groove. My voice seems to prefer chord changes in the more Western sense. It’s finally that. I remember that we were coming up with some pretty good grooves, but the songs weren’t very good. With Brian Eno at the helm, we were experimenting with a lot of grooves, but I remember saying to Edge: “I think my voice might need a few chord changes.” I am not black. I am white. Might as well accept it. [laughs]
But the idea of a rock star who goes over to Africa only when a big catastrophe happens there, and is not passionate about its music, or its people—it’s a bit upsetting.
What I’m telling you is, being Irish, I wasn’t exposed to Africa as a cultural force, more as a moral dilemma. Yeah, it’s a shame. Because Africa’s next door to Europe. It’s as close to go from where I am now in France to Africa as it is going from Toronto to Jamaica.
You could have swum over there this morning.
I think I was trying . . . to get away from you. [laughs] I ran out of air, actually. The truth of it is that Africa did not feel like a next-door neighbor to Europe. We grew up thinking of Africa as farther than Australia, which is a pity, because I would have loved to go as a tourist, and Africa needs our tourism. I’m trying to bring my children there now. But, no, I went there as part of a relief agency, an aid worker, and that’s not a great way to see Africa.
Still you traveled there, and I’m sure that seeing it for the first time was a shock to you. I would love to hear you talk about your experiences there the same way you discussed your first time in New York. So you are in Africa for the first time in your life. You’ve just landed and passed through customs. What is your first impression? What do you see? What do you smell? What do you feel? And where are you exactly?
It’s Addis Ababa. There’s heat, intense heat, and the noise of a busy airport . . .
Ali’s with you.
It’s just Ali and myself. We’re trying to meet someone. His name is Steve Reynolds, and he’s the guy who’s put this together for us. I think I’m enjoying the feeling of mild fear.
What is it that feels threatening?
Well, just because I don’t know what’s around the corner or where we’re going. I don’t know. Will there be people at the airport to meet us? Will it work out? It’s not unlike New York, actually. It’s that same kind of high-pitched chatter, and people shouting across each other. There is a certain molecular excitement in Africa, which you do pick up. It feels like the molecules are vibrating a little faster. So then, we go out onto the streets, and it’s the chaos of Addis Ababa.
I’ve never been there. How big a city is it?
It’s a big city. I’ve been there a few times now. I can’t remember where we stayed, that’s kind of gone. But before we went off, someone asked us if we wanted to see around Addis Ababa. They said the best way to do was by horse. So I said: “Horses?” And they said: “Yeah.”
Can you ride?
No, I didn’t tell them I couldn’t ride. You should know that about me now.
It’s true. [laughs]
Mengistu.
No, I didn’t say anything about not riding. Ali can ride. So, they said: “We can take Haile Selassie’s horses.” I said: “You’re joking!” They said: “Yeah. Now Haile Selassie’s gone, the palace has been taken by the Communists.” That’s right. But he’s not interested, as it turns out, in Haile Selassie’s horses. So somebody has them, and you can take them out for the day. They’re giant stallions.
What color? Black?
Black. And I had to get up on this horse. When I was a kid in Northside Dublin, the gypsy horses, they used to let them out in the winters. They’d come into our neighborhood, and we used to ride them bareback. But this is a very different thing. They’re about twice as tall.
It’s a double-decker.
[laughs] It’s a double-decker. You got it. I’m trying my very best not to show our hosts that I can’t ride. I’ve told them I can. So we go through the back streets, and I remember one vivid picture of the people who are with World Vision, which is an American aid agency. One of the women was breast-feeding a child on the horse. [laughs] She was so comfortable. She didn’t mean to be insensitive. But the Muslim women did not like this and came out and started throwing stones at her because she was showing her breasts. I love it when other people make such a faux pas. It’s usually me. But it was incredible to go through the back streets of this ancient capital by horse.
And when the people in the streets saw this white man looking a little funny riding that huge horse, [Bono laughs] how did they react? Did they wave at you or did they stone you?
They waved and laughed. Boys with big pearly grins just laughing their head off at the Irish people.
You toured the city, but I remember a couple of years ago you mentioned a story about visiting the countryside, where you saw a treasure in some holy place. Do you remember that?
Yes. The area of Ethiopia where we were working was in the north: a place called Ajibar, near Wollo. The local Communist commander took an interest in myself and Ali, I think just out of boredom. And he befriended us, would ask us questions about where we lived, and even our address. I got the impression he was going to bolt to get the hell out of Dodge, as the Americans say. We were in the hills, where you could see other hills way in the distance. At the top of one of those hills on a large flat mesa, you could just about make out a monastery. We asked “Comrade Gorma” about it and one day he took us there.
On horseback?
No, we went on jeep. Then we got out of the jeep, and then we took, I think, some donkeys. Maybe it was horses. I can’t exactly remember how we got up there. But when we got to the monastery, an extraordinary thing happened. All the monks started to panic and got down on their knees in front of this military man, and kind of begged him.
. . . not to harm them.
. . . not to harm them. And it was so shocking to see this. Then they all started bringing him in, and showing him around. He was not that scary a man, but it will show you the memory of the revolution had left these monks terrorized. The monks brought him and those following behind to this silo—I guess that would have been for grain, or something like that. There was a ladder. We climbed up the ladder, and then climbed down another ladder into the middle of the silo where, wrapped in sacks, was a treasure that they’d been hiding. There were crowns, gold crowns, and religious artifacts. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I photographed them. I still have the photographs. But the monk offered up the crown to “Comrade Gorma.” He put it on Ali’s head, and I have pictures of them. I really don’t know how priceless they were. I’m not qualified enough to figure out whether they were nineteenth- or eleventh-century. But as we left, we were so sad because we had the feeling these beautiful treasures wouldn’t be there the next day. I don’t know where this man went. Maybe now he’s an antiques dealer. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he handed it over and they’re in a museum somewhere. But it was Emperor Menelik’s retreat. Menelik was in direct line from King David. Ethiopia . . . it’s a mystic country. People are so royal looking. You read about Solomon coming to meet and indeed fall in love with the Queen of Sheba. It’s like Bob Marley on every corner. They say it’s where the Garden of Eden was. They say it’s where the Ark of the Covenant is. It’s a remarkable, beautiful country. It is bewildering to see the kind of poverty that lives there now.
There is something unexpected in your amazement at the beauty of the place. The experience you have just described is not particularly sad. There is an element of drama, but you are conveying a real sense of beauty. But each time I have heard you talk about Africa before today, it was only to remind people of how tragic and dreadful a place it is.
Whenever I visit developing countries, the thing that strikes me the most is the happiness in the midst of misery. I mean, you read about war and dismal poverty, but when you’re there, you see smiles, you hear laughter, you feel kindness, even joy.
I can’t agree with that. I always try to talk about the potential of the people and the place. As I say, it’s a place of rare beauty. In fact, my book of photographs, A String of Pearls, taken when I was working there, was not of the sick and the hungry. They were of the recovering and the well. Because I wanted to convey how beautiful and how noble these people were. Yes, I think it’s very important to describe Africa in terms other than tragedy. You have to find a way of describing its myriad of possibilities, its thick jungle and rocky terrains. The Serengeti, the shining temples and calls to prayer . . . Their holy cities, where they play their car horns like musical instruments. Big bloody suns, that’s another one. When you see the sun setting, you duck. Oh yeah, the absence of self-pity, which is a quality I wish I possessed. It’s a quality I admire in people the most: lack of self-pity. It’s one of the marks of some of my favorite people. But, oh yeah, the giddiness and the laughter. You know, I used to have earrings, when the two of us were in charge of this orphanage for a short while. I was called “The Girl with the Beard,” because I couldn’t shave.
I think that just by accident, you’ve come up with the title of this chapter.
That’s what it was, I was called “The Girl with the Beard.” Myself and Ali worked on a program where you could teach children through songs or one-act plays. It is still operating, I’m told. We would teach them the things they needed to know in order to not be sick. So I wrote songs and they were translated into Amharic. Somewhere, these songs exist, and one of the plays was about giving birth. We worked with the local nurse. Stuff like how to cut the umbilical cord. There were some bad practices. They would use cow dung, and things like that, which would cause infection. These people are a captive audience. The children would then go around, singing these songs and so teach their parents. It was a three-week program: a song, a play, and a story, and then repeated. That’s all we did there.
So your work was about the spirit of the people. It was not just distributing food.
The camp was about feeding, but myself and Ali were in charge of the orphanage. We slept in a tent. In the morning, as the mist would lift, we would see thousands of people walking in lines toward the camp, people who had been walking for great distances through the night—men, women, children, families who’d lost everything, taking few possessions on a voyage to meet mercy. Some, as they got to the camp, would collapse. Some would leave their children at the gates, and some would leave dead children at the fences to be buried. There was barbed wire all around the camp. I always thought this was so upsetting that we should have barbed wire. I thought the place looked like a concentration camp.
But why did they put up the barbed wire?
Unlike the concentration camps, it was to keep people out. It really brought home the problem. There was not enough to go around. Wouldn’t you steal food for your family? I would. And again, these people are so royal, they’re so elegant, so upright, these women and men. To have their dignity robbed from them, to arrive at a feeding station where it’s Auschwitz in reverse . . .
Were people from the outside threatening to loot the camp?
No, I don’t remember any feeling of aggression. The barbed wire was precautionary. I do remember a man coming to me with his child—his son. He was so clearly proud of his son. Giving me his son, and saying to me: “Please, take my boy, because if he stays with me, he will surely die. If he goes with you, he will live.” Having to say no, and having to turn away, is a very . . . very, very, very, very hard thing to do. One part of me did and, you know, one part of me didn’t. That’s the part of me that still goes back there. It’s a more than uneasy feeling. If you just put it into your own world, and think about your own child, and what it took for that man to say that, it’s . . . bewildering.
You did that right after Live Aid, right?
Yes. Having got caught up in Live Aid, I said to Ali: “I just can’t get these people I’m seeing on television out of my head. We have to try and do something. In a quiet way.” We didn’t tell anyone we were going. We just went out, as it were, under the radar.
These experiences have clearly altered the course of your life. Everything you’ve been talking with me about, all the presidents, all the Popes, all the arguments, I finally realize that it all comes down to this.
I don’t think I can talk about this anymore. Let’s change the subject.
OK, OK. Coming back to music, has your perception of African music changed after that?
I had a kind of epiphany, but it was a couple of years later, just sitting outside the Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles, when we were working on Rattle and Hum. The studio was way down east on Sunset Strip. And on a Saturday night, I would watch the parade of Mexican hot wheels, jumping trucks, muscle cars, and people cruising by, listening to rap breaking in America. Nineteen eighty-eight was incredible: incredible sound systems, deep sub-low bass, a cacophony of rhythm, chanting, disconnected voices, hip-hop coming from all directions. Amazingly sophisticated pop music. [suddenly imitates human beat box and syncopated rhythms] And I’m thinking: “I know this music. It’s African music.” The epiphany was realizing that technology had brought African music to the descendants of Africa in America. People who had no memory of their continent of origin, and no direct experience of the call-and-response music that is Africa. Yet through technology, through digital samplers, scratching old vinyl, their music was swimming back up the river through swing, rock ’n’ roll, soul, electronica, to its birthplace, which sounds to my ears so like hip-hop. How did that happen? Pure African music arriving through the DNA, through the genes of those people. That blew my mind. It still blows my mind because of what it suggests of a kind of folk memory, of what we all might carry with us from our ancestors. And not just music, gifts, maybe even prejudices.
What about your ancestors?
Oddly enough, Irish music has more than a little in common with African music or Middle Eastern music. It comes from a completely different place than the rest of Europe, well, Northern Europe. Its musical scale is pentatonic, not chromatic, i.e., quarter notes, bent notes. The Shanos singers, for example, their melodies they sing unaccompanied can be traced to Northwest Africa. I visited a musicologist in Cairo once who backed up the theory of professor Bob Quinn of University College Galway, who said the sea routes from Africa had brought much more connection even in the pre-Christian era between the west of Ireland, west of France, west of Spain and West Africa. If you look at Ireland’s most famous religious manuscript, the Book of Kells, it’s like Coptic manuscripts of the same era. Now you’d tell that to my old man, Bob Hewson, and you’d get more than a hairy eyeball. You’d get a clip on the ear. Blackfellows, the Book of Kells. Feck off! You see, a sneaky racism plays a part in everything. The Irish, and I’m guilty of this, think they invented everything.