There was something uncanny about Bono’s route to Africa. Each time he had the opportunity, Bono would lay Africa on the table, whether I’d asked him about clinical depression or his impression of President Bush. My view was that since 1985, when he and Ali had spent three weeks in that refugee camp in the north of Ethiopia, Africa had more or less vanished from his field of vision. He certainly didn’t set foot on that continent until the day the U2 PopMart tour stopped in Cape Town, i.e., March 16, 1998. The truth is, for twelve years, before he received a phone call from someone trying to find a worthy champion for the Jubilee 2000 campaign, Bono had very little to say or do about Africa publicly.
It’s not really true in private,he said when we discussed that.I just hadn’t found an innovating or inspirational solution to some of these problems, i.e., I didn’t want to be a bore. I didn’t want to go on and on, be a bleeding heart without a strategy.But what was he ready to do in private?My definition of charity is the old idea that the right hand should not knowwhat the left hand is doing. If it’s public, it’s not charity. It’s PR. Unless it’s taking a stand. And at that time, I hadn’t a stand to take other than the sort of “Rock against bad things,” which is so banal. In the end, justice is more poignant than charity, which is so patronizing.So when did he get a strategy?1997–98 is when I re-entered the fray. Jubilee 2000 had a great strategy for canceling the debts of the poorest countries to the richest as part of the millennium celebrations.
In mid-2002, Bono accompanied former U.S. secretary of treasury Paul O’Neill for a tour of several African countries. I wanted to ask him how he accounted for all those “lost years” regarding Africa. Most of all, I thought I had to challenge his ideas about aid, which often contradicted some recent reports I’d read. Since I had no firsthand knowledge of any kind, I leaned on the work of Paul Theroux, whoseDark Star SafariI had just finished reading. The book is an account of his crossing the African continent, from Cairo to Cape Town. Rather dauntlessly, he’d traveled only either by bus or train, or on the back of a Jeep or a truck. About forty years later, he was revisiting the places and the people he knew as a young member of the U.S. Peace Corps. His conclusions were devastating: Africa is worse off at the beginning of the twenty-first century than it had been in the early sixties, when fledgling countries started to free themselves from the colonial powers, and that is the case not in spite of Western aid, butbecauseof it, he stressed. Theroux’s judgment on various aid organizations and representatives is a very harsh one. I wondered what Bono would make of it. The result turned out to be one of our most revealing conversations.
I’m afraid I’m going to be making some snide remarks this morning.
Oh boy!
Maybe what you said to me about your father’s negative attitude encouraged me somehow.
OK. Go for it. I’m terrified.
I’m going to read out to you a few lines from a book called Dark Star Safari, by Paul Theroux.*
Yeah, yeah. I’ve read it.
So you’ve read it. Then you know the story. There is a passage I wanted to discuss with you. Maybe you remember that part where Theroux is in Ethiopia in a place called Shashemene, which serves as a sort of haven for Rastafarians. There he meets with this seventy-one-year-old bona fide Rastafarian and a young zealot called Patrick, who tells him that the millennium is about to come to Ethiopia, but it’s going to be slightly behind schedule because the Ethiopian calendar runs seven years and eight months late. And this guy tells him it’s not going to be water this time, but fire. And that—luckily—the Rift Valley will be spared. So Patrick invites the author to join him: that way he and his family will be saved. This is how Theroux concludes his piece: I thanked him and walking out to the main road I reflected on how Africa, being incomplete and so empty, was a place for people to create personal myths and indulge themselves in fantasies of atonement and redemption, melodramas of suffering, of strength—binding up wounds, feeding the hungry, looking after refugees, driving expensive Land Rovers, even living out a whole cosmology of creation and destruction, rewriting the Bible as an African epic of survival. I wonder how you reacted to that passage. You know that Theroux was very critical of the work of a lot of humanitarian workers.
Yeah. It’s a beautifully written book. There are passages I will never forget. A real love for Africa comes through as well as his frustration. But some of his comments since it has been published about humanitarian relief efforts have been extremely unhelpful. He figured the debate could do with some brutal truths. He was right there, but some of his comments were not true. He wasn’t really aware of the details of some of the proposals that were coming at the time. He was critical of aid propping up governments that should be let turn to dust. This has been true, and in some cases, it might still be. But to make that as an argument against aid per se is not credible. I think he’s just being a crank. And I love cranks! I mean, my country is filled with them, and people should voice off. But when your lives are depending on those drugs, when the communities are depending on help to build schools, such comments are not helpful.
He gives specific examples of humanitarian projects turning to ruin, such as a school in Uganda financed by Canada or a flourmill financed by the U.S.
Such examples exist, and this is part of the reason the level of aid over the last twenty years has shrunk. We’re trying to reverse that trend. It is not fair to point all the time to such exceptions. They are not the rule these days. I don’t appreciate Theroux’s comments, because they feed into the sort of ignorance about Africa and the continent—the “money down a rat hole” argument. I understand his frustration with corruption. Corruption is probably the biggest problem facing the continent, but it is not the only one. As I keep telling you, there are new ways to deliver aid, where it does not prop up a corrupt government, but it rewards governments that are tackling corruption and have poverty-reduction policies in place. That was the Millennium Challenge Account [MCA], which was the first major thing that we were involved in with the Bush administration [see Chapter 4]. Its concept was to reward good governance, transparency. Countries would get a special grant if they really were serious about tackling poverty, and were open to criticism, encouraging civil society, a free press, et cetera. If a government is doing the right thing by its people, they should be fast-tracked in increases in aid. [pause] That said, I should be fair here. It might be interesting to talk about revisiting Ethiopia, just because in a way Ethiopia is the best case for Theroux’s argument—and mine.
And why is that?
Because after years and years of aid, the country is still in deep crisis. And after all that stuff, all that attention on the famine in the eighties, in the nineties, when I got back, maybe three years ago [circa 2002], I was amazed, because Addis Ababa was a very different city. It was obvious that there’d been huge migration from the countryside, and so there were new ghettos everywhere, shocking ghettos. And I met prostitutes in the ghettos—no idea about using condoms, and were HIV-positive, but not telling their customers. All the degradation that poverty can bring to a people was present in Addis. And I had visited there when the Communists had it by the balls. Now I was meeting the guerrilla leader who fought against the Communists.
Meles Zenawi.
Yes. And he’s a very impressive man. He’s a brilliant macroeconomist. He taught himself whilst leading a guerrilla war. He taught himself on BBC’s Open University. He studied economics, apparently the brightest student they ever had. He’s a brilliant man. I spent some time with him, it was very interesting to hear his stories, about how he studied economics and political science. “In Ethiopia,” he said, “you learn everything by living with the farmers, because the farmers in Ethiopia are the smartest people in the country.” I said: “But why is that?” And he said: “Because if you aren’t smart, you starve.” So you have the most innovative people. They can make something out of nothing. He’d learned an awful lot about the country from hiding out in this guerrilla war. But I could see that after the war, they really haven’t recovered, and, still, though making great progress in a lot of respects, he wasn’t really encouraging the civil society. He still had a little bit of a Leftist control. For a guy who fought the Communists, he was not so committed to a free and open press as we would have expected. I think, though, in essence, he is a very, very good man, maybe even a great man. It’s just fear of losing control of the country. Time will tell.
So what did you think of the regression in Ethiopia?
What I’m saying to you is that there’s both: regression and progression. Two steps forward, one step back. Remember, it’s a war- and famine-ravaged country. Still, hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved that would have been lost. But Theroux would argue that hundreds of thousands of other lives are in danger because the Ethiopians and our NGO communities failed to put the mechanisms in place to stop that happening again. A wasted opportunity.
So he was right, there.
Yes. But recently, that’s changing, and let me give you a few examples on the micro and macro levels. Take Sister Jemba, who works in Addis at a very grassroots level with communities to improve their housing and sanitation in a sustainable way. It’s a bottom-up approach, and as I say, sustainable. At the macro level, there’s a group called REST: Relief Ethiopian Society of Tigre, this funded again by NGOs and donor governments in the north of Ethiopia. Their long-term integrated rural development programs working with communities and farmers try to improve the productivity of the land. For example, in Degua, stone dams have been constructed to prevent further erosion of gullies catching rainwater and building soil fertility. What was previously barren land is now producing 1,500 barrels of good quality hay for livestock every year. This is not insignificant. Save the Children have a program which will impact the lives of 150,000 people in the Amhara region. It’s called Linking Relief to Development, where livestock is sold to buy food, protecting the assets of the Woredas of Sekota and Gublafto for three years till they are self-sufficient, ganging up on local problems across many different areas: soil and water conservation, micro enterprise, et cetera. I know this stuff and these extraordinary tribal names because I’ve been working on this this morning. This is not the old top-down type of development, where you arrive in town like a bull in a china shop, trampling all over the people you’re supposed to help.
But even effective aid is not the long-run solution, is it, Bono?
No. Commerce and good government. We should look at foreign assistance as kind of start-up money. Self-sufficiency is of course the goal. The funny thing was traveling with an “entrepreneur” like Paul O’Neill, who was the United States secretary of the treasury. All the time he’d been telling me the future of Africa is in the hands of business and commerce. And I knew that to be sort of true, but not as much as I needed to, and this opened my mind to subjects like unfair trade relationships. It’s a shock to discover that for all our talk of the free market, the poorest people on Earth are not allowed to put their products on our shelves in an evenhanded way. They have to negotiate all kinds of tariffs and taxes. It’s not a level playing field. We can sell to them, but they can’t sell to us. I started to realize that even the most friendly faces to Africa would in Congress obstruct trade reform. It was the Left that sponsored the Farm Bill in the United States, which subsidizes American agriculture and makes it impossible for African farmers to compete. Imagine the shock of walking through the markets in Accra, Ghana, where ghettos have been swollen with out-of-work rice farmers, to find cheap American and Vietnamese rice on sale to people who used to produce their own.
You say commerce is the future. Is the future happening now?
Yes, but it’s slow, agonizingly slow. I want you to understand, Michka, the free market unencumbered is not the solution either. All successful economies have protected their seed industries until they were strong enough to compete. We cannot deny for others what we demand for ourselves. Successful economies in Southeast Asia had a very careful, gradual journey to competitiveness. They’re the best example of how aid can work. Without it, they wouldn’t be where they are.
So you’re describing an increase in aid that’s strategic and demanding of good government and in consultation with the people on the ground.
That’s really it. As I already told you, a kind of Marshall Plan for Africa. Think back to the Second World War, think back to the United States that liberated Europe, but then rebuilt Europe, spending one percent GDP over four years. They were being strategic, it wasn’t all out of the goodness of their hearts, though it was that too. The U.S. were rebuilding Europe as a bulwark against Sovietism in the Cold War. This is what we need in Africa and in some parts of the Middle East—a bulwark against the extremism of our age in what I call the Hot War. This makes sense, not just as a moral imperative, but a political and a strategic one. It’s the right thing to do.
So you’d like to see the military spending into a Marshall Plan–type investment. Is it realistic?
What I’m saying is, one is bound up in the other. Might it not be cheaper to make friends of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them later? When we started the century, people were still talking about Star Wars, they were talking about building space stations with nuclear capability . . . It’s a joke! Commercial airliners can be used to take down countries. On September 11, one of those airplanes was headed for the United States Congress, packed with people I know and respect and now work with. The whole of the United States Congress could have been taken out by just one of those planes, were it not for the bravery of some of the people on board. Star Wars? What were they thinking? This is a new era. We need tactical weapons in another sense. Take out hatred a different way. Destroy anti-American or anti-Western feeling by making sure they know who we are, working harder on the Middle East peace process, feeding people who are starving, bringing our pharmaceuticals to deal with the AIDS emergency. Africa is forty percent Muslim. For the price of the war in Iraq, the world could have been changed utterly, and people who now boo and hiss America and Europe would be applauding us. This is not fanciful, this is not Irish misty-eyed nonsense! This is realpolitik.
You’re up to your neck in all this stuff! How did you get involved at such a level? It seems that it’s only happened over the last five years. Mandela was released in 1990, but you didn’t set foot in South Africa until the late nineties.
First time, I think it was on the PopMart tour. As I told you, U2 were frontline agitators for the anti-apartheid movement. We were the first artists invited to the new South Africa by the ANC [the PopMart tour stopped in Cape Town on March 16, 1998].
So it was about thirteen years later. I think you offered an explanation, albeit unconsciously. I have here the speech you just made a couple of weeks ago when you received an honorary degree at the University of Pennsylvania, trying to raise the consciousness of future American decision-makers about AIDS in Africa: “I know idealism is not playing on the radio right now,” you said. “You don’t see it on TV, irony is on heavy rotation, the knowingness, the smirk, the tired joke. I’ve tried them all out. Idealism is under siege, beset by materialism, narcissism, and all the other isms of indifference.” What I’m underscoring here is: I’ve tried them all out. In the early nineties, U2 was very much into nihilism and irony. You and the band made a point of not being as earnest as you had been before. Does that account for your personally forgetting about Africa?
Firstly, let me say the music was not ironic in that period—it was wrapped in irony. Actually, there was real blood going through those veins. Secondly, concerning the packaging, the presentation, I think even then it was ironic in a very idealistic way. As to forgetting about Africa, all through that period, Ali and myself were quietly involved. As I told you before, it was not part of U2’s agenda.
So you really don’t think you lost your idealism, and to use your own kind of terminology, “surrendered to the world and its way,” which is surely the smirk?
Look, we didn’t want to look like the group that was too stupid to enjoy being at number one! [laughs] There’s only so much people can take of four angry young men. We had much more dimension in our personal lives. We wanted to reflect that in our public lives. Laughter is the evidence of freedom. A sense of humor is not always defensive. It can be a great attack dog. I mean, we described Achtung, Baby as the sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree. We had amassed a lot of moral baggage, and we just wanted to lighten the load a little bit for those four frozen faces on the cover of that album. We had painted ourselves into a corner. We needed to circle the square. Every sort of “Right On” movement was outside our door and knocking. We couldn’t let every serious issue in. We continued our work with Amnesty International and Greenpeace. That’s where we met the wider world, through those organizations. We stormed Sellafield with Kraftwerk and Public Enemy, and it was amazing. But I admit the period was more inward- than outward-looking, and at a certain point, maybe the worldview suffered, I’ll admit that. Compassion fatigue: I don’t think we had it, but it could have been an issue for our audience if we were to take on Africa at that period. I mean, I was reading about Africa in the newspaper or in the odd specialist publication, but I wasn’t anxious to stare at it for too long. I hadn’t heard any new ideas at that point.
When you did Live Aid and the Conspiracy of Hope tour, humanitarian work seemed to be at the core of your music. But afterward, humanitarian work was the small print on the list of acknowledgments in your CD booklets. I was wondering if you were touched by that wave of self-disgust that was going on in the nineties. There was Nirvana, and with grunge came the business of self-loathing. I mean it was not a business, but it was a trend . . .
[interrupting] No, it is a business! [laughs]
OK. Let me put it simply. Did you go through a crisis of faith?
Errr . . . a crisis of strategy more than a crisis of faith. I mean, taking a television station on the road, and spending a quarter of a million dollars a day wasn’t just a thrill. [laughs] It was a bit of a worry! I mean, we were burning money, a bonfire of our vanities. But we were at least spending it on our fans. We were risking bankruptcy for an art project.
But hadn’t you stopped trying to change the world in the real sense? Art projects are not something people would associate with U2.
Well you should, because it is one, and a commercial project, and a spiritual project, and a political project when it wants to be. We still had the idea in our heads that a rock star has two instincts: he wants to change the world, and he wants to have fun. If he can do both at the same time, that’s the way to go. But though we had a lot of interesting and arty ideas that were flashing around on our expensive TV sets, the mainframe of Zoo TV was still pretty radical. The siege of Sarajevo was going on, and we were broadcasting it.
Yes, it’s true. I’m being unfair. You were still setting up these operations. But that is my point. They were operations.
Heart wasn’t enough, you had to be smart in the nineties. We were trying something new. We were looking for hard juxtapositions, the kind you’ll find in conceptual art. It was uncomfortable. Because that’s the thing about television—you move from a kind of McDonald’s commercial to Africa in a second. And this sort of schizophrenic channel-hopping image of life that we were all leading was part of that whole thing. We needed new weapons for our arsenal. That was what Zoo TV was. We called it judo. Have we discussed that yet?
Yes, using the enemy’s strength to defend yourself. What did you have to defend yourself against?
Caricaturing in the media. We were being reduced to simple lines, there was no shading. We looked naive. Yes, that’s what was going on in that period. I don’t think it was a crisis of faith, no. Just looking for a new way to express old idealism.
But didn’t you go through a period of doubt in your personal life? I have this feeling that you were a little lost at that time.
On the contrary, I was going through a kind of glasnost. [laughs] The Politburo was coming out of the deep freeze.
Same years, by the way: 1989–1990.
I know. Of course I slept in Brezhnev’s bed. That must have been when all this started. I told you that, didn’t I? I went from the tents of Amhara to sleeping in Brezhnev’s bed.
I don’t remember the Brezhnev story.
When we were recording Achtung, Baby, the night we flew into Berlin was the last of the old divided city. And our tour manager, Dennis Sheehan, had found the old Soviet guesthouses for the old Soviet leaders. I happened to be sleeping in Brezhnev’s room. What a laugh! This was a brown room. All I remember is there was brown everywhere, and very large knobs on everything, even on the stereo. If I haven’t told you, I should probably. It’s a complete distraction to go back to Berlin, but if you want, I will, because the most extraordinary thing happened as we were living in that house. For our very first night, there were celebrations.
Oh yeah, when you joined the wrong crowd and found yourselves with people who were demonstrating against the destruction of the wall. I’m not surprised that happened to you. [laughs]
How perfect is that? U2 chills out. We want to be part of the parade and the fun, and have celebrations. We’re looking around, and we’re going: “These people, they really don’t know how to have fun, do they?” We’d heard about Bierkellers and we thought: “This is not looking like the Berliners we’ve heard about . . .” Then we find out: “Oops! These people are protesting the Wall coming down. They’re diehard Communists.” It’s just a great photograph, isn’t it? “U2 protests Wall coming down.”
You’re digressing again. In that speech at the University of Pennsylvania, you said: “I’ve tried them all out: the smirk, the tired joke . . .” What is it that you tried exactly?
That smirk annoys me, whenever I see it. Mostly, it’s the sign that I’m uncomfortable. It’s like a nervous twitch. There was an amazing moment when we played the Super Bowl recently, the finale of America’s football league. It’s a hyper-event in the U.S., the biggest date of the year. We had to build the stage in six minutes. Our idea was to have a music crowd on the pitch and then walk through that crowd to get up on the stage. I had on these earphones that were wireless. The band are walking through the crowd and there’s a camera right in front of me, and the punters start slapping me on the back. I realize that the tiny wires of my earplugs are vulnerable. All one person has to do is pull the wire, and I’m off air. I would hear nothing. Off the air in front of a billion people! And this is going out live, and there’s nothing you could do. So because this wire had been left exposed, I just started to quietly panic. But if you look at the film of that, you’ll see me swaggering with the most annoying smirk ever seen. You just think: that guy is such a prat! [laughs] The confidence, you just hate it. I hate anyone with that much confidence. Confidence gets you not very far in this life. But for me, it’s a sure sign of pure panic.
I still don’t know exactly what you were trying out with that smirk. You were suggesting an intentional change of image.
I always felt like a part-time pop star, never fully comfortable with the role. For a few years, I put on rock stars’ clothes and a rock star confidence to see where it would get me. I was surprised.
So where did it get you?
Everywhere.
Which means?
It was more fun than I thought.
But you seem to regret it.
No. Insecurity can take you a long way. That smirk opened doors.
You’re still not answering. What did they open to?
A concept.
What?
The importance of not being earnest.
And was it painful?
Oh yeah . . . [laughs] Agony!
And now you’re over it.
Not quite. It’s fun being a rock star . . . sometimes.
In that “glasnost” period, even though you worked with Amnesty and Greenpeace, Africa was not on your agenda. But was it on your mind?
No, sadly. Not as much as it should have been. A little, yes, but not a lot. I remember Ali and myself flying back from Africa the first time. And the first few days in Europe again, it was culture shock. We had a lot more difficulty re-entering than we had landing in Africa, and figuring that out. We said to each other: “We’ll never forget what we’ve been through.” But we did. We got on with our lives. When we said grace at dinner tables, we said it a little stronger. We meant it. Food tasted a little more. But you just get on with your life, and you slowly find a place to put Africa, this beautiful, shining continent with all its ups and downs. Occasionally, you’d take it out, you’d look at it again, and then you’d put it back in that safer place called distance and time. But there was one thing I always knew. There was a structural aspect to this problem that we had witnessed. That’s where I wanted to put my energy the next time round.
So Jubilee 2000 and DATA led you back to that continent for the first time in more than ten years. But had you met Nelson Mandela when U2 played in Cape Town for the PopMart tour?
No, I hadn’t, but we met Archbishop Tutu. Nelson Mandela’s story is one of the great stories of the twentieth century. But Archbishop Tutu’s is one of the great stories of the twenty-first century.
And why is that?
Because the lessons of his Commission for Truth and Reconciliation can be applied to the Middle East, can be applied to Ireland, can be applied to Kosovo, can be applied to so many places. This is the most important story of the last fifty years. Somehow, they realized, this new African leadership, that truth sometimes is more important than justice. So on the grounds of not being prosecuted, they offer people a chance to come forward and confess to their crimes under apartheid, be they police, be they from black to brown, from brown to black, whatever crimes were committed. You remember the awful “burning necklace.” Those were horrific crimes. But they didn’t set up law courts. They began a new kind of convention where you will see a policeman standing in front of the family he has abused, and the man of the house, the tin hut, is saying to the policeman: “Did you see a woman wearing an olive green dress that day?” And the policeman says: “I can’t remember the colors.”—“Her name was Melinda, and she was wearing a green dress. Did you see her? Do you remember shooting her? She was my wife.” And the policeman, with tears rolling down his face, is going: “I don’t remember her. I just remember shooting into the crowd.” I mean, it’s devastating. But Archbishop Tutu felt that the country needed to come clean if it was to go forward, that it needed to repent, and that maybe prosecution was not as important as that. It’s an amazing thing, you must find and write about. U2 went to visit that center on that trip, my first trip to Africa in ten years. And the four of us arrived. It was overwhelming. He brought us in to this place of Truth and Reconciliation. We were dumbstruck, but it was not without comedy. I remember this great man rebuking me . . . [laughs] It was really a turning point.
How did he rebuke you?
I was making polite conversation with him. He’s known by his people as “The Arch.” So it was like: “The Arch, this is The Edge.” He was laughing all the time, big-hearted, big-brained smiling man. Then I said: “You’re so busy with all these things. Do you get any time for prayer and meditation?” He stopped at me and said: “What are you talking about? Do you think we’d be able to do this stuff if we didn’t?” I felt it was like a rebuke to my own life, because I get so busy, and I have so many things on. At that time, I’m not sure I was spending as much time as I would like in reflection, in prayer and meditation. Not that I’m a monk, but I do like to spend some of the time in quietness, and I hadn’t been. I remember it felt like a rebuke.
That’s what you felt, but he probably didn’t mean it that way.
Yeah, maybe. He is a comedian. When he laughs, the sky, the trees, the room change shape. For a saint, he’s quite wily. He said: “I’ve some people that I’d like you to meet, who work in this Truth and Reconciliation program. Would you be up for meeting them?” So we said: “OK. Yeah, sure . . .” We walked up, and there was a room with six hundred people. And he ushered us in. [impersonating] “Ladies and gentlemen, I have brought to you the group from Ireland, they’re going to play for you . . . U2!” We just looked at each other. It was like: there’s not even an acoustic guitar, what are we gonna play? We thought it was a photo op, you know, pressing the flesh, shaking hands.
So what did you do?
We sang a cappella.
What did you sing?
Err . . . “Amazing Grace.”
The four of you? Even Adam?
[laughs] I wouldn’t call it singing! They joined in, they’ve got much better voices. But his is a story of Grace in action. It’s Grace interrupting Karma again, that’s what Truth and Reconciliation’s about. So actually it felt like the right song. And then I think we sang “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”
Did the crowd know the words?
To “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”? They knew the chorus, though, pop life being what it is. Elevators, Holiday Inn bands, they probably never heard us singing it. Actually, the band is pretty popular in South Africa. I hope they’ll figure it out.
What kind of feeling did you get from the crowd in South Africa? Did they react in the same way a crowd in Europe or America would react, or was it something completely different?
Well, you know, whenever you’re playing big events in South Africa, you’re excited about integration and what they’ve been through and survived—apartheid. But now having survived that, they have to face the AIDS emergency. You just think: these people are so resilient and so amazing. You go and you play a gig, it’s like “Spot the black people.” [laughs] You’re looking out at a sort of Irish audience. They look Irish . . . OK, maybe it’s ten percent, but it’s just that culturally they’re not into rock music. That’s no big deal, but it’s funny. The end of apartheid is everywhere but in music. [laughs]
What was it like when you met Nelson Mandela for the first time?
We didn’t see him on the first trip. I met him in his house outside Cape Town. One of the houses, I’m not sure where. It was a beautiful house on a sunny day. He was sitting with some of his family near him. Big beautiful trees outside the window. He’s just a very beautiful man in his demeanor as well as his spirit. He says to me [impersonating]: “What would you be coming to see an old man like me for?” Immediately turning it right around . . . It makes you burst out laughing! He always does that.
Was it easy for you to make a connection? I mean, he’s such a monument.
Well, he doesn’t behave like one. He’s a lesson in humility. If Tutu is “grace in action,” he’s “forgiveness in action,” bears no malice. Within six months of leaving prison after twenty-three years, he had befriended a lot of his one-time enemies. His re-entry into the real world of politics and compromise was supersonic. Having once proclaimed he would nationalize the diamond industry, he quickly copped on that maybe they were not the best people to be in charge of South Africa’s great national resources and employment centers. He made friends with commerce. Diamonds, as it turns out, are more to do with show business than you think. There are far more diamonds in the ground than any jeweler would like you to know. It’s by very careful manipulation of the market that they keep their value. It’s not a cartel, but the diamond industry is very shrewd: one false move, and a happy couple’s wedding ring would not be such a family treasure. Things like that say a lot about him and his Cabinet when they took power. How they avoided bloodshed and bile in the transition is one of the great miracles of the age.
What makes Mandela so different?
His imagination. His ability to see, taste, and almost touch a future that wasn’t yet there. Most people in his situation would have focused on what they had lost—the past. He’s only thinking about the future. I read an article about his amateur painting. He was eighty years old at the time, telling the journalist that this love of painting would come in handy when he retires. That’s hardcore.
You’ve appeared onstage with Mandela. When was the first time?
I went to an event with him we both agreed to in Barcelona. The event had not a great name, but memorably so—it was called “Frock and Roll”! It was fashion and music coming to the aid of the Nelson Mandela Fund. My friend Naomi Campbell was organizing it. We had agreed to go, but there had been all kinds of confusion with the promoter, and the city had turned on the event, and nobody knew whether it was happening or not happening. People, right up to the last day, were just pulling out. In the end, I think it was myself, Wyclef Jean, Alexander McQueen, Galliano, and a couple of other people. But at seven o’clock, there were about 500 people in the 20,000-seater arena. At eight o’clock there was about 2,000. Mandela was supposed to walk on at eight o’clock. So they held him back. There had been confusion. People thought the gig was canceled or whatever. And we waited until eight-thirty. There were about 4,000. People must have gone home to get their sisters and brothers. The organizers didn’t want to worry him, so they turned the lights down.
You mean they tried to fool him into thinking that there were lots of people at the event.
Not to mention you, I suppose.
Yeah, in a nice way. But this is a man who can’t be fooled very easily. And I walked out with him, me on the left and Naomi on the other side. We stood there, the small crowd clapped and cheered him as they should, and he just took the microphone and he said, looking out with his wise eyes [impersonating]: “It is a dangerous thing to have high expectations. And I’ll admit to you I had high expectations coming to Barcelona.” The crowd grew a little restless. I start staring at my shoes. He leaves a long pause that has everyone sweating, and with perfect dramatic timing continues: “I want you people to know this is a welcome I could never ever deserve or expect. Thank you for coming out to see me and for supporting the Nelson Mandela Foundation. It is a matter of great honor and pride that you have all come!” I looked out at the crowd . . . and suddenly it looks full! It is the same amount of people, it just didn’t look empty anymore. Because that’s the way he sees the world. If you spent twenty-odd years in the slammer, every day you’re out is a good day. As I say, his modesty is overpowering. He taught me a real lesson there about our way of seeing the world. I remember when we were kids, looking out, asking our manager: “How many people are in the hall?” He’d say: “Well, there’s 120. Capacity is 500, but it looks fine, it looks OK . . .” I remember feeling sick, or playing to eleven people in Bristol. It was just wonderful. We always tried to play our best, whoever turns up. But, Nelson Mandela teaching, it was a just a great way of seeing the world—that what you have in your hands is more than enough sometimes.
You just brought up the topic of performance. Something just crossed my mind. Haven’t you ever had a weird feeling while onstage in front of adoring people, worshipping you whatever you do?
[interrupting] But they’re not worshipping us . . .
OK, they’re not worshipping you. But I mean, they’re ready to have the time of their life whatever you do, even if you’re on a bad day, even if the sound is shit, and I’ve certainly experienced this kind of night. Isn’t that weird for you?
Well, you see, I don’t think they will. As I’ve told you before, I think the screaming and those deep roars are for themselves. That’s the thing that’s going on in a U2 show, in fact a lot of rock shows. People are screaming their souls out, they’re screaming for themselves, because their lives are wrapped up in those songs. So one starts, and then they go off. You see, it’s not about us—it’s about them. If we weren’t great, they wouldn’t be there the next time. That’s just the way it is. People are discerning, and tickets cost money. The reason people are there is because we really give a lot of ourselves in our live shows. So I don’t see it as that sort of adoring crowd thing. I think that’s almost a Hollywood idea. What’s going on is much more complex than that. They’re not really adoring.
Really? Are you serious?
An amazing thing happened in Chile—it has happened more than a few times. I think you might call it dissent. Whatever you call it, I think it disproves your theory of adoration.
I’m all ears.
In Chile, we played our song “Mothers of the Disappeared,” a very controversial song in that country. Lots of families had children “disappeared” while in the custody of “government police.” We asked for the show to be televised that night. Most of the population couldn’t afford tickets and be able to see it. I brought the madres out on to the stage, and they said the names of the missing children into the microphone. Then I spoke to Pinochet as if he was there, as if he was watching television, which I’m sure he wasn’t. I just said: “Mister Pinochet, God will be your judge, but at the very least, tell these women where the bones of their children are buried, because years later they still don’t know where their loved ones are, you see . . .” They reckon that he does, or some general does. And this crowd divided quickly into two halves. One half cheered, and one half booed, because there are still mixed feelings about what went on. I thought: “Wow! This is not all just people who are on our side. They don’t agree with us, they’re letting us know, here . . .” Two songs later, they were back cheering again. People are smart. They don’t have to agree with you all the time. The rock audience, the U2 audience, does tend to be smarter than your average bear. They’re not like a bunch of arty-farty types, they’re not intellectuals, but they’re thinking people.
I guess music isn’t about what you think. It’s much more about what you feel. And U2’s music is no exception.
That’s absolutely right. A feeling is much stronger than a thought.
But U2 has always been about ideas as well. Maybe there’s a contradiction here.
Well, I don’t see it is a contradiction. I think they work side by side. Anyway, I’m gonna have to run.