It took me some time to ask Bono about his closest friends: his fellow musicians in U2 and their manager, Paul McGuinness. I thought Bono and I had to get closer in order for him to talk about them, which he eventually did in a very revealing way. It was a Saturday afternoon in his study, and the mood was very relaxed.
Have you heard the story about how Mick Jagger and Keith Richards met up for the first time? I guess they were about sixteen, waiting for a train to London. Richards actually approached Jagger because he had seen him walking with these ultra-rare records from the Chess catalog. Can you remember a similar encounter between you and Edge, something you’d refer to as the founding scene of your friendship, both personal and artistic?
Which albums?
Well, Edge was in Ali’s class at high school. They were a year behind me. I’d seen him hanging around the corridors of school with albums under his arm. I remember there was a group called Taste.
Oh yes, of course. They were Rory Gallagher’s first band.
And then I remember Edge picking the guitar, sitting down in a corridor, once. He was playing Neil Young’s “The Needle and the Damage Done.” I was trying to play it as well. I was envious because I could tell that he could play a little better than I could. [laughs] What I didn’t realize at that time is that he could play a lot better than I could. He always had that thing about him, that he wouldn’t nominate himself to run in the race. But if he was put in the race, he would want to win it. It’s a strange thing, and I don’t know where it comes from. He has a healthy disrespect—and respect—for his own ego.
What do you mean?
He knows what he’s capable of, and he would not push himself forward. He would rather hang back in the shadows and be discovered.
So what you’re implying . . .
[laughs, interrupting] What I’m implying is I’m his manager. Whereas Larry was different. Larry, who started the band, would tell you that he has no interest in being a rock star. But he’s the one who started the rock band. So that’s a little disingenuous, because he’s the guy that loved T. Rex, Bowie, and the great pop stars. It’s a strange thing. So he, in a way, though he didn’t hang around in the shadows like Edge, once he was discovered certainly made attempts to run back there. But “Me thinks he doth protest too much,” because I think Larry’s really great at being in a rock ’n’ roll band, but he doesn’t think he is. Has all the instincts, but the way it appears is that myself and Adam were the showmen of the group.
Adam was already the “cool guy” in your school, right? He was more of a hip dresser than the three of you, which maybe was not such an outstanding achievement.
Yes, but he, like myself, has got it wrong.
You mean more wrong than you?
No, it was both. In terms of sartorial elegance and expertise, as the two showmen of the group we have proved ourselves inept over the years. Whereas the two supposed shy men of rock ’n’ roll are very good at it. They always look good, they never put a foot wrong, and they never want to lose their cool. My only excuse is I never wanted to be cool, I always wanted to be . . . hot. [laughs]
You probably were more impressed by Adam than he was by you. Wouldn’t you say?
Yeah, I think that might have been true. I was fascinated by him. I’d never met anyone quite like him.
What do you mean? What was he like?
Well, he had been expelled from an upper-class public school in Ireland, and arrived at this free school with a posh accent, wearing a caftan that he had picked up on his holidays at age sixteen, hitching through Afghanistan. He’d had “Afghanistan ’76” written on his T-shirt, and his hair was corkscrew blond hair, but in an Afro. He looked like a negative of Michael Jackson.
Maybe he wanted to look like Jimi Hendrix, the way Eric Clapton did when he was in Cream.
That’s right, Hendrix was a big hero in Ireland. And he has a lot in common, in a certain sense. Adam has a very unique sense of where the one is, in terms of where the beat is in the bar. His timing is very unique. Most rock ’n’ roll is made by people who love 4/4, but his timing is much more 5/8, much more of a jazzman. I heard somebody saying, when Jimi Hendrix was taught guitar, he couldn’t keep 4/4 time, the simplest time. Now Adam can, but it’s not really where he wants to be. [laughs] I think it’s probably because he listened to a lot of jazz, to Jimi Hendrix. That’s where he was coming from.
Ever since I met you, I’ve always heard you address Edge as “Edge,” but do you remember a time when you called him Dave?
Yeah, I think probably for the first year. By ’78, I think he was The Edge.
And did he call you Bono first or Paul?
He would have called me Paul up until, maybe ’76. I was known as Bono by my friends in Lypton Village.* Edge and Adam and Larry weren’t really a part of Lypton Village until later.
Was it easy for them to start calling you that? Maybe a few people found it irritating and kept calling you by your given name?
The thing about these kinds of nicknames is they’re contagious. You don’t have to ask people, they just start doing it. I can’t remember when Ali started calling me Bono. I was sixteen, I’d say. Edge had another name from Lypton Village.
And what was that?
“Inchicore.” It’s the name of a small town on the outskirts of Dublin City.
So who had this preposterous idea to call him The Edge?
I do preposterous in this band. It had something to do with the shape of his head, his jaw, and an insane love he had for walking on the edges of very high walls, bridges, or buildings. Before Bono, I was “Steinvic von Huyseman,” and then just “Huyseman,” and then “Houseman,” then “Bon Murray,” “Bono Vox of O’Connell Street,” and then just “Bono.”
“Bono Vox of O’Connell Street”—now that’s an aristocrat’s name. There’s nobility in it.
Well, yes. [laughs]
Weren’t you a baron or a count?
What my friends had in mind is close to count. [laughs]
When he started the band, Larry was not even fifteen, and you were sixteen and a half. Didn’t you feel like a grown-up amused by the nerve of this kid?
It was his band. I think, for a minute, he wanted to call it the Larry Mullen Band.
What sort of music did he want to play?
He loved glam rock. That was his thing. The Larry Mullen Band wasn’t really a very glam-rock kind of a name.
It sounds like a jazz-blues band from the mid-seventies.
He was the star. When he sat behind the kit, definitely, the room changed temperature. There was something going on. He played the drums like his life depended on it. And I think, in some very real way, that was true.
And by the way, why didn’t Larry and Adam get a nickname, like you and Edge did?
I think the “Junior” [Larry Mullen, Jr.] certainly added the jazz-blues band bit. I convinced him to do that. Adam Clayton just sounds black anyway. But they had unofficial names: Larry was “Jamjar,” and Adam was “Sparky.”
So would you say Larry was the most dedicated musician of the bunch?
Edge was pretty good—I mean, no, Edge was more than good. But Larry was really impressive, I thought. Just the drum playing, the way the sound just fills the room, and the silver and the gold of the cymbals. His kit was a bright crimson. We’d never seen anything like that. I mean, we’d been playing shitty guitars.
And he had a perfect kit.
I mean, his kit was like a cheap copy.
But it looked great.
It looked great. It was bright and shiny. And he looked great behind the kit. Adam knew all the right words. He knew what to say; he had the lingo; he was [adopting ghetto voice] “down with his big bad self.” He had all the musician talk. But what we didn’t know, until a few practices, is that he could not play a note. He arrived with a bass guitar and a bass amp, and he looked incredible. He had all the gear, had all the right terminology. He looked funky, he acted funky. We didn’t realize at the time he couldn’t play a note. And so big was his bluff that we looked pretty much everywhere else to why we were sounding so shit. Him!
You mean you didn’t realize it in the first place.
Well, he was the oldest, and he looked the most professional.
On a more personal level, I have this feeling that the one you had to feel the closest to was Larry, because you shared some difficult experiences in your teenage years. He lost his sister and then his mother in those years. Was it something that helped you get closer to him?
We always kind of hit it off, actually. Then, as now, Larry does not let many people in. But when you’re in, he’s a very loyal and reliable friend. I’m a kind of a loyal and unreliable friend. But there’s nothing he would not do for you. The thing that stuck us together was that I had this experience of bereavement. I had lost my mother when I was fourteen and he had lost his when he was sixteen, and we both had to deal with fairly authoritarian fathers. As Larry would tell you himself, we both ran away with the circus. So, while the tent was being put up on the outskirts of Europe, we were still outside, and would look at the elephants, and talk a lot. We still do, on occasions.
What did you discuss the most with Larry—and wouldn’t as readily with Edge or Adam?
The moment, the now that we wouldn’t miss out on, the moment we were in, because of the place we wanted to get to in the future. Because Larry wasn’t sure about where we were going, and I wasn’t sure about where we were.
So Larry’s the first one you really got close to?
I’d say Larry and I were pretty close friends. We shared a room on tour. We were the odd couple, really, because he’s completely meticulous.
And you’re not?
I’m just not. My suitcase would just blow up, and there’d be stuff all over the floor. Larry used to bring his own sleeping bag, because he didn’t like to sleep in the sheets of these really cheap hotels. He would actually sleep in his sleeping bag up on the bed.
So he wouldn’t catch any fleas or lice?
I remember one time I slagged him off so much that he said: “OK.” He threw away the sleeping bag, and he left the sleeping bag at the bottom of the bed. He slept in the sheets. When he woke up, he was head to toe in this rose-colored rash. So people used to laugh at the two of us.
Insiders have written accounts about the tacit division from the very beginning between you, Edge and Larry, the Irish Christians, and then, on the other side, Adam and Paul McGuinness, the English skeptics, with business sense and posh backgrounds, raised by military fathers. Is this real or an invention?
Well, Adam and Edge were friends. They came from the same suburbs. They were kind of middle-class and they both had British passports. But in terms of fun and frolics, going out, drinking wine, looking sharp, and living the life, I think Paul and Adam had a lot in common. They became friends. Myself, Edge, and Larry were kind of zealots. And we were determined that the world, in all its finagling attempt to corrupt you, to take you away from where you should be going, would not get us. But it’s like that old story of the guy who’s hiding from the world by climbing up the mountain backwards. He gets halfway up the mountain. He finds a cave. He just looks left and he looks right, he looks up and he looks down, to make sure the world hasn’t followed him. Then he looks back into the cave, that’s dark and that’s quiet. Then he hears something. What’s that? It’s the world! [laughs] There’s no escape. We just didn’t know that, then. But it turns out that that’s a much more subtle threat than sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Self-righteousness, self-flagellation, these things are as dangerous as what you might call the worship of the self. At that time, we were determined that we would never change. The music business would never change us, success would never change us. But if you think about it, that’s a terrible thing. That would be awful, not to change. And of course you should be changing. Paul and Adam just wanted to have fun, and get out there, and see what the world had to offer. We knew what the world had to offer—we didn’t want to buy it. So we went in a completely different direction. But there was a lot of respect from us to them, and from them to us.
But have Paul and Adam tried to talk you out of this zealot attitude over the years? Or did they remain silent and respectful?
No, they were very respectful. I remember Paul saying, when we put out our second album, October [1981], which was a kind of religious experience of an album to make, very un–rock ’n’ roll: “Look, these are not questions I’m asking, but they’re questions I’m interested in. Anyone with a brain should be interested in these questions. And though you won’t find many people in rock ’n’ roll who are prepared to be so open like you are on this album, you look to black music, it’s full of songs like this. Look to Marvin Gaye, look to Bob Marley.”
That’s a case you’re often making. You’re presenting ideas of what U2 did or what you yourself are doing now by pointing to black artists. It’s interesting, because very few black artists have had a big impact on the rock audience, apart from Bob Marley or Prince.
Yeah, it’s the Irish, we are the white niggers. Paul had the overview, because he was a few years older than us. Chris Blackwell, who had founded our record company, Island Records, also discovered Bob Marley. So he was very supportive. So you have your manager and your record company who are totally supportive of what looks like completely eccentric behavior in white rock ’n’ roll. But if you look to writers and painters and poets, then you’ll often find the search for the ecstatic, the trauma of religious experience.
Which writers, painters, and poets are you alluding to here, specifically?
Well, in music, Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Bob Marley, Stevie Wonder, the list is endless. Poets: Kavanagh,* maybe an even greater poet than Yeats, John Donne, William Blake. Emily Dickinson—she was a great influence on me. All the Renaissance painters, torn between God, patronage, and the desires of the flesh.
Have you discussed Marley with Blackwell? And would you say, based on what you learned, that Marley went through the “trauma of religious experience”? What is it that ultimately keeps black and white artists apart? I mean, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash went through that as well.
Chris Blackwell was—is—a real support on this level. Again, another critical character in our lives. Like Paul McGuinness, he seemed to understand that sometimes the best influence you can have is not to try to have any. I mean, Chris was this great producer of music; he could easily have turned up in the studio and asked us the hard musical questions: “Where’s the single? What are you on about? Why doesn’t that groove?” He had faith we would find our own way. I think in an odd way he had faith in our faith. But as regards Dylan and Cash, they nearly were exceptions. White music is so much more uptight spiritually. Most black artists came from the Church anyway.
In a nutshell, what did you find out about yourself from your manager, Paul McGuinness?
I found out what I was capable of.
Which was?
I mean, more than anyone in my life, he is a person who believed in me and gave me the confidence to realize my potential as an artist. He has an enormous and sharp intellect, and mine was very unschooled and haphazard. On many occasions, he would sit me down and say: “You have what it takes. You must have more confidence in yourself and continue to dig deeper. And don’t be upset or surprised when you pull something out from the depth that’s uncomfortable.” [laughs]
So you discovered things that, on first glance, you’d rather have kept hidden? What were those?
The gauche nature of awe, of worship, the wonderment at the world around you. Coolness might help in your negotiation with people through the world, maybe, but it is impossible to meet God with sunglasses on. It is impossible to meet God without abandon, without exposing yourself, being raw. That’s the connection with great music and great art, and that is why it’s uncomfortable, that is why cool is the enemy of it, because that’s the other reason you wanted to join a band: you wanted to do the cool thing. Trying to capture religious experiences on tape wasn’t what you had in mind when you signed up for the job.
What about your own sunglasses, then? Do you wear them the same way a taxi driver would turn off his front light, so as to signal to God that this rock star is too full of himself and not for hire at the moment?
Yeah, my insincerity . . . I have learnt the importance of insincerity, the importance of not being earnest at all times. You don’t know what’s going on behind those glasses, but God, I can assure you, does.
What else did Paul McGuinness encourage in you?
He said to me when I was very young, like twenty-five: “You have something that very few artists have.” And I said: “I don’t think so, Paul.” He said: “No. You see the whole equation.” And that is . . . a curse and a blessing. But it’s a very interesting thing, and I’m not sure I understood what he meant back then. I’ve never really discussed it with him since, but I think I know what he means, which is: the gift is at the center of the contradiction, but the circumference is full of other stuff you have to figure out if you want the gift to really grow.
A blessing, I understand. But why should it be a curse?
It’s an end to laziness, it’s an end to being a passenger on a train somebody else is driving. You are responsible, no one else—not the record company, not the management. You’ve to develop other muscles in your bodyguarding of your gift.
I don’t think you’ve talked much about your relationship with Edge, Larry, and Adam in terms of their families. How close did you get to the families of your fellow musicians? You told me that in order to escape your father’s sternness, you wanted to go to places where you felt warmth. Was, for instance, going to Edge’s place as warm a feeling as going to Guggi’s or Gavin Friday’s?
Edge’s family are extra-special people. They’re very laid back, they’re cool in the extreme. They’re not looking for the obvious. They’re both academics, they’re not very material. Edge’s father was very successful in business. I’m sure he could have been even more successful, but he couldn’t be arsed. [laughs] He’d rather hang out, he’d rather play golf. He and my father used to play golf on occasion. They got on pretty well, though my dad did complain once that Garvin was a little bit of a stickler for the rules. [bursts out laughing] He said: “He’s learnt that fucking manual off by heart.” But they both loved opera. In fact, it was a great moment when we played Madison Square Garden some years back, when they were both drunk and singing a duet from La Traviata, walking down Madison Avenue. It was the kind of place where you could always crash out. I remember coming back at four in the morning, and Mrs. The Edge would come down, rubbing sleep out of her eyes, and ask Edge if he was hungry, and . . . [gives a bewildered look] I thought this was just a different universe, completely. I was expecting, like: where is she stashing the weapons, OK? [laughs] As soon as he says: “Yes I’m hungry,” she’ll bring out the howitzer! But he’d say: “No, no. I’m OK, yeah. You go back to bed, I’m fine.” And then, it was all very easygoing. And his brother, Dick, was a bit of a genius. The government were paying for him to go to college in computer engineering. More than just a scholarship where they pay your studies, they were paying him to study. He was that good. And then he joined the Virgin Prunes. So there were two mad musicians in the house for the Evans family to deal with. But they were very . . . open is the word. It felt like an open house. And Mrs. The Edge was always interested in what you were.
Did Edge’s mother work?
She was a schoolteacher, and then, I think, she might have just helped Garvin. Her name was Gwenda, and they were both Welsh, so they had this kind of singsong accent, which made it all the more inviting. Then, they had a garden shed that we used to play in, which is about the size of this room, maybe a little smaller, a very small thing, and they let us play in this bunker, which is about 4 foot by 3, maybe 5 by 4, but that’d be pushing it. So you could just fit the drum kit in, you could just kind of stand, but it was great for a while. I just met Garvin recently, and jokingly, he was wondering what it would be worth now on eBay. He said: “Is it the time, Bono, for the garden shed?” I explained to him that we haven’t had a whole lot of luck on eBay, trying to unload our giant lemon spaceship [from the PopMart tour].
I’m curious about your first impression when you entered The Edge’s room. Was it very tidy, very organized, the way I’d fancy it?
Oh, I don’t remember his room. I remember Adam’s room. Adam’s room was like a nightclub, by age sixteen. He had ultraviolet light—UV, you know—incense burning, albums everywhere, and a soft chair. [laughs] Oh yeah, I’d never seen a room like Adam’s.
What sort of atmosphere did you feel at the Claytons’ place?
The Claytons had a very elegant kind of house. I mean, it was a very large detached bungalow in a nice neighborhood. I had never seen anything like it myself, coming from a just regular lower-middle-class street. They kept it very well.
Was there a garden?
They had a nice garden. I remember they had this white shag pile carpet. I said to Adam: “Wow! If we had a carpet like that in the house, you wouldn’t be allowed walking on it.” He said: “You’re not. Take your shoes off! [laughs] No one’s allowed walking on it. We’re hardly allowed in here.” But his mother was very glamorous, and his father was a pilot, which is again a very glamorous occupation. He was very wry, Adam’s father, liked to go fishing. His eyes are never far from rolling at all the fuss around him. He was from the East End of London, and never wanted to forget that, despite having made it to the officers’ mess in the RAF. His mother was very able in an argument. So we had many discussions long into the night about life, death, God, and the universe . . . and why we couldn’t walk on that white shag pile carpet.
So what kind of people were the Claytons? As laid back as Edge’s parents?
No one could be as laid back as Edge’s parents. I think Jo Clayton was ambitious for her son, very worried, because he’d already been expelled from one school, and now he joined a rock band, and was hanging out with some very strange-looking people: us. So she was very sweet to us on the surface, but I think, beneath it all, very concerned that her son had fallen into the wrong crowd.
Had Adam been thinking long and hard about becoming a professional musician? Did he feel like he’d fallen in with the wrong crowd?
Adam was looking for the wrong crowd. There was nothing else he wanted to be other than a bass player. There’s a joke in the band that goes: Edge wants to play the drums, Bono wants to play the guitar, Larry wants to be the singer, Adam . . . only wants to play the bass! Adam and his younger brother Sebastian were great. They were always laughing, I do remember that. They had that kind of English potty humor. They’d put socks over their penises and kind of walk around, trying to embarrass their sister Cindy. I mean, Adam always loved nudity. He’s always been that way. He, when we were in school, used to streak down the corridor, naked.
So he was more of an exhibitionist than you. Great!
Yeah, I know. I remember the first time, we were just teenagers. Ali was talking to him, and she felt some humidity on the side of her leg [laughs], and he was peeing, not on her leg, but near her leg. He’d whip that thing out at any opportunity. He wouldn’t want taking a pee to interrupt a good conversation. And he might forget to ask. [laughs]
And how did it feel at Larry’s place? I guess it must have been a little more somber.
Yeah, I think. Larry’s home life was much more like mine, you know. You had this bereaved man, and in some shape or other, no matter how hard they tried to hide it, you were dealing with their unhappiness.
So Larry was living with his father.
His father and his sister, yes.
His younger sister had died as well. What had happened, exactly?
I can’t remember the exact details.
Larry was living in the same sort of house as you. Or was it a different background?
Very similar.
Was his father as harsh on him as yours was on you?
His father was very worried about his son throwing his life away with a rock ’n’ roll band. His father thought, if he was interested in music, it should be jazz, you know. Learn to play properly. And the only difference was his father would have wanted his son to achieve more than he did in terms of university and all of that. And Larry wasn’t interested remotely. Whereas my father couldn’t really care less whether I went to college—and I would have quite liked it. That’s the only difference.
Did you use to hang around at Larry’s place as much as in Adam’s or Edge’s?
Occasionally. Our very first rehearsal was in Larry’s place.
Was there enough space for that?
In the kitchen. There wasn’t much space.
Would his father put up with it?
His mother probably told his father that it was a jazz group assembling. She was a spectacular woman. She was just gorgeous in every way. There was no vanity to her. And she loved her son, and wanted him to be a drummer, because that’s what he wanted, and facilitated him by letting her kitchen be used for our first rehearsal. We were all standing there, there were like six of us at that stage, and I remember even then, there were girls screaming outside for Larry. He was fourteen, I suppose, and I remember him taking the hose to them: “Go away! Leave me in peace! Shhh!” He’s been doing the same ever since. But I really didn’t hang out a lot. We went to rehearsals. Finally we got a rehearsal room—oddly—next door to the graveyard where my mother was buried. A complete accident. A little yellow house next door to a graveyard . . .
Aside from music, what were the things the four of you enjoyed doing the most together?
Nothing at first, but then, we realized we shared the same surreal sense of humor.
I never imagined you’d say that. You mean you’d make practical jokes together?
Yeah, we’d do some mad shit together.
Like what?
I think Edge was with me once when we got into Guggi’s car. He was seventeen years old and had a car. His father just collected these jalopies, broken-down cars, and would fix them up. I remember we snuck out of the school into his car and drove to a girls’ school with a painting that we had done, and went into the school, and knocked on class doors to sell them the painting. So before they got a chance to call the police, we had hit several classes at the girls’ school: “Excuse me. We were round here, we have a painting and we’re advised that we might find a buyer here in Class C English. [changes tone] Hi, girls!” [laughs] Just teenage stuff, but surreal. Or we’d do mad theatrical stuff.
What do you mean, “mad”?
Well, I remember, in one of our early gigs, we put on Christmas concerts in the middle of summer. They were called “The Jingle Balls.” And so we got on at this nightclub and we did it up with a Christmas tree. We just pretended it was winter in the middle of the summer. Childish things . . . In Lypton Village, we gave each other names and we spoke this other language. Edge fit into that very well in the end, and so did Adam, because they were all very surreal. Larry was just a little more suspicious, but he would be, anyway.
Funny. I mean, the sort of reputation U2 had when the band began was that of a very intense and earnest act.
Yeah, that’s why some people who saw Zoo TV were confused—I think you were one of them—and just concerned about the way things were turning out. But actually that’s where we came from. Staging, like this Christmas concert in June, you know. We have been playing with theatrical constructs from the very beginning. I had a character called “The Fool,” which I played with, which was a forerunner of “The Fly.”
OK, I’m willing to accept that you revived a sort of very early U2 tradition with Zoo TV in the early nineties. But it looks like humor had been completely out of the question for the first ten years.
I think we lost our humor a bit. I really do. It was the bends, really. It was just changing pressure, moving from Dublin suburbia to traveling around the world and all that comes with it. This thing we were talking about before, just this sort of determination not to be changed—this zeal, I think, came partly in response to that.
But didn’t it exist even before you’d encountered that huge success? Boy was sort of tragic, October had a terrible solemnity and sadness to it, and War was full of anger.
By the time we got to Boy, we had taken some of the surrealism out. We had an idea, a construct for the album, and we fit into it. The thing you have to get used to with us is that, when we have an idea, we change shape to fit into it. It’s not strange if you’re a director or a writer. In order to research a subject, you change clothes and shoes and walk funny. But bands are not supposed to. The subject of our songs, if you like, has always dictated the way we presented them, the clothes we wore, the films we made, the kind of shows we put on.
Oh, really, Bono? From where I was standing, you didn’t seem like the funniest guy on a stage in those years to me . . .
It wasn’t a large part of our work, no. But our life, some of our life, lost humor. I think I was the more intense. I don’t think I am now. But it was an act of will. Defeat was not an option, though it was much more likely, if you’re being honest. I think, you know, I really sensed defeat at any minute, and I was so determined to drown out the voice of failure that I just took out all peripheral vision. I just became very single-minded.
Maybe U2 needed that kind of dedication then. Maybe your audience did.
Maybe they did. Everyone was determined, but no one was more determined than I was. And it could get pretty intense and pretty tense, because this would have to be the best show of our life every night, which, you could say is like: “Chill out, Bono . . . Chill, OK?” [laughs] But . . . no! Every night, I am not messing or exaggerating, because in our heads this was the only way to be true. If it wasn’t, if you weren’t inside those songs, if you didn’t live it in that moment, you were lying and you were stealing from the people. We were zealots, we became prisoners of our own cult. [laughs] And we’d taken hostages. Paul McGuinness and our road crew were incredible. Joe O’Herlihy, our sound mixer, what a legend! Everybody was working hundred-hour weeks just to push the rock up the hill. It was a high hill, and it was difficult, and our talents weren’t really the obvious ones that you need for this particular journey. But it turned out we had other ones, which were maybe more important.
What do you mean by those “other talents” that were more important?
The spark. There was something original about our point of view, even if it wasn’t very well expressed. And we were relentless. Just those two things can get you places. When I look back at twenty years, I see the slowest, almost invisible evolution: just tiny, tiny gradations, just on the way of degrees. Just slowly the talent has opened up, and there’s moments that looked like we’re searching ahead, like The Joshua Tree or Achtung, Baby, or now. But really, it’s just so slow to me. I think, it’s taken us this long to figure all this out. I think we’re the slowest learners in the world. But you read about the Beatles, and it’s just all in ten years. [imitates sound of a jumbo jet] But, for us, we’ve just got to Rubber Soul now.
Are you serious?
Oh, absolutely. In my mind, absolutely. OK, I might start to feel ill with envy if John sang “In My Life,” sitting in the rehearsal room. And, in fact, all of their songs would make me feel some nausea. But I would say to them: “Your songs have extraordinary melodies that are beyond compare, but our songs have a kind of weight that yours don’t. Gravity, you could call it . . .”
It used to be the weight of things to come. But maybe it’s a different story now.
It’s just weight. We had weight. And weight counts for a lot. There’s an incredible moment—I don’t know if I talked to you about it—which was after 9/11, when there was a concert for the New York police, the fire department, in Madison Square Garden. The Rolling Stones played an amazing song, “Miss You,” so in the moment . . . [sings] Do-do-doo-doo / Doo-do-loo / How I miss you . . . Jagger looks incredible. And it was just really a beautiful performance, and it had a lightness of touch that only he has. But then on walked . . . The Who. There were three of them. And in comparison with the effete Jagger, these guys looked like they were long-shoremen. They looked like they’d just come up from New Jersey with an iron bar in their back pocket, OK? They put on the guitars and they went into “Who Are You?,” and then “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” For the first time in the night, these fire department and these police, who’d been drinking off their grief as they should, and were loud and noisy—“Yeah, there’s the Stones! Yeah, there’s such and such”—suddenly they stopped. Their mouths fell open. It was nothing to do with cool, it was nothing to do with smart, it was nothing to do with sexy. It was to do with authority—weight, some sort of weight. And our music has that. We’re learning the other stuff, even now: figuring out the more unpredictable melodies, the lyrics that can trick you into feeling one thing and then surprise you with another—that’s all craft and songwriting, and it’s coming and it’s great. But that other thing we have, we have it and it’s being very strong on this current tour, because we’re coming into something. Chris Blackwell used to say: “That’s the thing about U2. The band always feels like it’s coming, never that it’s arrived.”
What is the thing you argue about the most in U2? Can you remember when you felt for the first time something like: Oh God, this is wrong; I thought it would never come to this for the four of us?
I might think, if I’m honest, there have been periods of time when I have found each member of the band incredibly frustrating.
You wouldn’t use another word?
No, but I’m sure that has happened in reverse about me too. Luckily, it hasn’t all come at the same time. [laughs] I think that’s what you call a solo career. But I think you have to give people some space to lose themselves now and then, and I can remember when each of them had lost themselves, or lost their way in the work, and I found that very upsetting. And then, I don’t know, there’s probably a period when they felt that about me, but I don’t know when that would be.
Can you remember a particular time when you felt the band was resentful of you?
Recording All That You Can’t Leave Behind, I think I did push their patience the most with our Africa work, just by being on the phone a lot.
Let’s get back to that zealot period of yours in the early eighties. How did it come to an end? How did Adam catch up with you, and how did you catch up with Adam?
I think we met somewhere in the middle. Adam . . . we found a third way. He was tired of the world, and I was a little more curious.
Are you all believers now?
Yes. Adam had his own path, and it took him further out into the world. But I would say Adam is, right now, the most spiritually centered of the band.
Because his path was very rough?
Yeah, I think he is the person who is now the most watchful of the sheep as they stray out of the herd. [laughs] I do love the image of sheep. You’ve got to hand it to Jesus. [laughs] That is a great one, sheep, isn’t it? Because there’s something like: pigs are intelligent, they’re useful farm animals as they wallow in the muck. But sheep! I mean, they’re useful for making jumpers, of course, but they really are pretty dumb. The great image of mankind. And they move in packs as well. They all head off the wrong direction together. There’s no particular leader, anyone can become a leader, and anyone can be right for a particular stampede. They’re so frightened, and not even aware that they’re of great use for making woolly jumpers, or when they’re dead making sheepskin coats for secondhand car dealers. [laughs]
I don’t know how much this has been true or to what extent it’s been made up, but the story goes that Achtung, Baby was mainly based on Edge’s personal crisis at that time, the trauma of his divorce. Has this really been a group crisis or, on the contrary, has Edge’s problem stayed inside the borders of his private life?
No, you’re right. The fracturing and the fissures in Edge’s life were a perfect metaphor for what was going on with the band. There was a lot of tension between us during the making of that album, with Edge and myself wanting to chop down The Joshua Tree, and Larry and Adam wanting to put a glass house around it and play to our strength. Because Larry and Adam have that humility, but Edge and myself had the arrogance that it wasn’t the sound of the guitar, it wasn’t a collision of notes that made up a melody, or a particular bass and drums approach that made U2. We believed that what made U2 was the spark, and that you could destroy all the outward manifestation, and it would still be there. You could put my voice through a distortion pedal, you could ban Edge from playing his echo unit and those silver notes that he plays, you could change the subject matter . . . [laughs] you could just deface all that was recognizable in the band, and it still would come through. You could take subject matter that you wouldn’t normally associate with the band.
Would you say that the chaos that reigned inside Edge’s life gave him the musical nerve to do that?
Ermm, no. It was very hard for Edge to go through that. He’s a hard person to fall out with. It took an awful lot, I think, for him to let go of his marriage. He loved Aislinn so much, and his kids were everything to him. So it was excruciating to watch someone so averse to this kind of splitting up. In the middle of it, I think he did just focus on his music as a way of keeping. The intensity of the band must have paled in comparison. So he went on holidays to our argument from his own.
But had his personal crisis isolated him from the band?
Well, we worked very closely together. I mean, I was the one really pushing for the change in direction, and Edge was the one most supportive. There were times when Adam and Larry were, actually, antagonistic. But again, for reasons of modesty, they felt our reach couldn’t meet our grasp.
How did Edge’s way of dealing with that chaos turn into music? Did it happen in the subject matter of some of the songs, like “One”?
Yeah, subject matter, of course. They are very adult themes. There is a desperate struggle for fun [laughs], which, I think, is, you know, a contradiction in terms. There it is. All these albums, when we tried to escape gravity, Pop and Achtung, Baby, we always ended up sort of flat on our backs under the weight of the air. [laughs] It’s very funny.
A few months ago, I listened to all those albums in a row. Achtung, Baby comes out as the strongest of the lot, but also the darkest and the hardest. It sounds harder now than it did then. At the time, I thought it was fun, because you’d been experimenting with machines, and your voice was distorted. But with hindsight, it’s amazingly violent.
Yeah. “Love Is Blindness” is really something else. And I remember Edge played the solo at the end of this. I was pushing him and pushing him and pushing him, and he played until the strings fell off. Actually, you’ll hear strings snapping during the solo towards the end. He was, I think, in tears on the inside, and the outside was just raging.
There’s so much self-hatred in that record.
It’s a black beauty.
Speaking of black beauties . . . I mean, people won’t understand—and I won’t understand [laughs]—if we don’t broach the thing that happened during Adam’s “difficult period.” How did it feel when Adam missed the Sydney show on the Zoo TV tour in 1993? I think you never really told the story from your own perspective. How did you learn about it? How did you face it? How did you live through it? And what happened when you next met up with Adam?
[puzzled] Err . . . What’s the connection between Adam and black beauty?
Well, I was thinking about Naomi Campbell.
You’ve jumped over from Naomi to Sydney.
I had the question ready, but you know what I mean.
[a little embarrassed] No . . . I introduced Adam to Naomi. And he’d always had a thing for her. What people have to understand about somebody like that is that there is a sort of prowess and a kind of big brain in that cat suit, and she is a wildcat—I think she’s a puma. But you know, they were in so many ways really great for each other. I think it would not be fair to characterize Naomi as being in any way responsible for Adam’s demise and final fall at Sydney.
It was just an association of ideas. I wasn’t implying there was a logical link.
Oh, I see. Because I think he was on a road to perdition. [laughs] And extradition, and re-ignition—any other “ition” you can find—long before he met her. He had gone out into the world, and was taking the biggest slice of the pizza he could find. He was young, he was in a great rock band, and he was the only rock star in the band. [laughs] He had four people’s portion for himself. So that’s a lot of pizza to eat! [laughs] He got sick after a while. He couldn’t do a gig because of the size of the bellyache. The real betrayal in Sydney was not between Adam and the band. The real betrayal was between Adam and himself, because there is no more pro a person in the band than Adam. He found it very hard to live with that, and indeed he couldn’t live with that. He realized that he had gotten himself quite sick, and he wanted to be better. It took him a few years, but that was a real turning point. As I say, he’s a real pro.
A pro who didn’t turn up for work.
Yes. We were filming, which made it even harder. It was the first night of Zoo TV live from Sydney. Twenty cameras in the house, steadycams and cranes, extra lighting—lights, action. Or in this case, lights, no action. We went ahead with the show out of respect for the people who turned up and the size of the bills we were going to have to pay if we didn’t roll cameras. Adam’s bass tech, Stuart Morgan, understudied that night, it was a heroic performance from him, and in fairness a performance deserving to be lit, which he wasn’t. He was left in the shadows. [laughs] In fact, some people who were there thought it was Adam, which probably hurt him the most, though I might say, if I could, something about Adam’s bass playing, and why in the end, it is irreplaceable. The bass can be the blandest of instruments in a rock quartet. Most concerts I go to, and not even rock—jazz, pop, blues—I don’t notice the bass. Nobody does. Nobody knows what the guy who gets the girl is doing. In U2 that is not the case. I felt an enormous void that night and I felt I was falling down it. I felt we all were.
But had you seen it coming?
Yeah, yeah, we had seen it coming. But what can you do? He’s so fun, he was so good at it. [laughs] He was very, very good at it. But it takes a long time to recover from that stuff. You can lose the spring in your step for a few years. I think separation from drink and drugs is probably very like separation from your wife. They say it takes about half the length of time that you’ve put in it to get over it. So if you’ve been married for ten years, it’ll take you five. If you’ve been married for twenty, it’ll take you ten for you to be really over it. I think if Adam was at it for ten hard years, it probably took him five years to get over it.
What sort of impact did it have on the band?
Whenever Adam got into trouble, we were always there for him. And no matter what scandal was happening, no one cared about the band in those moments. Everyone just cared about him.
Were there moments when you thought it was putting the band in danger?
Oh yeah, for sure, I was always concerned. Because, for us, it wasn’t a win until everybody had scored. Everybody had to make it through this alive, to misquote Jim Morrison. Our motto was: “Everybody gets out of here alive.”
So Adam was dating Naomi Campbell and you had come face-to-face with the paparazzi and the celebrity business. It must have been traumatic for that zealot still breathing, from time to time, inside yourself.
No, no, no. Because you remember celebrity was on the list. It was part of the subject matter. Sliding down the surface of things was the energy of that period. I was the one who agreed to do the cover of Vogue with Christy [Turlington], and I had had enough of these po-faced U2ers. We were travelling the same routes as these girls, staying in the same hotels, though we weren’t walking in the same shoes. [laughs]
Who knows? Maybe in private.
I’m sure Adam tried them on, occasionally, as a great connoisseur of the shoe that he is. But he certainly poured champagne into a few. There was a certain fascination with their power with the populace. It goes back to the silent movie stars. Because in the thirties, Hollywood was never as powerful as it was in the silent age, and there’s great power in not opening your mouth.
It’s a power you haven’t relied very much on during your career.
Which is why I so respected it in the likes of Christy Turlington, who, when she chooses to open her mouth, has a lot to say, thoughtful, considered, and intelligent as she is.
People say there were no bigger stars than Rudolph Valentino and Greta Garbo.
None bigger. And these super models [Christy, Naomi, and company] were the silent movie stars of our age. Blank faces and stares that on one level suggest a kind of erotic acquiescence, and on the other a kind of spitting at the cameras, a kind of annoyance seasoned with mischief. [laughs] There was something very powerful. When you got to meet those who were at the top of that particular tree, they turned out to be very clever, very smart managers of their own brand and, in the case of Christy, Helena [Christensen], Naomi, and Kate [Moss], people you’d want to hang out with.
Really?
Hmm . . . They were much more interesting than most musicians. We had a lot of fun, a lot of laughs. We spent summers together. It was great, but it was anathema for a lot of our fans.
Some thought you had lost it completely, or betrayed some sort of sacred cause. You were living the rock-star life.
The funny thing is, those girls, all of them, love and know music more than most musicians. Kate and Christy are brilliant DJs, and always know what’s coming round the corner musically. Helena the same, and one of the great conversationalists, hungry for ideas—what can we make happen that night, that year. They can see potential, where others might miss it. And Christy just doesn’t miss a thing. Our summers in the mid-nineties were a little heady, a little hedonistic, but Edge and myself fell back in love with music in a way that was largely inspired by those girls and some of our other friends, like Michael Hutchence: great house parties, dancing, swimming in the Mediterranean, night-swimming—there was a great REM song—Michael Stipe, a true poet. Frivolity, exactly the time when we needed some.
There’s a word you’re not using, which is decadence.
I’m not using it because it wasn’t decadent, it was just the opposite. Decadence is when you have it all in front of you and don’t notice. I noticed everything. And I appreciated it.
What about the rest of your family?
It was a great time for them also. We were all at home, Ali was now closer to the “big girls,” as they were known, than myself and Edge. There were young kids to look after, so we kept it somehow grounded.
But living the rock star’s life was not what we expected from U2. Isn’t it a cliché: here you are now, with a villa in the south of France. Didn’t the Rolling Stones have a villa up the road where they recorded Exile On Main Street in 1971?
They should have stayed there; that’s a great album. I’m one of the people who believes there’s more in them. The music has to come out of a life. If there’s no life, there’s no music. But I think, again, as much as we were playing with clichés, we were also trying to crack them open. You’ve gotta remember the context here, the context of grunge, the sort of Seattle sound that was dominant at the time. I loved Seattle and I loved the sound, in fact the sound in the sense of a river, as it comes into the delta, the mouth of the river. It’s industrial, it’s gray, there’s rainy skies, there’s a plaid shirt, there’s ripped jeans, there’s thrift-shop jumpers with holes in them, and this kind of umbilical roar from Kurt Cobain. And there arrive in the harbor, plastic pants on a giant cruise ship with a satellite dish at the top going the wrong way up the river. [laughs] On Zoo TV, I suppose we were against the obvious definitions of authenticity. Authenticity is about an honest discourse between heart and mind, body, soul. It’s nothing to do with the clothes you wear. These white rock stars, they think they’re authentic, and that Prince is just some sort of show business Christmas tree. But he has more soul in his little finger than a whole harbor full of those rock bands. Kraftwerk . . . There’s another example of cosmic soul.
The grunge movement was very much anti-eighties. It was aimed against the pretension to glamour of the eighties.
But the eighties weren’t glamorous. The eighties were ugly: big hair, shoulder pads. I see the eighties as very ugly and very unglamorous. I think U2 are one of the few things you can recommend from the eighties.
The eighties were the reign of fun, fashion, style over substance, the love of money, all those things that people thought U2 were standing against.
We were, and still were in the nineties, challenging them, we just took a different route. The nineties were much sexier.
The nineties were sexier for you, because you had been a zealot during the eighties. Others hadn’t been. I mean, look at Madonna. I think the funniest thing about the nineties is that pop artists wanted to go dark and introspective, and acts like U2 wanted to go pop and fight for their right to party. They sort of changed sides and crossed each other’s paths. Would you agree?
But Achtung, Baby and Zooropa are hardly pop. They are as intense and dense as it gets. In fact I remember telling this to a German journalist before the album came out. But he misunderstood “dense” for “dance.” The remixes put the confusion to work.
That was in Europe. What about America?
I loved Pearl Jam. Eddie Vedder had an authenticity in that voice of his. They had and they still have commitment as a band. There wasn’t much of that in the eighties. In fact, at the end of the nineties, when the PopMart show eventually got to Seattle, the city was really good to us. It was the best show of the tour, outside of Chicago. All the Seattle musicians came down to show support for what we were doing. You know, even Kurt Cobain, before he died, was dressing up in a silver shirt.
Who says no the most often in the band? I’m guessing it’s Larry.
[laughs] Well, I wouldn’t have thought that needed much private detective work. Yeah, he’s by far the most cautious person in the band, and does not want to set out on the journey until he has a clear idea of where we’re going and how we might get there. How old-fashioned! [laughs] You know, he’s the most sensible man in the band in that sense.
I remember, when The Joshua Tree was released, way before it turned out to be your biggest success, Larry was the one, in the interviews, who was supposed to have convinced you that the duty of U2 was to write and perform timeless pop songs.
Yeah. He and Paul McGuinness are the two people around us who are the most intolerant of what we might call the artiste, which is to say they’re suspicious of art. [laughs] But that’s all about control. If I were an artist, I’d want to be in advertising, because I would find it very difficult—and Larry would find it impossible—to hand over judgment of the quality of your work to critics. That’s the problem with art: what is and what isn’t art is decided by very few people. So those people, because there’s less of them, become very powerful. Whereas with a song, it goes on the radio: people hear it, they like it, they put it at the top of the charts. It’s not mediated the same way. So I think Larry’s always had a suspicion of art, because, then, we’re depending on the critics. Any band that has ever depended on the critics is usually broken up by the critics.
Because there’s too much pressure on them? Is that what you mean?
Well, that’s just no way to live. So he was always looking for the clearer idea, the clearer melody line with the least pretension.
But was he happy while you were recording Achtung, Baby?
Well, no. That’s what I’m saying. So, therefore, the only way Larry was going to like Achtung, Baby is if the songs were great. He couldn’t care less about the fact that we were working with technology. And the art project, that was just Bono and Edge being self-indulgent. Whereas the songs—are they any good? If not, let’s go home, this place is freezing.
What was his opinion of Brian Eno?
Well, there again, there is a perfect example. Larry would have the least amount of time for process as an essential ingredient. Brian’s all about process. The first thing Brian does when he arrives at a session is he redecorates the room—I’m not kidding. He tidies up the place, gets rid of instruments, amplifiers and . . . people [laughs] who are not integral. Then he asks about our approach, what approach are we taking. So there’s a lot of time spent on the process. So Larry would have his eyes up to heaven. But then, when a great song arrives at the end of the day, Larry would walk up to Brian and go: “That was a great day.” But if the song didn’t arrive, Larry would try to stop him being paid. [laughs] He’d want Brian to be writing the check for the privilege of being in the room with the band. [laughs] It’s all about results. If the song arrives at the end of it, that must have been worth it; if the song didn’t, he’d rather be home playing with his kids.
How was he showing his impatience?
I think on Achtung, Baby, there were a couple of occasions he was nearly at the airport. There was one occasion when he was left behind at what we called “the Brown Hotel” in East Berlin, where everything was brown. At a very tense time, when we had been in Berlin for three weeks, and had produced not one note of any real worth, when things were really tense, Larry was left in the hotel lobby by mistake when everyone else was taken to the studio. I mean, I think the comedy in the situation was eventually spotted by him. But Larry wouldn’t mind being left behind if he later had to catch up to something great. He couldn’t handle being left behind if he would later catch up with something as brown as the hotel. And there was a lot of brown on that record, before it finally became Day-Glo.
So it took Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois, and Flood to turn black and white into Day-Glo?
And Steve Lillywhite to keep it in focus. I have to say I don’t know where we’d be as a band without these people. Daniel Lanois is the finest musician. If you’re making an album with him, it’s got to be a great album, or someone is gonna die—either you or him. He can’t be around average. He can’t be around anything that doesn’t ring true. He’s the definition of a line I used in “Vertigo”: A feeling is much stronger than a thought.
With Brian Eno, wasn’t it the other way around?
You would think he would be egghead over heart, but he’s not at all. He listens to a lot of gospel, doo-wop, vocal groups that would bring you to tears. That said, he is hard on old concepts, always looking for the new. But context, fashion are not as important to him as soul. He is—has been—the great catalyst for some of U2’s best work: “Bad,” “With or Without You,” “Grace,” “In a Little While.” These are very emotional songs that would not have existed were he not in the room.
“In a Little While,” I love that. I recognize you in that song.
Well, Brian kicked that one off. He was playing around with some gospel chords, and I just started singing.
How does Flood fit into that picture?
The only man in the world who is a fan of my guitar playing! A true innovator. The explosions at the start of “Zoo Station,” where you think the speakers are blowing up, that’s him. A dark lord.
I’m remembering a word I meant to ask you more about. It’s the first one that you used when I started you on Edge, Adam, and Larry, and that’s the word frustrating . . . Let’s take the example of the recording of your new album. Were there moments when this feeling of frustration returned?
[pause] Ermm . . . On How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, we got on pretty well, though. [pause] It’s very hard sometimes to work on something for a long period of time, prepare for it, present it to the band, and then receive deafening silence, or the sound of a jaw opening and a yawn coming out. But Adam and Larry have very high standards, and usually, if it’s really great, they will be very interested. But even then, they won’t be hugely excited.
Don’t you ever have this feeling of: “God, I know these people by heart. I know the joke he’s going to make. Please, spare me . . .” How do you guard yourself against those feelings?
You mean they keep you on your toes?
Yes. They keep me on my toes.
So, this is silly, but . . . Imagine I’m some sort of headhunter, and I’m making a phone call to you. Let’s say that Edge has become a doctor, like he’d intended to way back then. So I’m asking you: You’re one of his best friends, and I really want you to tell me frankly about the guy. I’m about to give him a job as a director in a clinic. So what’s your opinion? What are his best qualities, his shortcomings, and what would you warn me against the most?
Well, first off, please don’t make him a director of your clinic. [laughs]
Should we appoint him as a surgeon?
The thing that the three of them have—in excessive amounts—is integrity. They are capable of, on a regular basis, walking away from huge sums of money for doing the simplest things. [laughs] And I’m always amused at that. They’re unbendable in that sense—flexible, but not bendable. The three of them have very sly senses of humor. So that keeps me interested. This is a surgeon. He will make the smallest incision possible, but you’ll need extra ether, anesthesia. But he’s gonna probably spend an hour walking around the patient before he finally cuts him open. The area he’ll be interested in will be brain surgery.
I heard rumors about weird experiments he enjoys conducting. Should I be afraid of that?
If it’s somebody else’s head, I think you’re safe. [laughs] He’ll be very responsible with it, and, as I say, he will do the least damage on the way to the problem and on the way out of the problem.
So you’re warning me about his tendency toward self-mutilation?
Yeah, I wouldn’t let him operate on his own head. [laughs] And I’d have a backup emergency power supply, because it could take a long time.
OK, now on to Adam. I’m about to hire him as a landscape gardener. I know he loves nature. I’ve just bought a huge property, a wonderful place in the south of France. We have vineyards, we’re going to set up a golf course, I’m thinking of waterfalls as well. We have heard about this man, Adam Clayton. We know you’ve worked with him a lot. So do you think he might fit the job?
Well, the first thing I’d say to you is: you want a very, very big budget. And be prepared to spend as much on the garden as you have on the property and on the house. Because, for him, the four walls are not half as interesting as what’s outside of them. He sees the garden as God’s furniture, and tends to it in a very meticulous way. He will never be seen running in your garden. He will frustrate the rest of the staff by how long it takes him to trim the hedge. But when you stand back, you will see some great and unexpected shapes in the hedge. He moves very slowly, but he’ll build a bridge over the river that runs through it, even if he won’t use a regular stonemason and he’ll use a sculptor.
Excuse me, sir, but that’s pretty worrying. You’re telling me he’s going to be very expensive and that he won’t finish on schedule. I’m afraid I’m not going to hire him.
Very expensive, won’t finish on schedule. Every artisan will be an artist. And it’s only when you realize you have no money left in the bank and you have to sell the place that it will dawn on you that this property is now worth ten times what you put into it. Nothing that he does dates, except his hair.
Last one, of course, is Larry. And, by the way, I have no idea of the sort of job he’d have done had he not turned out to be a drummer.
Ermm . . . So what would I recommend him for? . . . An actor! Because in a way, he is the one in the band who has the most pretense for a person who is so unpretentious. He has created a character that’s, I think, very enduring, unknowable, fascinating by doing very little. And I think that the camera loves people who . . . loathe the camera.
Let’s say you’re his agent. How would you cast him? What sort of directors would you make him work with? What kind of partners and stories?
Well, I think that all great actors are always themselves as well as the person they’re playing. It’s one of those great contradictions. Daniel Day-Lewis is one of my favorites. As he disappears into someone else, there’s always something that rings true, because it’s always him. So I think Larry will always have that quality going for him. The actor that he most reminds me of is David Carradine. There’s a sort of loner quality about all his roles, even when he’s in a crowd. And then, when he laughs, the whole room laughs, because something must be very funny. [bursts out laughing]
What would be the breakout role for him?
The highway patrolman in the middle of America. Somewhere like Aimes, Iowa. He would play the highway patrolman who is so distressed at his inability to sort out his local neighborhood, because the farms are closing down, and finally one day he cracks and starts to plan how he’s going to rob the local bank.
And what should I be wary of about him?
I’d say . . . don’t ask him to do Shakespeare! [laughs]
And why is that?
Because he’s not an “ac-TOR.” “Ac-TOR” is the man who likes the sound of his own voice. You know, the people in theaters. [puts on voice] “Hello-o, da-aa-rling . . .” The air kissing . . . He’s not an “ac-TOR,” he’s an “acteur.”
And eventually, you, Bono, you’ve become a top insurance salesman in our company. We’re about to hire you as the head of our new venture in online insurance. Does that sound like a good idea to your fellow musicians and Paul McGuinness? What would they say?
They would say: why should we buy insurance from somebody who had never taken any out?