26 Bono

U2 are more important to the story of contemporary Ireland than most commentaries seek to suggest. The standard analysis remains doggedly on the surface, celebrating the wondrousness of the idea that a rock’n’roll band originating in Ireland could possibly be regarded as the best in the world.

Little credence is given to the idea that U2, in their progress through the world, have unveiled a kind of secret history of Ireland. A deeper examination of their own history reveals a community of individuals who were somehow able to transcend the exterior climate of negativity and reaction, and to drive their receptors deep into the culture whence they emerged, acquiring a shamanic capacity to plumb the interior reservoirs of Irish creativity and genius, creating in the process a parallel dramatization of Ireland on the world stage.

In the 1990s, this became deeply infectious for their own people. Even that prevailing superficial idea of their world-conquering adventuring seemed to creep into the soul of their native land, provoking in their fellow countrymen a counterintuitive ‘Me too?’ followed by a defiant ‘Why not?’

But if we are to give them credit for in part inspiring the national reinvigoration that became world-famous as the Celtic Tiger, then we must also consider the possibility that, somewhere in the U2 story, there was also a portent of the unwinding of that miracle in the late Noughties.

When people find fault with U2, it usually tends to be about the extra-curricular stuff: Bono’s charity campaigning or the cartoon persona he’s fashioned for the stadium that is the modern mass media world. The first time U2 got on the cover of Time, over two decades ago, the ‘Rock’s Hottest Ticket’ headline provided their fellow citizens with an opportunity for an orgy of reflected glorying. Nowadays this kind of thing happens so often, we realize that Bono has not just outstripped the rest of the rock’n’roll pack and become far bigger than his own band, but has left his native country behind as well. This provokes a complex reaction in his fellow countrymen, which often comes out as resentment. And this, again, causes us to miss the main plot.

Much as it irritates so many people who insist that ‘it’s only rock’n’roll’, Bono has for some time been going bravely where no celebrity spokesman for his generation had gone before, earning considerable international respect for himself and his motivations, and offering an answer to the niggling question about whether rock’n’roll can move beyond its Dionysian obsession with sex, drugs and other false forms of freedom. These ambitions derive, whether we like it or not, from the Irish historical experience of wretchedness and want. Part of the reason Bono’s evangelicalism provokes such antagonism in Anglo-Saxon culture is that the experience he calls on has far more in common with the black societies in which rock’n’roll emerged than it has with the ‘white’ world to which Ireland ostensibly belongs.

The real problem, strangely, is with the music. In the beginning, U2 created a soundtrack that, in its innocence and innovation, retrospectively revealed itself as containing a prophecy of the shifts in Irish culture and fortunes. But then, deep in the 1990s, as soon as the prophecy began to take hold, something happened. It is as if U2, having discovered their essence, were struck down by the same condition that had affected their native country in their childhoods: a kind of retreating into a settled view of themselves, a solidifying around their own essence with a view to maintaining their brand and position.

The band’s two early-2000s albums, All That You Can’t Leave Behind and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, were disappointing for anyone who had truly tuned into U2’s mission. Confusingly, they sounded like great rock’n’roll albums should sound, even a bit like great U2 albums. But they didn’t sound like the albums U2 should have been making at the age they were, in a sequence defined from Boy to Achtung Baby.

The 1990s’ in-between albums, Zooropa and Pop, were essentially scrapbook albums of various experimental elements traceable to the revolution that had occurred in the band’s imagination at the time of the extraordinary 1991 opus Achtung Baby. But the subsequent albums cannot be excused on this basis, since they were produced at leisure and after considerable contemplation. In an odd way, they reflected the complacency and self-congratulation that crept into Irish life in the early years of the new millennium, when everyone became so pleased with themselves as to forget about the necessity for constant regeneration.

Of course, the idea that there was anything wrong with these albums may seem mystifying to many people. They were massively successful, and this is difficult to argue with. The trouble is that the ethic governing both these albums seemed to be more about affirming U2’s role as the world’s foremost rock’n’roll band than about the U2 mission as understood from the beginning.

U2 always promised more. They promised meaning and mission and undertook to liberate rock’n’roll from its modern obsession with the material. They said the world could go far if it listened to what they said. They gathered up a ragged medium and sought to reintroduce it to its own roots. They demanded of pop no less than that it grow up. Having started as pop-illiterates, they acquired an awesome competence which they emphasized was for an exalted purpose. They seemed to represent a defiance of imposed cultural notions and yet utilized these notions as the very fabric of their creativity. There was something here about redemption, about taking back the devil’s music, about wrestling the guitar from the grasp of the dark angel, about demonstrating some connection between inspiration and faith, reason and humility, love and rigour, hope and desire. It wasn’t just about giving God a good guitar sound, but about showing how some hitherto implausible connections could be extended into the stratosphere of the pop imagination, infiltrating the secular consciousness with something beyond the hip and the harmless. It was about giving a voice to things we all felt, underneath, but lacked permission to speak.

Those ambitions, though constantly implicit, tended to move ahead of the band, a vaguely defined but nevertheless deeply held set of aspirations that promised something extraordinary for those who stuck around. With The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, there was a sense that U2 were about to reach out and touch their very reason for being, and perhaps in doing so define anew the uncreated conscience of their own race. But the target kept moving and, more worryingly, U2 appeared not to notice. They kept talking about how music is more than diversion and about the possibilities of the medium to make a difference beyond the dance floor. And they kept on making music that seemed to miss the point of their own existence. That music was unquestionably U2, but when you took off the wrapping there was nothing there but the sentimental repetition of the unanswered question.

This crisis went largely unnoticed. Perhaps, though it seems unlikely, it went unnoticed even by the band-members themselves. Indeed, because the problem sounded as if it had arisen from an increasing atomization of the band, perhaps the very process of undoing conspired also to conceal the difficulty. The thing about U2 had always been that the whole was much greater than the parts. But the music they produced as they hit middle age conveyed a sense that what they embodied was no longer a passion born of friendship and ambition, but four individual forms of craftsmanship acquired in togetherness and now rapidly diverging. There was, in the predictable grammar of their newer songs, in the adherence to fashion and formula rather than the forbidden, a vaguely detectable hint that what each of the four was now contributing was less defined by the internal dynamic that had made the band great. U2 had become, to an extent, trapped in the codes they had started out trying to subvert. They no longer appeared able to access the collective recklessness of the early days.

This is what made No Line on the Horizon such a welcome arrival in 2009, a recording that at once consolidated U2’s position as the world’s great rock’n’roll band and reasserted their core mission to remind us that everything we ‘know’ is wrong. In a subtle way, without disturbing the core U2 sound or sensibility, it took us somewhere new. Bono was singing better on this album than he had for a long time, and seemed again to be at home in the sound the rest of the band were creating around him.

Perhaps, again, it is prophetic. Perhaps, for those who seek to look deeper, it is the continuation of that secret history of Irish culture. Perhaps. We can only hope that history is capable of holding the tune.