Killing Bono

Sometimes I dream of a revolution, a bloody coup d'etat by the second rank. Troupes of actors slaughtered by their understudies, magicians sawn in half by indefatigably smiling glamor girls…I dream of champions chopped down by rabbit-punching sparring partners while eternal bridesmaids turn and rape the bridegrooms over the sausage rolls…And march an army of assistants and deputies, the seconds-in-command, the runners-up, the right-hand men, storming the palace gates wherein the second son has already mounted the throne having committed regicide with a croquet mallet. Stand-ins of the world stand up!

Tom Stoppard,
The Real Inspector Hound

Chance is a kind of religion

Where you're damned for plain hard luck.

I never did see that movie

I never did read that book.

Love, come on down

Let my numbers come around.

Don't know if I can hold on

Don't know if I'm that strong.

Don't know if I can wait that long

Till the colors come flashing

And the lights go on.

Then will there be no time for sorrow

Then will there be no time for shame

Though I can't say why

I know I've got to believe

We'll go driving in that pool

It's who you know that gets you through

The gates of the playboy mansion.

—U2, “The Playboy Mansion”

I was Neil McCormick's fan in school. He was much cooler than me, a much better writer, and I thought he'd make a much better rock star. I was wrong on one count. He's written a great book. It pulled me back…with a bit of a shudder. I can think of a few people who will wince when they read it, and I am certainly one of them. You might imagine it would be very hard for me to like a book like this—it's excruciating to me at times—but it's very funny and it's very moving. I recognize myself in Neil's prose, which is very unusual. His own candor is extraordinary. There is a deadpan quality to the description of his life that is very appealing, but his passion is never far from the surface. It is one of Neil's gifts to be able to write about really heavy things and make them feel weightless. There are a few narratives going on here, we bump into weighty subjects, but they sort of bounce past you like a big beach ball. And the truly astonishing thing is that the songs that he's written, that are quoted in the book, they ring like bells, and you can't even hear the melodies. The aspirations of his luckless protagonist are all fanciful until you read those lyrics. Then you realize this isn't just a guy who thinks he could have been a rock star. He fully inhabits the great line out of Marlon Brando's mouth in
On the Waterfront
…“I could have been a contender.”

Bono

I always knew I would be famous.

By the time I left school, at seventeen, my life was planned down to the finest detail. I would form a rock band, make a series of epoch-shifting albums, play technologically mind-blowing concerts in the biggest stadiums on the planet until I was universally acknowledged as the greatest superstar of my era. And I would indulge in all manner of diversions along the way: make films, write books, break hearts, befriend my idols…oh—and promote world peace, feed the poor and save the planet while I was at it.

You might think I was just another arrogant teenage airhead with fantasies of omnipotence. Indeed, there were plenty around me at the time who did their best to persuade me that this was the case. But I wasn't about to be put off by lesser mortals jealous of my talent. Because I knew, deep, deep in the very core of my being, that this wasn't just another empty dream. This was my destiny…

So there I was, thirty-five years old, sitting in a shabby, un-heated little excuse for an office above a bookie's in Piccadilly, watching the rain drizzle down my single, grimy window, wondering where it had all gone wrong. I'd wanted to be a rock star and had wound up becoming a rock critic. To compound my torment, I was suffering from a bad case of writer's block with my newspaper deadline looming and the fucking telephone hadn't stopped ringing all morning with a succession of PRs pestering me about their shitty rock bands, all of whom I secretly resented for, I suppose, just being more famous than me. But at least talking on the phone gave me an excuse for not writing my column.

“It better be good,” I snapped into the receiver.

“This is the voice of your conscience,” announced my caller in a gravelly, wasted Dublin accent that reeked of smoke, late nights and fine wines.

“Bono,” I said, in recognition.

“You can run but you can't hide,” he laughed.

“The way I feel right now, I don't think I could even run,” I sighed.

It was, indeed, Bono: rock legend, international superstar, roving ambassador for world peace and (though it is unlikely to feature prominently on his CV) a schoolfriend of mine from Mount Temple Comprehensive.

“Where are you?” I inquired, listening to the echo of global distance bouncing down the phone line.

“Miami,” he said. “Playground of America. Ever been to Miami? The gangsters look like fashion designers. Or maybe the fashion designers look like gangsters. Sometimes it's hard to tell…”

There was a time when we had both been singers in schoolboy bands, playing every toilet in Dublin, convinced against all the odds that we were the chosen ones, bound for glory. We moved in different circles these days. I wrote for a newspaper. He was the news. But every now and then, when something brought me to mind, Bono would call up out of the blue to fill me in on his latest adventures in the stratosphere of superstardom.

“I was out at a club last night,” he said, slipping into raconteur mode, his voice an intimate whisper. “It was very Scarface but, like I said, maybe it was just a fashion thing. Lots of men with mustaches, models draped over their shoulders, you know? Every man and woman in the place was puffing on enormous cigars. Clouds of smoke everywhere. Smoke-rings rising up to the ceiling. There's something about a beautiful woman and a cigar; it's a very powerful combination, don't you think?”

“Until you kiss them and find out they taste like an ashtray,” I grunted.

“You're such a romantic,” said Bono. “So I'm led into this room at the back which is just filled with hundreds of little drawers, floor to ceiling. And each little drawer has a little plaque with a name on it: Schwarzenegger, Stallone…Madonna! You know, all the famous cigar smokers! It's like a walk-in humidor. All these personal stashes of illegally imported Cuban cigars maintained at perfect temperature and humidity for whenever they want to drop in and have a puff. I was looking for the President's name, 'cause I'm sure he has his own drawer in there somewhere. It's pure Miami. This whole city's like the shop window for the American dream. But then—and you'll love this, Neil—I see a box with the name ‘Sinatra'! Francis Albert! They keep one for him. How cool is that?”

As I listened, occasionally making encouraging noises, I watched a pigeon splashing about in a puddle that was building up on the ledge outside my rotting window-frame. Miami seemed a long way away. Bono sounded woozy and happy after his night on the tiles but I had a strange feeling welling up in my chest, a disturbing swirl of conflicting emotions. I was pleased that Bono had called me. Flattered, even. I liked and admired the man as much as anyone I had ever known. So why did his voice have the power to send a sharp stab of insecurity running right through my heart?

“I thought of you, 'cause I know you've always been a big fan of Frank,” said Bono. “I can't quite believe this myself, but I have done a duet with the Chairman!”

That was it. Something popped in my head. “Stop!” I spluttered. “Enough! I should be doing a duet with Frank Sinatra! What's Sinatra to you? Just another famous scalp! I love Frank Sinatra. Leave him alone! Next you'll be telling me you've been asked to play James Bond.”

There was a moment's uneasy silence, then Bono laughed. “Actually, the Edge and I have written the new
Bond
theme for Tina Turner.”

“Oh, fuck off!” I snapped. “The problem with knowing you is that you've done everything I ever wanted to do. I feel like you've lived my life.”

Laughter echoed back down the line. “I'm your doppelganger,” Bono said. “If you want your life back, you'll have to kill me.”

Now
there
was an idea…

When I put down the phone I started to brood. Was Bono really my evil twin? Or was I his? Now that I thought about it, our careers had diverged early on and just kept on getting wider and wider apart. As he rose to the highest realms of fame and fortune, I had plummeted to the depths of anonymity, a rock 'n' roll casualty, leaving only the briefest of traces in the margins of pop history, and that for being the first person to leave U2.

Oh, yes. I didn't mention that, did I? But we'll get to it.

Perhaps I was the yang to Bono's yin. The dark counterbalance to his life of success and good fortune, absorbing all the bad luck and mischance that never seemed to go his way.

I pulled down a decaying, much-thumbed, hardback antique
Oxford English Dictionary
from my overcrowded bookshelves.
Doppelganger
(ad. Ger. Double-ganger): The apparition of a living person; a double, a wraith.
'That's me all right,' I thought. Just a phantom reflection of everything I ever wanted to be. And everything I ever wanted to be was personified by a bloke I had gone to school with. How cruel was that?

“Bono Must Die!” I typed into my computer. I blew it up, 72-point bold, and printed it out. It looked good. I knew a few people who would wear that T-shirt.

“I, Bono,” I typed. Perhaps I could sell my story to
The National Enquirer
. “Bono Stole My Life.”

Not that I hadn't achieved things in my own right. Deep inside, I knew that to be true. But, in the blinding glare of superstardom, the small triumphs of ordinary existence don't always register. Instead you can easily become a footnote in somebody else's story.

So let me get something straight from the start. Contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, I do not have the dubious distinction of being to U2 what Pete Best was to the Beatles: the man who missed the gravy train. I know, it is right there in black and white in the group's authorized biography,
The Unforgettable Fire
. In Chapter Four, biographer Eamon Dunphy informs his readers of the first fateful gathering of the band that would become U2, to which Bono, apparently, “turned up with another Mount Temple pupil, Neil McCormick, who, like everyone else present, fancied being lead guitarist.” However, after a few grim renditions of rock standards, including “Brown Sugar” and “Satisfaction,” “Neil decided to bail out.”

That rather trivial little tale seems to follow me around wherever I go, as the source of many other biographical presumptions. I still wince whenever I see myself described in print as an “original member of U2,” or, worse, “ex-U2,” as if the defining moment of my entire life was petulantly stomping out of a rehearsal room back in my schooldays. So please read the following carefully: I wasn't there and, even if I had been, any ambitions to become lead axeman in the nascent combo would surely have been hampered by the fact that I had only ever mastered three chords on my daddy's Spanish guitar—and I wasn't even sure which chords they were.

But if something is printed often enough it becomes the truth, or at least the official version of events. I think the members of U2 actually believe it themselves at this stage. Certainly, that was the impression I got when I finally made it to Miami, as a guest of the band for the launch of their 2001 world tour. At a backstage party, the band's manager, Paul McGuinness, kept introducing me as a member of the original lineup. The fact that a former alumnus of his band was now music critic for the conservative British broadsheet the
Daily Telegraph
seemed to amuse him immensely.

The pouting and gorgeous Andrea Corr was there, somehow looking even more desirable than usual with a pint of Guinness in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. “Did you really walk out on U2?” she asked, sounding suitably impressed.

“I told Bono the band wasn't big enough for the both of us,” I replied. “If they'd have stuck with me, they could have really gone places.” (Come on. What was I supposed to say to the most beautiful woman in Ireland? That it was just a misprint?)

“How does it feel seeing them on stage?” Andrea asked. “Do you think, ‘That could have been me up there'?”

Now
that
was cutting a little too close to the bone.

I looked around the room, crowded with familiar faces. The sleek, über-rock figure of Lenny Kravitz lingered in a corner, dressed in fake fur entirely inappropriate for the climate, his expression hidden behind omnipresent, impenetrable reflective shades. He was silently accompanied by someone who appeared to occupy the role of mobile-phone roadie. Lenny would hold out a hand and a gleaming, metallic phone would miraculously appear in it. When his conversation was over, he would hold out the phone and the roadie would slip it back into his pocket.

Elvis Costello, an entity from a different end of the rock spectrum, portly, bespectacled and dressed like he had just been for a rummage in a charity shop, mopped his sweaty brow, engrossed in musical conversation with chrome-domed producer Brian Eno.

There were old friends of the band, such as the extravagantly talented singer-songwriter and one-man art installation Gavin Friday (who had an arm wrapped around one of the beautiful Corr sisters) and eternally poised press officer Regine Moylett. There was the red-blazered Irish aristocrat Lord Henry Mountcharles, perhaps slightly the worse for wear, directing his conversation into the unconvincingly inflated cleavage of one of Miami's beach-babe set. The small but perfectly formed figure of supermodel Helena Christensen flitted by in a flimsy summer dress while Christy Turlington posed resplendently on the other side of the room. There were members of U2's crew and management, familiar faces from Dublin, many of them looking red and puffy following a few days on the tear in the Miami sunshine. There were wives, girlfriends, children. And there was a smattering of tanned and immaculately attired local worthies who had succeeded in blagging coveted Access All Areas passes.

Upstairs in an enormous ballroom a party was in full swing, with superstar DJ Paul Oakenfeld spinning discs and scantily clad waitresses serving free drinks for several hundred regular, common-or-garden VIPs. But this was where the real insiders could be found, crammed into a narrow corridor behind the stage, basking in the presence of the band.

Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen, the four members of U2, were scattered about the room, sweaty and exhausted after a two-hour tour de force performance, graciously accepting fulsome praise from this ragged assembly of celebrities, family, friends, colleagues, freeloaders and assorted hangers-on.

I watched it all and wondered where exactly I fitted in. This was the very life I had imagined for myself all those years ago, but here I was only by an accident of acquaintance. I caught Bono's eye. He was, as usual, the center of a huddle of activity: rock stars and supermodels hanging on his every word. He winked at me and grinned.

I remembered a conversation we had, late one night, many, many years ago. We were talking about U2's first-ever performance, playing cover versions on some rickety school tables held together by sticky tape in the Mount Temple gymnasium.

“That gig changed my life,” I admitted to him.

“It changed mine too!” he excitedly replied.

The difference was, it changed his for the better.