Killing Bono (12 page)

“No, no, just the Durex, thank you,” I mumbled, blushing furiously. Romeo and Juliet never had to put up with crap like this.

I wrote a song with Ivan about that, called “In Your Hands,” a torturous but rather poetic account of the fear and guilt and twisted sense of defiance that was loaded by the church on to the simple act of making love. Our songwriting was definitely improving. And with it an artistic goal was crystallizing. I wanted to write about the realities of teenage life in Ireland: the frustrations of desire in a nation where law seemed to make young love illegal; the gnawing fear of mortality set against the bland succor of an atrophying religion; the obstacles placed across the path to fulfillment by repressive adult society. I wanted to fill the songs with practical details only a teenager would know, writing about the frustration of having to leave my girlfriend's house every night to catch the last bus home in the prosaically titled “Last Bus Home.” I wanted to accomplish great things and I believed the Modulators could be my vehicle.

We were getting paying gigs at last, with Johnny negotiating an £80 fee for supporting a show-band at an illegal strip club known, rather unattractively, as Sweaty Betty's. Anticipating that the audience might not be particularly open-minded, we learned a raft of rock 'n' roll classics which we duly played at our usual breakneck speed. The place went wild, with one rather elderly fellow jiving on the tabletops to our hyped-up “Peggy Sue.” Afterward he came up to congratulate us. “So this is what they call punk rock, eh?” he said. “It's not so bad!”

We made our television debut on
Young Line
, a well-meaning but ridiculously stuffy and amateurish youth program on RTE, Ireland's only TV station. I walked into the studio wide-eyed, spinning around to take in the cavernous room with its thick hanging drapes and the multitude of lights suspended from a latticework over our heads. I took my position on stage and watched as the huge cameras rolled silently about, their lenses turning like blank eyes toward me. I stared boldly back, as if trying to see through the looking glass and out into the world of TV-watchers. Here I was: inside the magic box at last! I felt entirely nerveless. This was where I belonged. At a crucial juncture of our performance, I did something I used to do at gigs and leaped off the stage to jive about on the dance floor. Unfortunately, to the viewing public I simply disappeared out of shot. The camera had not followed my flight and now darted around in panic, as if looking for someone or something else to focus on. Then it cut to a presenter wearing a ridiculous multicolored knitted pullover and muttering inanities in front of a wobbly silent projection of the rest of the Modulators' performance. It was dreadful. I cringed inside at the sight of all my exaggerated movements and labored gesticulations. Did I really look like that? And as for my singing…I knew my voice was not exactly one of the natural wonders of the world but I was absolutely horrified by its lumpy tone and my gulpy, frog-in-throat delivery. How had I ever convinced anyone to let me front a group?

But in the weeks that followed the power of television kicked in to reassure me that I was on the right path. Kids in Howth would approach, giggling nervously. “We seen you on TV!” I was a star, if only in my own backyard.

One day in September, I descended into the basement of Advance Records to buy a 12” single. I held my new purchase in my hands with a sense of wonder. It was U2's debut release, an EP featuring “Out of Control,” “Stories for Boys” and “Boy/Girl,” billed as
U2-3
, and for the sum of £1.49 I had picked up number 16 (written on the sleeve in black felt-tip) in a limited edition of 1,000. It is now probably the most commercially valuable record I own—but it has always been valuable to me. Back in 1979, it represented the bridging of a gap between the mundane, ordinary world in which I had grown up and an alternative, fabulously exotic universe of records, rock stardom, glamour and…possibility.

The possibility that someone like me could actually cross over into the silver-screen dimension of twenty-first-century dreams. Because some guys I knew had actually made a record! Boys I went to school with! Logically, of course, I had always understood that this was possible. But, like Doubting Thomas, I needed proof. It had to be more than just seeing it with my own eyes. I needed to touch it. To hold it in my hands. To put it on the turntable, to watch it spinning hypnotically around and around and around at precisely 45 (the magic number) revolutions per minute, to let the needle slowly descend until with a soft click and the faintest hiss it dropped into the groove and…

…there was the metal pulse of Adam's bass. De-dum-dum-dum-de-dum-dum-dum-de…How many times had I watched him playing that riff, standing close enough to touch? Then ching-chang-
ching! The Edge's guitar riff chimed out. Larry's drums kicked in, racing hi-hats and snappy snare. And here came Bono: “Monday morning / Eighteen years of dawning…”

The record had been made under the auspices of Jackie Hayden, who ran CBS Ireland, a parochial offshoot of the multinational that was not taken remotely seriously by its parent company. CBS had passed on Jackie's recommendation of the Boomtown Rats and so, while they remained unenthusiastic about his latest local discovery and rejected the opportunity to sign U2 worldwide, they did sanction the Ireland-only release of a set of demos produced by London A&R man Chas De Whalley. It was a measure of U2's growing preeminence on the Dublin scene that
Hot Press
supported them with a cover feature in October, much to the grumbling discontent of every other local band. Bono and Edge came into the office on the day of publication, to pick up a copy hot off the press (so to speak).

“Looking good!” said Bono, a note of genuine surprise sounding in his voice as he contemplated the cover.

“Well, I look good,” joked Edge. “I don't know what
you
look like! I told you not to wear that shirt with the paint down the front but would you listen? You look like you've just wandered off a building site.”

Bono ignored him. “We look like a rock band,” he said, confidently.

Meanwhile Edge, who was in ebullient spirits, turned his mocking attentions to me. “How's the
pop
group going?” he asked, making
pop
sound like an insult.

“You didn't hear about it?” I said.

“What?”

“We got fucked by the Pope!”

It had all been going so well. The Modulators played headline gigs in both the big universities (Trinity and UCD), did an art-college dance and put on a massive show in front of 200 high-spirited kids at a packed community center in the notoriously rough area of Darndale. That would have been judged a great success were it not for a stage invasion at the end of our second encore during which £200 worth of hired equipment got spirited away, leaving me standing on the stage forlornly pleading with the crowd to return at least one of the microphones. And then we had been offered a shot at the Dublin big time: a headlining slot at McGonagles.

There had to be a catch. We just weren't high enough up the local greasy poll to warrant such billing. Could it have been anything to do with the fact that Pope John Paul II was arriving in Ireland on a three-day visit guaranteed to paralyze the country, culminating in a Mass for an estimated one million people in Dublin's Phoenix Park on the same day as the gig? Well, it didn't bother us. Ivan and I were among a very tiny minority in Ireland completely unmoved by the papal visit. As far as we were concerned, the Pope could play to his crowd and we would mop up whatever irreligious rock 'n' roll dregs were left behind. Then our bassist informed us that he had the honor of being selected to be an altar boy for the Pope and, because of the complex logistics of the occasion, would not be available to perform that evening.

I was incredulous. What wannabe rock star in their right mind would put serving God's representative on earth before a headline spot at McGonagles? We bullied, we hectored, we wheedled and flattered, to no avail. I pointed out that there would surely be thousands of other altar boys involved in this massive public act of communion and that one would not be missed. But our saintly bassist would not be shifted. “It is a great honor to be asked to assist the Holy Father,” he said, crossing himself. “It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

“So is headlining McGonagles,” I snapped back. The peculiar thing is I really believed it. To me, this gig was more important than anything going on in Ireland—fuck it, in the entire world—that day. “You've got to play the gig,” I insisted. After days of relentless pressure, David finally caved in. He would do the Mass, then extricate himself in time for a late sound check, making his way to a street corner some distance from the park, where we would be waiting to pick him up and scoot over to McGonagles.

“Miss this and you're out,” I warned him.

“I'll be there, all right? Don't worry,” he promised.

Where had I heard that before?

I borrowed my dad's car and Ivan and I drove into Dublin on the day of the Mass. The city was dead. Not a person on the streets. Not a shop open. It seemed everybody had gone to the park to see the Pope. The scale of the event finally began to dawn on me. We found one pool hall that had not locked its doors, owned presumably by a fellow curmudgeonly atheist, and so we went in and shot a couple of games, listening to the balls clack together in the empty silence, giggling with pleasure at our blasphemy.

Of course, when the time came to pick up our bassist he was nowhere to be found. We waited for hours, exasperation building to murderous proportions, before making our way back to McGonagles to discover that our drummer (who was proving to have the reliability of Keith Karkus) had got tired of waiting, packed up and split. We sheepishly confessed to the manager, Terri O'Neill, that we wouldn't be able to play.

“Never mind, lads. Nobody's fuckin' turned up anyway,” he said, which I thought was very charitable of him under the circumstances. “It's dead out there.”

So that is how the Pope broke up my band.

“You better get down on your knees and pray, boy,” laughed Bono, as I finished my sorry saga. “Sounds like you've got some powerful enemies.”

W
ithout a band to burn up all my excess energy, I threw myself into life at
Hot Press
. I managed to persuade Niall to let me take albums home to review. The first time this happened, my opus about some minor-league punk outfit almost filled an entire school exercise book (it was a mark of my age, I suppose, that I chose this particular medium for my labors). I then had to endure the sound of scratching from the editor's office as he struck blue pencil lines through every pretentious sentence, finally emerging to admit defeat. “There was a lot of interesting stuff there,” he said, encouragingly, “but, uhm, nothing I can actually print.”

Niall was a great editor, among the best I have ever known. He may have been overseeing something more high-powered journalists would have dismissed as a parochial rag but his passion and commitment raised
Hot Press
far above its natural level. Niall believed that the magazine had the potential to make a difference in Ireland and encouraged his writers to use it as a forum for serious issues and a vehicle for their highest creative ambitions, always encouraging passion and nurturing individuality. And he was an immensely supportive person, with time and consideration for everyone who worked for him, inspiring huge loyalty among his staff. Certainly, he seemed to have identified something in me worth persevering with, and showed immense patience in developing whatever talent I had. He would talk me through the journalistic process, point me to other writers who might inspire me and carefully explain the cuts he made to my naïve early efforts so that I began to understand things like structure and substance.

Of course, for a cut-price operation like
Hot Press
, employing me offered one distinct advantage. Although I received a wage for my graphics work, it did not even occur to me that I might be due extra money for my writing. Even when I progressed to doing cover stories for the magazine, I received not a penny for my efforts. And never thought anything of it. I wanted to write. I begged for the opportunity to write. What kind of ingrate would expect to get paid for it as well? I did the local live reviews no one else wanted to do. Wrote about the albums none of the other critics were interested in. Interviewed the bands no one else wanted to talk to. And considered myself the luckiest guy in Dublin.

There were, inevitably, moments of doubt. Like my first interview, with the Revillos, a band from Scotland who had formed from the ashes of the punk-party outfit the Rezillos. In retrospect, they were one-hit wonders whose career was on a rapid downward spiral to oblivion, but that one hit, “(Everybody's On) Top of the Pops,” was exactly the kind of self-aware, catchy, unpretentious new-wave pop that fitted my personal manifesto for music, so I repeatedly solicited Niall to allow me to interview them.

The night before I met the Revillos, I watched them perform a show of spirited, silly, Day-Glo pop that married Shangri-La girlie-group melodies to jerky rock with comical B-movie lyrics. Band leader Eugene Reynolds had the longest quiff in show business, a towering achievement for hair gel that threatened to decapitate his fellow performers every time he turned his head. And singer Fay Fife was a sexy Scots minx, punk's Highland pin-up. Throughout the gig, I was glowing with a secret sense of pride that I (me!) was actually going to meet these stars of stage and TV screen tomorrow (in person!). To everyone else in the audience they would remain objects of distant veneration. I was about to enter their world.

I turned up at their hotel the next day thinking that there must have been some kind of mistake made. I still clung to the belief that anyone who had a record out (certainly anyone who had appeared on
Top of the Pops
) must be fabulously rich and famous, so I was bewildered to find myself at a low-rent boarding house where half a dozen members of the band and crew were sharing a couple of dingy rooms. Without her makeup and stage costume, Fay was sharp-faced, spotty and distinctly ill at ease, her expression shifting between boredom and outright hostility. The strands of Eugene's quiff hung long and limp in front of his face as he sat on the edge of a lumpy single bed, no doubt contemplating with mounting depression the sight of this skinny, opinionated teenager, clearly the most junior member of the
Hot Press
staff, who had been sent to speak to them.

I carefully consulted a piece of paper on which I had scribbled questions. “How would you define the Revillos' trash aesthetic?” I began, a question designed to show the band they were talking to no ordinary rock hack.

“Whit does that mean?” sneered Eugene in a thick Scottish accent. “Trash aesthetic? How would
you
define it? Trash aesthetic! It's just two words stuck together to make them sound interesting. It disnae actually mean anything at all.”

“I mean…uh…What I mean by that is…” I began to fear he might have a point. What did I mean by “trash aesthetic”? “I mean the aesthetics of trash, ehm…” I would have to do better than that.

“Trash as in ‘rubbish'?” asked Fay. “Trash as in ‘garbage'? Are you saying we're garbage?”

“What I'm talking about is finding beauty in something other people might think of as disposable rubbish.”

“Ach, yer talking shite, man,” snarled Fay.

“Next question,” ordered Eugene.

I struggled on, but even as I read them off the page I could see that the questions I had worked on so lovingly were convoluted and pretentious. Soon the pauses were growing so pregnant they could have gone into labor. Eventually Fay broke the embarrassing silence. “Yer not much of a journalist, are ye?” she said.

I returned home in a state of abject despair. My deadline was Monday, so I had the weekend to rescue this humiliating travesty. I labored at my typewriter (no more school exercise books for
this
aspiring professional) in my bedroom for forty-eight hours with very little sleep, writing and rewriting, tearing things up and starting again, slowly and painfully crafting a piece about the illusory nature of pop music and the sometimes painful gap between fantasy and reality. It was a kind of coming-of-age piece, concluding not with disillusionment but with new acceptance of the contract of the imagination between performer and listener.

I left it on Niall's desk, then listened fearfully outside his door for the next half an hour, ears peeled for the sound of the dreaded blue pencil. But there was nothing, not a scrape, not a scribble. Finally the editor emerged. “It's excellent,” he pronounced. “I'm sending it down to the typesetter.”

The despondency I felt a few days before was transformed into delight. I had cracked it! This was a profound moment in my interior life. I knew there and then that I could actually do this. That I could write. That I could express myself in print. The process was no mystery to me anymore. I was a journalist.

Usually I was entrusted with only the most boring
Hot Press
pages, but Karl allowed me the honor of laying out my own maiden interview. I went to town on it, with a wacky font for the headline, a large photo set at a zany angle and, topping it all off, an overlay of a comic-strip zigzag across the whole page, with instructions to print it in bright yellow.

“That'll look cool,” said Karl encouragingly.

Well, it might have looked cool if it had been printed by someone who knew what they were doing. When the magazine came back from the presses in Kerry I contemplated my work with horror. The overlay had been printed jet-black. A huge inky zigzag ran through the middle of my piece, randomly obliterating huge passages of painstakingly crafted prose. The article was illegible.

“Wow!” said Liam Mackey, with mock awe. “Is that the kind of thing they teach you at art college? Remind me to make sure Karl lays out my next feature.”

To be honest, I am not sure what kind of thing they were supposed to be teaching me at art college, since I was rarely there. In order to reach the required 80 percent attendance, I had to get Barbara to sign me in. Although I was now on a specialist graphics course, I was increasingly bored with the lessons. I felt I was learning more practical skills on the job at
Hot Press
. When I tried to talk to tutors about print-ready artwork and four-color separations I saw a look of blank fear creep into their eyes. Not for the first time in my life, I became convinced that I knew more than those responsible for my education.

As much as I was caught up in life at
Hot Press
, I was positively itching to get another group started. I was about to turn nineteen and there was still no sign of my destiny arriving with all bells ringing and lights blazing. In February 1980, as if to emphasize the expanding gap between us, my classmates played the National Stadium in Dublin. This was an extraordinary event by local standards. The 2,400-seater arena (calling it a stadium was always somewhat fanciful) was the preserve of top international acts. U2 had by now released a second CBS Ireland single (the uplifting but woefully underproduced “Another Day,” featuring a rather amateurish sleeve sketch by Bono) and topped five categories of the
Hot Press
readers' poll, yet it was considered by most of their contemporaries to be the height of narcissistic folly to think that a home-grown new-wave rock band last seen playing the pubs of Dublin could fill such a large and prestigious venue.

I was on the guest list that evening. But then, so was everyone else I knew. History records that the gig was a sell-out but I am not convinced. There must have been at least 500 friends and associates and friends of friends and associates of associates with free tickets. There were perhaps 500 paying customers. But the atmosphere was all that really mattered and another 1,000 or so people would not have made the slightest bit of difference. The crowd gathered to the fore, loud and proud, roaring support for our boys. With Bono as lightning conductor, U2 electrified audiences, sweeping them away in a landslide of emotion. As far as everyone in that stadium was concerned, the night was a blinding, joyous celebration, a valediction for our local heroes—and a kind of farewell, because we all knew there would be no going back after this; U2 would be moving onward and upward, taking off from this small island to take on the world.

In the dressing room after the show, U2 were offered a deal by Nick (sometimes known as Bill) Stewart, head of A&R at Island. It was almost unheard of in those days for a British A&R man to actually make the effort to come to the rock 'n' roll backwater of Ireland, so Stewart's appearance at the show was a bit like the mountain raising itself up and shuffling over to pay tribute to Mohammed.

I saw Bono at a bus stop in town sometime afterward. There was another mental adjustment to be made. I thought that record deals were synonymous with limousines, the beginning of the easy life. “You know, you spend all this time and energy trying to get a record deal,” said Bono. “Then you get to the end of this whole struggle and find out it's only the beginning. The real work starts now.”

We sat at the back of a 31 bus, talking. He was riding out to visit Ali at her parents' house in Raheny. I was on my way home from work. Bono was in a serious mood, contemplating the future, talking in an urgent, intimate whisper. “U2 are alone out there. We don't fit in. We're not going to be able to take the usual roads to success. But I really think it's important that we get to where we're going, we get a chance to fulfill our potential. 'Cause music can be a celebration of life. It's a contemporary art form for everybody–working-class, upper-class; never before has there been an art form so versatile. And it's being abused. It's being commercialized. And it's being bent. Punk was about trying to straighten it out but it was just the same old story. Power corrupts and it bent it out worse than it was in the first place. U2 are standing against that. It's one up for the positive side of this culture—the pop culture, as you always call it. If we're on the radio, if we get to number one, we're doing all the people that make that crap factory–produced music out of a job. I think it's important.”

Oh, I was convinced! Bono can be a mesmerizing speaker. He has the poetic language and proselytizing gifts of a preacher, but rather than ranting and raving his delivery is low-key and intimate, filled with warmth, humor and surprising humility. Small talk is not really his forte. He has a tendency to go straight for the big issues. But he doesn't talk
at
you; instead he puts his listeners at the center of the conversation, making you feel as if your involvement and agreement is vital. That you are in this together. “You've got to get your band going again, Neil,” he told me, pressing the notion as if the very future of the music business depended on people like me standing up to be counted. “You've got a big talent, you've got a part to play.”

Then we were at his stop and he was off, with a last “God bless.” Why did he always have to bring God into it?

Ivan had been gigging with two friends who used to roadie for the Modulators, Ivan O'Shea (who will be henceforth referred to by his surname, to avoid confusion) and Declan Peat (who shall be known by his nickname, Deco, the basic approach to male nicknames in Dublin being to take the first syllable of the Christian name and add an
o
at the end. Thus I knew lots of people with names like Philo, Johno, Robbo, Kevo and Steve-o. But, funnily enough, only one Bono). They called themselves the Jobbys, a euphemism for noxious waste products expelled from the posterior. “We're shit and proud of it,” as my brother would say. The basic principle behind the Jobbys' unique sound was that each member was assigned to the instrument he was least competent on. Thus Ivan was drummer, O'Shea was guitarist (though he had never before touched the instrument) and Deco was bassist (ditto). Their songs involved them all changing chords at the same time but not necessarily in the same order, and they performed with buckets on their heads and their backs to the audience. This was all very amusing (to them at least) but it was essentially just a diversion, bringing Ivan and me no closer to our goal of global stardom. It did not pass unnoticed, however, that Deco was threatening the very raison d'être of the Jobbys by making swift progress on his chosen instrument. So one day we asked him to accept promotion from roadie to bassist in our new group. Given that we didn't actually have a new group, in reality this represented only a minute step upward in the band infrastructure, but Deco was so slobberingly grateful you might have thought he was joining the Rolling Stones. “I won't let you down, guys,” he declared in tones of humble conviction.