Killing Bono (22 page)

Joan was madly in love with me, I had never been in doubt about that. She was brokenhearted when I left but we kept in touch with a constant stream of letters and our romance was re-animated with each trip home to Ireland. I was happy to see her in London but a little worried about the implications. I was not ready for the commitment of cohabitation. It was agreed the flat would just be a resting point while she got herself together but somehow things became more complicated, as things are wont to do. We were lovers, our lives inexorably and increasingly inter-twined, and it was gradually accepted that we were living together until…well, until I got my record deal. And then things would have to change. Joan lived with the insecurity of threatened abandonment while I worried about being tied down. It was very brittle, fragile terrain for a relationship that veered wildly between passion and antagonism. We were constantly breaking up and making up in the cramped environment of a three-room flat.

None of this was helped by the fact that Ivan did not approve of Joan in the least. I don't know whether Ivan felt threatened by her connection to me, or whether it was just some particular incompatibility of personalities. Joan was not the easiest person to get along with, striving to hide her insecurities behind a proud exterior, but Ivan always managed to make situations worse, seeking out weakness with cruel humor.

And somehow we fell out, rather dramatically, with Jeff Banks. I was never entirely clear on the sequence of events leading up to this, though he had every right to be fed up with us. He had a televison (which we did not) and so we always trooped up to watch
Top of the Pops
. When he went away on a business trip to Japan, Jeff gave us the keys to his flat and invited us to make use of it. A bit of a party broke out there one night, as parties were liable to do at the time. Now, Jeff was a Buddhist and extolled the virtues of daily meditation, which he used to practice in front of a ceramic dish full of ashes and burning incense. During the evening's revelry someone knocked the dish over, spilling the ashes on the floor. We guiltily cleaned up the next day, restoring the flat to a state of spotless order, but the ashes provided a bit of a conundrum. Quite apart from the question of whether they might be the remains of someone dear to him (in fact, they were just the remnants of incense sticks), I had noticed that the surface of the ash seemed to be arranged in a pattern, which may have been random or may have held spiritual significance. I had no idea. If it was the former, I figured the various replacement lines and squiggles I etched might go unremarked. But if it was the latter, I imagined Jeff's next meditation session was going to be somewhat puzzling. I comforted myself with the thought that Buddhists were known to be very forgiving and put the whole matter out of my mind.

Then there was the incident with the clothes. Ivan and I returned to the flat one day to find a whole lot of suits and jackets perched on top of the dustbins. This was a gold mine for a couple of impoverished scavengers used to shopping for clothes in charity stores. We scooped them up and took them into the flat, trying them on for size. There were some pretty sharp and stylish garments in there. Some we kept, some we liberally doled out to friends who popped by.

A few days later, I ran into Jeff on the stairwell. He proceeded to tell me he had fought with his girlfriend, who had thrown out all his clothes in a rage.

“That's awful!” I said, thanking my lucky stars I wasn't wearing one of his jackets. It was too late now to even begin to try and explain. I just told Ivan that the rest of the stuff had to go to Oxfam. And we'd better make sure Jeff didn't see us dumping it there.

Joan got a job as a photographer's assistant. She often worked with model Annabel Giles, a former fiancée of Jeff's, who mysteriously warned her that our neighbor was a more volatile character than he might appear. We got a rather dramatic demonstration of that when we returned to the flat one day to find that the door had been knocked down. We rushed in, looking to see if we had been robbed, but nothing appeared to be out of place. Apart from the door, that is, which had been violently removed from its hinges. Our flatmate Ross went up to speak to Jeff, to find out if he had suffered a similar attack.

“That was me,” Jeff revealed unrepentantly. “I wanted my roasting tray back.”

Apparently he had been planning to cook a chicken but had been unable to locate his roasting tray. Convinced we must have borrowed it without asking, he had angrily knocked on our door. Finding no one in, he ran the length of the corridor and karate-kicked the door down. As you would.

The thing is, we were entirely innocent on this count. The tray he removed was ours, which we never used anyway because our cooking skills were pretty much limited to heating up tins.

Jeff moved out not long after, which was a relief given the poisonous atmosphere that had descended. Nowadays, when I see him on TV in his guise as one of Britain's best-loved fashion gurus, I wonder if his copresenters appreciate his martial-arts skills. But I wish Jeff well. He was nice to me when it really mattered. When I was just a young immigrant, adrift in London, in need of a friend.

Given the increasingly boisterous nature of the household, it was hardly surprising when Ross also moved out. After that, the flat became a staging post for an Irish invasion. Tens of thousands of young Irish people emigrated every year and, for a while at least, it seemed that most of them passed through our flat, pausing briefly on their migrant journey to stay in the smallest bedroom or, if that was occupied, to sleep in the bath. Or, if the bath was taken, to put their sleeping bag down on any bit of spare floor they could find. For a whole month my sister Stella camped in the middle of the bedroom I shared with Joan, which played havoc with our love life. One time I counted fourteen Irish people sleeping in different parts of our three-room apartment. Things started to get a little crazy. The flat became party central, aided by the arrival of two girls, Lynn and Alison, in the flat below. The neighbors sometimes complained about the noise but our landlord did not seem to care. We lived in the most run-down house on the street and as long as he got his rent on time he left us to our own devices.

One of the itinerants who wandered into my life around that time was Gerry Moore, a singer with an Irish band called Street Talk. Gerry was twenty-seven but looked ten years older, a grizzled, working-class, hard-drinking, dope-smoking Dubliner with a big hooter of a nose that looked like it might have been hit a few times and a voice, well…

It was a voice you could set up home in, a big, expansive, oak-timbred voice, with enough room to raise a family in love and laughter, with a musty cellar reeking of whiskey and cigarettes and some quiet recesses for moments of solitary contemplation. Gerry was quite a singer and a whole lot more besides. Music poured out of him. He could snatch songs out of thin air, making them up as he went along. And he was a gifted mimic, capable of impersonating vocalists as varied as Frank Sinatra and Tina Turner. But there was more. There was something truly special about him. He was an incredibly dynamic individual, observant, clever, compassionate, outrageous, sometimes a little scary (Gerry had sharp edges), but more often than not hilariously funny.

When he paid a visit, guitars would come out and the cheap wine and the cider and the beer and the vodka and the spliff and we'd be singing and laughing all night. Gerry's philosophy for life was simple: “Legalize hashish, listen to Nat King Cole and make music!” I remember Ivan strumming away one night while Gerry improvised a melodramatic country-and-western song about star-crossed love and unwanted pregnancy, entitled (for reasons I was not entirely clear about) “The Big O.” He ended with a perfectly pitched radio-style voice-over for an abortion clinic. “At thirty quid a shot, just remember: when in doubt, have it out!” “Jaysus, if me mother heard that she'd kill me,” he giggled as the song came to its natural conclusion.

“I think you've got a hit there, Gerry,” I said. “But where on earth does the expression the ‘Big O' come from?”

He looked amazed at my stupidity. “Obortion!” he exclaimed.

Gerry couldn't spell too well but he was the most talented man I'd ever met who wasn't a household name. And that was the thing that really fascinated me about him. He was a born star who wasn't famous.

“What's ‘making it'?” Gerry said to me one time, when we were discussing our elusive dreams. “Making lots of money? Having musical fulfillment? Having a wife and kids? There was a girl called Rosie used to go to Sloopy's Nite Club and I had a mate and his idea of makin' it was gettin' Rosie. Straight up. That's all he wanted. And he worked really hard on it! I mean, when I was a kid, makin' it was gettin' a chance to sing. I've made it, man!”

But I don't think he really believed that. There was more than a touch of desperation creeping in by the time we met. Street Talk were a funky, gritty rock band who had been working the Irish circuit for a few years. They released a couple of singles but didn't seem to be able to make the next step up. I was persuaded to accompany them on an overnight trip to play a gig in Rotterdam and got a glimpse of life on the bottom rung. We traveled by train and boat to a dirty venue for a fee that barely covered the drinks bill (mind you, there was a lot of drinking going on). There was no accommodation arranged so after the show (a blast of a gig, a rock 'n' roll stonker) the band just opted to stay up all night with the aid of cocaine pilfered from the briefcase of a promoter known as Dik Heavy. The party was wild but it eventually reached the point of collapse, with musicians and a few hardcore fans crashing out in various corners of the venue. Gerry, almost the last to give up the ghost, passed out in mid-conversation, falling unconscious on the floor of a toilet. He started to vomit in his sleep. When his manager, Al Richardson, failed to wake him we turned him on his side so that he wouldn't choke. “A rock 'n' roll death. That'd be a fine thing,” said Al, wearily.

Nobody could wake Gerry the next day. We shouted at him. Slapped him. Kicked him. Nothing. We were just starting to talk about calling an ambulance when his bloodshot eyes popped open. He sniffed the air and looked down at his yellow-stained clothes. “Who puked all over me shirt?” he yelled.

I got to see the other side of the rock 'n' roll coin the next time U2 came to town, to play two sold-out nights at Wembley Arena in November 1984.
War
had established U2 as a major attraction, with relentless touring and a mini live album (
Under a Blood Red Sky
) swelling their fan base, and they reaped the benefits when
The Unforgettable Fire
, in many ways their strangest, most free-flowing and impressionistic recording, swiftly gave them their first million-seller. A million! It was the magic number, six zeros representing global awareness. Could all those people around the planet really know and care about the band from Mount Temple school? Yet, on this night, the transition from gymnasium to arena seemed seamless. Bono was the same dynamo, stalking the stage, relentless in his need to reach out and embrace the audience, not 100 screeching schoolkids now but 12,000 baying, singing, arm-waving fans. And the music, well, it was bigger now, of course—wilder, more emotional, more daring—but its core was the same: thunderous, electric three-piece rock that hauled you to your feet and dared you not to be involved. During a tumultous, epic version of “Bad,” Bono wrapped himself up in the song, encircled by Edge's shimmering spectrum of guitar sounds, then kicked and scratched and punched his way back out, roaring his defiance. It was an astonishing performance in which one man's spirit seemed more than the match for the thousands in front of him. The essence of this gig was everything I remembered and everything I had ever loved about U2; it just seemed the group had expanded somehow, swelling up to fill the available space.

Oh, and, just to confirm that some things would never change, Adam made a couple of clunking mistakes.

Afterward, Ivan and I made our way backstage. There were guest lists to be negotiated and colored VIP stickers to be collected. In keeping with the band's rise up the ladder of success, access was starting to be restricted, yet we were ushered into a hospitality area where the band were greeting friends and admirers.

“How's the music?” asked Bono, after we had offered our congratulations on his performance.

“I don't know,” I admitted. “It's a bit frustrating at the moment and we can't seem to get hold of Ossie…”

“Well, your prayers have been answered,” said Bono. “He's here.”

And indeed he was. U2's gregarious accountant was in one corner of the room, beer in one hand and triangular sandwich in the other, engaged in animated conversation with Paul McGuinness. Ivan and I made a beeline for him, ready to give him a piece of our minds. He must have seen us coming out of the corner of his eye because he turned toward us, opening his arms in greeting as if we were the very people he had been waiting for all evening.

“Lads, lads,” grinned Ossie. “I was just talking to Paul about you. Two of the finest songwriters to have come out of our little island. We've just got to find a way to persuade the music industry to share our opinion of your talents.”

Oh, the devious shit. He could always outmaneuver us with his wily charm. Ossie assured us our career was uppermost on his mind and told us to give him a call in a couple of days, when he was back in Dublin.