Killing Bono (25 page)

It's all to easy to see what category of forty-something rocker Bill would put me into.

So there we were, bereft, abandoned, well and truly fucked. And then an extraordinary thing happened. The new issue of
Record Mirror
hit the stands. It was the poor relation of the music weeklies (
NME, Sounds
and
Melody Maker
) and had recently become a glossy A4 mag to try to survive. But, while the bigger papers had ignored our show,
Record Mirror
attended and were clearly impressed with what they saw. They featured a huge photo on page two of the next issue, over a declamatory piece heralding us as the future of pop:

Record companies started to call us. All the A&R men who had failed to turn up to our showcase wanted to know where they could see us play. And who were we talking to? Word of the WEA debacle was getting around, which was a bit of a double-edged sword. Other companies were interested to find out what got WEA worked up but were also seeking out the flaws that had made them dump us so quickly. But at least A&R departments were talking to us now. Of course, “talking” in A&R terms is a euphemism for extended bouts of procrastination. When a record company wants you, they act. When they're not sure if they want you but they're afraid somebody else might, they talk.

We had to get another gig together. The problem being that we were broke. Shattered. Beyond penniless. In debt. Heading for bankruptcy. Living off our girlfriends and far too embarrassed to ask our dad to bail us out again. We explained this situation (well, perhaps not in detail) to an A&R man at London Records who was especially eager to see us perform.

“They don't hand out grants for showcases at the Unemployment Office,” I pointed out.

“I thought you worked as chefs,” said the A&R man.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“Well, what's with the outfits, then?” he asked.

It dawned on me that he was referring to a pair of matching, white, side-button shirts that Ivan and I had blown our dole money on. “This is high fashion, I'll have you know!” I protested.

“I didn't mean any offense,” he apologized. “Some chefs look very cool.”

Anyway, he agreed to contribute £100 and we managed to scrape together enough money to put on a gig in an out-of-the-way pub venue, the Half Moon in Putney. This time the music business came out to see us, a row of watchful men conspicuously lining up along the bar at the back of the room. The place was rammed, with most of the audience returning from our first show. The atmosphere was charged with excitement. I went to the toilet before we were due on stage and an extremely pretty girl followed me in. “I want to suck your cock,” she announced.

This is not the kind of thing that usually happened to me. My would-be groupie's timing was terrible, however. “I've got to get on stage,” I apologized.

“After the show,” she said, invitingly.

I could tell you we were great that night. But I don't want to keep blowing my own trumpet so maybe I should let someone else blow it for me (and I'm not referring to my new female admirer, who, as far as I know, wound up blowing our drummer's trumpet, having succumbed during the show to his peculiar pheromonal charm). Damien Corless from
Hot Press
was in London on an interview assignment and came along to review the gig. Damien was part of a new generation at
Hot Press
, a writer I did not know and who owed me neither friendship nor favor, but he subsequently became a big champion of the band.

I couldn't have put it better myself.

After two encores, we descended into the crowd like a conquering army. Some of the A&R people had even hung around and they were full of praise, offering such over-the-top flattery that I felt it had to climax with the declaration “We want to sign you.” But the magic words never came.

We went to see the man from London Records, who was umming and awwing, apparently having come down with a terminal case of vacillation. “Very entertaining, very good songs, great presentation,” he said, as if to himself.

After a long silence, Ivan exploded. “What else do you want?!” he demanded.

I don't think he really knew what else he wanted. “There's no doubt that it would sell,” he said after some thought. “But I'm interested in something with a little more substance as well.”

He was sitting in front of a poster of Bananarama, London Records' biggest act.

But still, he didn't say no. He did not throw us out and tell us never to darken his doorway again. He just asked to be kept informed of developments. This was one of the phrases we were beginning to hear with depressing regularity.

“Don't sign anything without talking to us first” was another.

“Has anyone actually made you an offer?” That's a good one.

As we settled into a gigging routine, our shows became regular meeting places for London's A&R community. Even journalists noticed. “Their opening gambit's a good one, a commercial
tour de force
which grabs the attention before the watching A&R men can even think of turning down their deaf aids,” reported a
Melody Maker
review of a Shook Up! gig at the Embassy Rooms. ‘Love Is Stranger than Fiction' states the band's case to perfection, building from a solid bassline purpose-built for the 12-inch remix and erupting into a beautifully crafted melody.” The reviewer went on to say, “Forty minutes with Shook Up! is like listening to an embryonic
Greatest Hits
album.” For some reason, this did not seem to be enough to impress the watchful A&R community, although others benefited from their attendance. We were supported at that show by a band from Liverpool called Black, who played dirgey post-Bunnymen rock and trashed the dressing room while we were on stage, defacing our posters with witty slogans like “London wankers” and nicking anything that wasn't pinned down. They were offered a deal by one of the A&R men who had come to see us, although I am happy to report that lead singer Colin Vearncombe immediately split from his backing band of thieving bastards and essentially went solo. I spoke to the A&R man in question afterward and he proudly told me that among the blizzard of noise he had spotted “an enormous hit.” And he was right. Ish. Black reached number nine with a song called “Wonderful Life” which had been transformed from its rocky origins into a kind of mournful, easy-listening ballad. Mind you, that was pretty much the last anybody ever heard of Colin, so there would be no
Greatest Hits
album for Black. But sucking on sour grapes never made anyone feel any better about their own misfortunes. Colin had his hit and, in the immortal words of Loudon Wainright III, it is “better to have been a has-been than a never was.”

We dispensed with the services of our mercenary and expensive keyboard player and recruited a young maestro called Damien Le Gassic, who acted as if he might have been prepared to pay us to be in our wonderful group. Damien was a skinny, pale, wide-eyed whiz kid fresh from music college whose naïve enthusiasm made us feel like grizzled veterans but whose musical skills put us all to shame. We had to keep an eye on Damien, however. He was so small and frail, he once passed out while loading his equipment into a hired van on a freezing-cold morning and developed frostbite lying unconscious in the snow. He proved immensely popular with a particular section of our growing army of fans. Every gig, we noticed increasing numbers of Oriental girls in attendance. They turned out to be foreign students of English and they loved Shook Up!—though presumably, given their still rather basic grasp of the language, it was not my lyrics that got them going. One of the girls, a very cute, teenage, self-proclaimed virgin, offered herself to Steve for deflowerment. It was an experience which he later described as so stressful he was unable to perform—until he convinced her it would be better if her concerned friends waited outside the room, rather than sitting in attendance offering helpful tips. A couple of the girls succumbed to the charms of Ivan, who did not set much store by the concept of loyalty to his long-suffering girlfriend, Cassandra. But the Oriental favorite, by some distance, was shy Damien. In an apartment shared by several of the girls I saw a shrine to Damien, with flowers and memorabilia arranged around an artfully assembled montage of photographs, with candles and incense burning beneath. It was explained to me that in the East pale skin was considered very attractive; Damien was the palest white boy they had ever seen.

By now I had entered into what was simultaneously the most rewarding and most frustrating phase of my twisted relationship with the music business. This was the best band lineup I had ever played in. Superb musicians, intelligent people, all getting off on the music and fired by a common cause. Even rehearsals were thrilling as we assembled intricate arrangements of new songs. And as for playing live, well, it was positively euphoric. There were moments when every element of the musical puzzle would fall perfectly into place. It was like an alignment of the planets. We would achieve lift-off, rocketing into space on a groove, the aftershock sending a musical vibration through the room that would drag the whole crowd into orbit in our wake, everybody communicating on the same wavelength, floating in zero musical gravity. This band was everything a musician could dream about. It was, surely, undeniable. Why, then, did the music business continue to deny us?

Reviews were glowing and audiences growing. Every performance ended in multiple encores. We stole the thunder of any act we supported and got invited back to every venue we appeared at. Soon we were regularly filling London nightspots like the Rock Garden, the Embassy Rooms and Fulham Greyhound in our own right. U2 played Live Aid at Wembley Stadium and, for once, I paid for my ticket and went to see them. I was moved and impressed by Bob Geldof's extravaganza; it seemed incredible that an Irishman could bring the world together like this. And I was enthralled by U2's part in it, a strangely manic performance in which Bono, desperate as ever to make a connection, disappeared for huge periods of time into the flag-waving crowd while the band, shorn of their lead singer, improvised sections of “Ruby Tuesday,” “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Walk on the Wild Side.” But I did not feel in any way belittled to see my old friends on such a stage, for Shook Up! contributed in their own small way to Live Aid, headlining a bill of fifteen up-and-coming bands at a charity event hosted by Radio One DJ Bruno Brookes at Le Beat Route, raising a few hundred pounds for our efforts. The music industry might not be impressed but fuck them, we were creating our own momentum.

We did not have to pay for demos anymore, as studios started to invite us to work with them. We recorded a live favorite, “Stop the World,” with talented producer Terry Thomas, who went on to work with Bad Company, Foreigner, Richard Marx and Three Colors Red. It was a punchy little Motown-influenced rock song about global anxiety, a typical Shook Up! subject.

We got ourselves an agent, a dour Northern Irishman called Barry Campbell who specialized in reggae and indie rock, a roster from which we protruded like the proverbial sore thumb. But he could get us into colleges, where you could actually make some money. We toured Ireland twice, with the help of In Tua Nua's manager, Mark Clinton, where we were greeted like returning heroes. We appeared on a prime-time RTE TV show performing “Stop the World.” We were written up in every newspaper in the country. “Shaking Their Way to Fame and Fortune” trumpeted the
Sunday Press
, who quaintly noted that “Shook Up! received tumultuous applause from raving teenagers and well-known stars such as Bono.”

Bono and Ali had joined an appreciative audience at Trinity College. Bono declared himself suitably impressed. “I don't know much about pop,” he joked, “but I know what I like!” He told us that what we were doing reminded him of Queen, which we took as a compliment, even though they were probably one of the least hip bands in the universe. “The showmanship is great, the songs are classic. I don't see how record companies can fail to go for it.”

Oh, but they could. Our reviews were astonishing. I am convinced that we had more enthusiastic reviews than any other unsigned band in history. I put together a ten-page booklet featuring the best of them and circulated it among record companies. The front page of the booklet read: