Authors: Neil McCormick
⦠or is it?
Post script to second edition, 2011
As I may have already pointed out, life goes on. And on.
And so it was that, in February 2010, I found myself sitting in a ramshackle social club somewhere in the hills outside Belfast with my brother, Ivan, brooding over a black, black pint of Guinness, while a primped-up band pranced about on a dingy stage beneath cheap red-and-blue spotlights. Cigarette smoke hung in the air, a naked girl was shaking her tassled tits in my face, and I was battling an almost vertiginous sense of unreality, a whirling vortex of conflicting emotions, breathless nostalgia, stabbing shame, overwhelming pity, empathy, pride, anger, and embarrassment.
Onstage, a handsome singer in a red shirt and black tie postured and hiccupped, his every move and vocal inflection reeking of youthful ego, ambition and pretension, while his deluded band murdered a half-decent song.
My song.
Which he had every right to trash within an inch of its life, because the naïve, precocious, prancing idiot onstage was me, thirty years younger.
So what did that make the gray haired cynic twitching nervously in the shadows?
A different me, with decades of lines and weight and experience weighing him down. I felt like a chasm in the space/time continuum had ripped opened and was about to swallow me up when, mercifully, a voice called out “cut,” the music suddenly stopped, the band froze, and a different thrum of chatter and activity filled the room, as if everyone present had been mysteriously released from a spell. As my narrow point of focus pulled back to once again take in the cameras, lights, clipboards, microphones, and cables of the film set, a creamy English voice broke through the shadowy buzz of action, bringing me back to Earth with a bump.
“So what did you think of that, darling?” enquired Nick Hamm, the director. “You look like you've seen a ghost!”
“That was great!” announced my brother, who has never really suffered from the curse of self-consciousness.
I could still feel my younger self's eyes on me. The actor, Ben Barnes, was probably only looking for some approbation from the character he was playing, but to me it felt like so much more. I wanted to go up to myself, shake me by the shoulders, and say, “What the fuck do you think you're doing?”
Imagine that. Imagine having the opportunity to address your younger self, explain some of the facts of life, avert mistakes that haven't yet been made, put yourself on the right track. Who hasn't had the thought, “if only I knew then what I know now”? I could spell out some home truths and maybe spare myself a world of pain to come. I might even have been able to ease my younger mind, persuade myself not to treat everything as a matter of life and death, enjoy the moment and the music and the people, and accept wherever it was taking me, and maybe get through that thick skull that success and failure are not diametric opposites but merely illusory staging posts on a much bigger journey.
Fat chance, of course. I know how my twenty-year-old self would have reacted to some middle aged music critic quoting Kipling's advice to “meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.” I'd have thought, “out of the way you balding, bitter old Buddha. Can't you see I'm going to be a star?” And then maybe tried to cadge a drink and explain my latest theories about the future of pop. But if none of my older self's words of philosophical wisdom were getting through, I could have at least passed on some practical tips and helpful phone numbers. That's something I know my younger self would have appreciated.
Of course, I didn't say any of that. It was just a film, after all. And just an actor. “Ben,” I said, “It's uncanny. Watching you is just like looking in a mirror.” Well, maybe one of those mirrors they have in designer-clothing-shop dressing rooms, with very flattering lighting and subtly curved to make you look thinner.
Most people who have films made about them have done something worthwhile, or at least of historical significance. There are warriors and world leaders (from Alexander the Great to Joan of Arc, Ghandi to Che Guevara), sportsmen and rock stars (Ali, Babe Ruth, Elvis, Buddy Holly), movie icons and artists (Chaplin, Van Gogh, Picasso), and sometimes notorious outlaws (Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger). Not me, though. All I did was fail, repeatedly, abjectly and quite unheroically. Then they made a film about it. I have been immortalized in celluloid as a total loser.
Nick Hamm contacted me quite soon after my book was first published in 2003 to say that he wanted to option the film rights. Now that was a call I had been secretly waiting for my whole life. Still, I thought he was mad. It's such a sprawling, anecdotal story, spread over a lifetime, in which redemptionâif it occursâis almost all internal, a slow, psychological and philosophical acceptance of fate. Nick saw it as an everyman story, because most people have much more experience of failure than success. The world may have become obsessed with fame and fortune but the pyramid geometry of show business requires far more of us to be propping up the bottom than standing in glory at the peak. Nick had made a few films in his time, with varying degrees of success and, perhaps more importantly, failure. Something about my story spoke to him, and he impressed on me how determined he was to get it made.
It took six years from that first meeting to the cameras rolling in Belfast. The movie business is a bastard. I may have had a horrible time trying to make it as a rock star but I still count myself lucky I didn't pursue my earlier ambition to become an actor.
You need so much money to make a film, and so many people are involved, and so many things can go wrong, that, watching from the sidelines as the production rose and fell, scripts were written and revised, money was offered and retracted, shooting dates came and went, I began to think it is a miracle
any
film ever gets made at all. After a while, my initially rather delightful interactions with Nick became limited to annual phone calls to renew the rights, in which he tried to negotiate me down with pleas of impending poverty and nervous exhaustion. “You have ruined my life, darling,” he told me during one late night phone call. “You have ruined my life.”
At least, in best theatrical tradition, he was still calling me “darling.”
Things began to heat up in 2009, with a new producer, Ian Flooks, onboard, who used to be U2's booking agent. But as the production started to come together, and the script went through its fourteenth revision, new issues emerged. “The problem with your life, darling,” Nick told me, “is that there's no third act.”
“That is because it's a life, Nick,” I pointed out.
“Don't worry though,” he smirked. “We're going to give you one.”
I wasn't sure I liked the sound of that.
Meanwhile, my real life had got even more entwined with U2's. Bono liked my book so much, he asked me to write his. And so I became U2's ghostwriter on their autobiography
U2 by U2
. It was the best-selling music book in the world in 2006, although I'm not kidding myself it was because I had my name attached.
It was an interesting journey. I got to see how U2 operate from the inside and saw for myself how they earn their luck with talent, honor, commitment and sheer bloody mindedness. We wrote that book, took it apart, and put it back together. It was supposed to take a year but it took two, sucking up my life in pursuit of something idealized and intangible, because U2 didn't just want a hagiography to take up space on the shelves, they wanted a book that got to the very heart of what it meant to be in this band. We took it right to the wire, making last-minute adjustments even as the printing presses ran. And, at the end, after all the work I had done, the hundreds of hours of interviews, the painstaking weaving of a poetic narrative from so many different voices, the endless discussions and debates with designers and publishers, the band went off to take all the plaudits. I didn't even bother going to the book launch. Who wants to speak to a ghost? As Bono said, toasting me at an after-hours bar, “You have joined a very exclusive club of people this band has driven mad. Now you know how U2's producers feel.”
Oh but we had some more adventures. I was around for the final recording sessions of
How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
. I walked into the studio during a take of “Vertigo,” and as Bono sang “Your love is teaching me how to kneel,” he dropped to his knees and said, “Hey, Neil!” I hung out on Vertigo tour dates, spent a week on the road in America, and I was in on the start of Live8, as Bono's and Geldof's expanding campaign to persuade rich nations to drop African debt came to a head with a massive concert in London, and a lobbying campaign at the G8 summit of world leaders at Gleneagles, in Edinburgh. I took my little boy on his first protest march. Well, I marched. He rolled along in his buggy.
And I was there for the opening night of the 360 tour in Barcelona, when their space-age adventure with a circular stage beneath a giant alien claw almost never got off the launch pad. At the end of a remarkable show filled with technical breakdowns, the controls of Bono's LED suit had somehow fused with the sweat and heat of his body so that he couldn't turn off his laser-firing jacket. I watched him being bundled into a people carrier for a quick exit, disappearing down a Spanish highway, firing random red lasers through tinted windows into the dark sky. I imagined ground control trying to bring him back to earth: “Hewson, we have a problem.” It seemed a curiously fitting exit, as the hi-tech and the human fused in unpredictable fashion. The future never quite works the way you want it.
But I caught up with the traveling sci-fi circus in the U.K. and U.S. as it evolved and mutated into the greatest show on earth. Well, the latest model anyway. There was a particularly extraordinary night in the Stadio Olimpico in Rome, where I was standing on the base of the claw, at the foot of the stage, so close to the band we could have all been back in McGonagles in Dublin. But their eyes were focussed on another space altogether, over my head. So I turned to see what they see, and watched the mass of people, 89,000 Italian U2 fans spreading out across the stadium floor and rising vertiginously up the sides, just a dense, pulsating throb of humanity, absorbing all that music and emotion and powering it back at the band, hands aloft, mouths open in song. There was a mad energy to the moment, an intense feedback of feeling, looping and crackling between rock band and rock fans, with Bono as the lightning rod. And I was struck again by the sheer improbability of all this, that my schoolmate from Dublin had become this fantastic, iconic, ridiculous and amazing twenty-first-century superstar.
Later, we had a high-speed police escort out of the stadium. “Do you ever wonder how this happened?” I asked him. By phone. Because he was in one car, and I was in another.
“All the time,” he laughed.
Life is strange ⦠and getting stranger every day. At a gig in my local bar, I met a Northern Irish musician named Joe Echo. When I introduced myself, he said “You're Neil McCormick? I'm writing the songs for your film!”
Which is how I found out the producers were not going to be using our original music. I was gobsmacked, even though Ian Flooks patiently explained he wanted a sound track with a rockier, contemporary edge. After some debate, they agreed to use two of our original songs, “Sleepwalking” and “Some Kind of Loving,” in radically rewritten forms. Nick Hamm, for his part, said he just wanted music that worked with each scene, which meant being able to ask his composer for a bad punk song, or telling him to rewrite “Sleepwalking” as an embarrassing example of jerky Eighties' synth pop. For some reason, he thought I might prove resistant to such demands.
“But âSleepwalking' is a beautiful song, why would you want to ruin it?” I protested.
“Exactly!” he said.
I sort of got the point. It still felt like the ultimate insult. They make a film about your life as a failed musician and decide your own music isn't good enough.
I was consulted on casting. The first time I saw a screen test of an actor playing me, I wanted to crawl out of the room with embarrassment. The great Scottish poet Rabbie Burns has a famous couplet: “O would some power the giftie gie us/to see ourselves as others see us.” But I am not convinced this is a gift at all. Writing my story, I have had a chance to acknowledge my worst characteristics with the ironic awareness of an older and wiser self. Maybe I was the butt of the joke, but at least my narration allows me the grace of acknowledging that I am in on the joke. But confronted with this unmediated vision of my youthful gaucheness, my pretentiousness, my tendency to overexcitement and propensity for motor-mouthed bullshit, I wondered how I had ever once convinced myself (let alone anyone around me) that I was destined for great things.
At least the actor eventually cast as me was extremely good-looking. Maybe even too good-looking, if there is such a thing. Ben Barnes is among the most handsome, charismatic young leading men in Britain. He played Prince Caspian in
The Chronicles of Narnia
, for goodness' sake. This may have been pretty much how I always saw myself, but I am not sure everyone agreed with this assessment. I said to Nick, “With his looks and my talent we could have gone far.”
Nick said, “It's okay, he's playing you as a kind of supergeek. That should be enough to put people off.”
On the set, to distinguish between us, the crew started calling me Real Neil. I wondered how long
that
last? I fear I am in the process of becoming my own doppelganger. I am waiting for the day when I introduce myself as Neil McCormick, and the response is “Rubbish. You look nothing like him.”
Or maybe just a disappointed “You were much better looking in the film.”
I suggested we get Brendan Gleeson or Colm Meany to play Bono. You know, a good Irish character actor, preferably old, overweight, and balding. That would have been the ultimate revenge.