Killing Bono (9 page)

Walking home along the Howth seafront at night, Ronan and I debated what we had seen. U2, we concluded, really were something special. But as for the Virgin Prunes…

“Are those two fellas into each other, you know what I mean?” Ronan wondered.

I knew what he meant. Officially there was no homosexuality in Ireland. Along with no contraception, no divorce, no abortion and (if the Catholic church had its way) no sex for any unmarried person not engaged in the procreation of good Catholic babies. “I don't think so,” I ventured. “They just like to wind people up.”

“Why?” asked Ronan. Which seemed fair enough.

“To get a reaction.”

“Well, they got a reaction tonight,” laughed Ronan. “Half the audience fucked off and the other half tried to kick the shit out of them. They were crap.”

He had a point. Over time, the Virgin Prunes would, perversely, become the focus of the local rock scene's resentment toward U2, attracting the kind of elitist audience who sneered at U2's populism. Yet at that gig in Howth, I saw the Prunes emerge from the womb of U2, the bastard offspring proclaiming autonomy and scampering away into the night. The connection between these two camps always baffled the uninitiated. They were like yin and yang, opposite sides of the rock 'n' roll coin. On one side you had a primal, four-piece guitar band reaching for the sky and trying to carry their audience with them and on the other were a gang of performance-art provocateurs, breathing fire and brimstone in an effort to shock audiences into reacting—positively or negatively; the Prunes didn't seem to care which. Bono would joke that it was like having God and the Devil on the same bill, but it did not always serve U2 well, since they often had to play to a crowd who had been completely alienated by Gavin and Guggi's antics. But for Bono it was about embracing extremes: the Prunes ventured into places U2 couldn't or wouldn't. Not for another decade anyway.

That gig gave me food for thought. Rock music was entering a period of flux, there was room for sonic experimentation and artistic exploration but, despite my allegiance to the supposedly revolutionary aesthetic of punk, I began to realize that it was really the traditional musical virtues to which I adhered. I liked melody and lyrics, not noise and rhetoric. I wanted soul and substance, not pretension and provocation.

U2's growing creativity was rewarded with the first signs of local recognition. I was strolling down Nassau Street (home to Advance Records) one Saturday when I was hailed by Bono, who had in his hands the latest issue of the
Hot Press
, a fortnightly broadsheet magazine covering the burgeoning home-grown music scene under the banner: “Keeping Ireland Safe for Rock 'n' Roll.” “Have you seen this?” asked Bono. In the corner of one page were four tiny, artily black-and-white head shots of my schoolfriends, over the comically banal headline “
YEP
!
IT'SU
2.” A few short paragraphs by Bill Graham, the magazine's leading critic, suggested that U2 might be “a band for the future,” although, quaintly, he revealed that they would not be around for inspection for a while as they were “currently studying for their Leaving Certs.” Bono was proudly showing it to everyone he knew.

The appearance of U2 in print seemed revelatory to us at the time.
Hot Press
had been running for about a year. It may have been amateurishly laid out, badly printed and full of typographical errors, but, by celebrating the achievements of a handful of Irish rock icons (Van Morrison, Thin Lizzy, Rory Gallagher, Horslips and, latterly, the Boomtown Rats) alongside reviews of local concerts, it legitimized the native music scene, helping to shrug off the sense of inadequacy that pervaded Irish pop culture. To be written about in
Hot Press
was proof that your band existed in the wider world, not just in an imaginary scene consisting of friends.

As the school year drew to a close, U2 were invited to perform an outdoor concert during a Mount Temple open day, and once again invited us to support. A problem soon developed, however, when Frank demanded to play the four-note guitar riff kicking off the Sex Pistols' “Pretty Vacant,” which we had just learned.

“No way!” insisted Ivan, asserting his right as lead guitarist to play the lead guitar parts.

“Maybe you could both play it,” I suggested.

“No way!” Frank and Ivan chorused.

This went on for days. Larry was called in to try to break the deadlock. “Lads, lads,” said Larry, reasonably, “it's just a riff.”

“But it's my riff,” said Ivan, stubbornly.

Frank declared that if we didn't let him play the intro he wasn't going to play anything at all. “I'll just have to leave the band.”

I realize that this might not seem a particularly significant incident in the annals of rock history but to me it felt as cataclysmic as the breakup of the Beatles. I had pinned a lot of hope on our little band of brothers, constructing elaborate hypotheses of our imaginary futures. Would it really all be over before it even began? In an instant, I could see how naïve my whole conceit about this group had been.

Ivan grumpily caved in. Frank could play the intro, then, if it really mattered so much to him. Frank cheered up immediately. We were all friends again, as if nothing had ever happened.

But something had. At seventeen, there are moments when you really feel like you are accelerating toward adulthood. Tiny revelations flare like fireworks, leaving their afterimage burning in your mind. With a blush of something approaching shame, you sense the innocent illusions you have maintained throughout childhood being suddenly stripped away. I knew then that we were just rank amateurs, schoolkids playing at being a band, and that if we were ever going to achieve anything we would have to raise our game.

There was a meeting in the changing rooms of the school gymnasium before the show. A stocky, watchful man in his late twenties was quietly seated in a corner as U2 and the Undertakers discussed running times and set lists. I assumed the interloper must be an elder sibling of one of the band. Bono was doing all the talking, which was not unusual, until the conversation turned to the schedule for our half-hour set.

“Half an hour is out of the question,” the interloper quietly but firmly interjected.

“What?” I spluttered, struggling to understand what one of U2's relatives could possibly have against us.

“Guys, this is Paul McGuinness,” said Bono. “He's our manager.”

With a friendly smile that belied his firm, no-nonsense tone, McGuinness ran through the afternoon's schedule, explaining that (due to time pressures) we had to be on stage by three o'clock and off by three fifteen. “We've been practicing a half-hour set,” I muttered sullenly.

“Sorry, fellas,” said McGuinness, not looking sorry at all. “You're here because you're friends of the band. It's U2's show, U2's equipment. There has to be a little give and take.”

So that's how it was going to be, then. “We'll just have to play faster,” said Frank.

At the appointed hour we took our positions on a makeshift stage on the low, flat concrete roof of the boiler room, overlooking the school car park. Frank started picking out the opening riff to “Pretty Vacant.”

For us, this was an apocalyptic anthem of sneering teenage-outsider attitude but (despite the enthusiastic pogoing of three of our punk allies) the smattering of parents spread about the car park seemed largely unimpressed. There is something very dispiriting about yelling your heart out into a microphone to be confronted by the sight of onlookers chattering among themselves, sticking their fingers in their ears with pained expressions on their faces or, worst of all, drifting off to see if there is something more interesting going on elsewhere. When we finished—with a snarled “And we don't care!”—our efforts were mortifyingly greeted with polite applause.

As we kicked into “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker,” I was fighting a losing battle with my bass guitar, struggling to stay in time with drumbeats enveloped in multiple echoes off the back wall of the school building. I stared at my fingers with horror. I could count the beats in my head but somehow I could not communicate the information to these rebellious digits at the end of my own hands. Even our loyal fellow punks were looking confused and had halted their desultory attempts to jump up and down in time. When it came to performing the Buzzcocks' “Fiction Romance,” I did something that had been at the back of my mind for some time. “What are you doing?” hissed Ivan as I put down my instrument. “Just start the song,” I insisted. It was a complicated bass part which I had never really mastered and, in front of all these critical gazes, it finally dawned on me that I was never going to. Indeed, that I did not even want to. I did not belong in the fraternity of bass guitarists, the backroom boys of the band! I was here for one thing only. Lights! Music! Action! It was rock stardom or nothing! So, while Frank and Ivan concentrated on the interaction of their jagged guitar parts, I grabbed the microphone and started singing.

Now this was more like it!

“Fiction romance! Fiction romance!” I yelped. I bent the microphone stand and leaned out to the audience, snarling and whining and roaring the lyrics of the song. I waved my fist at the disinterested faces. I grabbed the mic and prowled the stage. I held my arms aloft. I demanded attention!

As the song came to a tinny, bassless conclusion, Paul McGuinness appeared in the corner of my vision, making a vigorous chopping motion with his hands. It quickly dawned on me that this was not applause. “That's it, lads,” he mouthed, imperiously waving us off.

“We've only played three songs!” I protested. But Adam was already unplugging our leads while Edge was plugging in his effects units. The urgency of their actions suggested they were afraid that if we played any longer the car park would be completely empty by the time U2 went on.

“Well done,” said Bono, kindly, as we trooped off.

There was a smattering of applause from the corner of the car park where our families were gathered.

As U2 launched into a smart, professional set, Ivan and I exchanged a look that communicated more than words ever could. Edge's guitar chimes floated over our heads. How come we hadn't been able to make a noise like that? Bono was putting on the moves, Larry was pounding out the backbeat, even Adam was swinging his bass around like he was playing Shea Stadium, not a half-empty school car park. There was a chasm between us and them…And they weren't anywhere. So where the hell did that leave us? We actually started to laugh as our parents approached.

“That was lovely!” announced Mum with all the cheerful goodwill she could muster.

Ivan and I guffawed helplessly.

“What's so funny?” Dad wanted to know.

“Nothing,” I said, giggling with the insane relief of a disaster survivor, standing among the wreckage of shattered illusions.

S
chool was over. Summer and adulthood stretched ahead. What a strange few months: a little interlude between distinct phases of existence, the calm before the storm of life.

I was having a fantastic time. I may have given you the impression that music was all I cared about but, of course, that is not strictly true. There were girls, for a start, but (oh, my aching heart) let's leave them out of it for the moment; they were the one thing that could have spoiled my whole summer, all that raging desire locked behind a barrier of self-consciousness. But my teenage psyche was so pliable and amorphous that it could be entirely consumed in the fabric of the moment, reshaped on a whim. I could thrash around my bedroom dreaming of being the first rock star to play a gig on the moon and conducting imaginary interviews with journalists at ground control while floating in zero gravity (“As David Bowie pointed out so eloquently, fellas, planet earth is blue. Unlike Major Tom, however, I do know what to do!”), then sit down with my sketchpad and decide that actually I was born to be an artist. This was not your staple van Gogh or Picasso fantasy of misunderstood, revolutionary genius, however (although I was attracted to the idea of living in a garret full of naked life models). I wanted to be a comic-strip artist. I spent huge swathes of time drawing detailed pen-and-ink studies of square-jawed spacemen grasping phallic sci-fi weaponry surrounded by scantily clad female aliens and erotic robots with armor-piercing nipples, pouring all my sexual frustration on to the page. I actually sold a couple of cartoons to
In Dublin
, a listings magazine, including a pen-and-ink caricature of Elvis Costello, who was my new musical hero, principally on account of all those twisted couplets detailing his miserable romantic life. But don't get me started on romance, for pity's sake.

I got a job running Howth's municipal tennis courts (which essentially entailed putting the nets up in the morning and taking them down again at night) and harbored brief fantasies of representing Ireland at Wimbledon, practicing my lethal backhand against any poor sucker who turned up without a partner until two schoolgirls punctured my illusions by whupping me and my friend David Hughes in straight sets. But never mind those floozies. I went sailing, crewing with various friends who raced two-man dinghies in front of Howth harbor. I never dreamed of being a famous yachtsman, however. The sea was too cold and wet for my tastes. The only thing I liked about sailing was the postrace dances held at the Yacht Club, where I could cast longing looks at the pretty, posh girls who would hardly deign to talk to me because I didn't even own my own boat. Ah, but let's not get into that! Rather, let me recall my great triumph at the Malahide races, crewing for a fellow Mount Temple rebel, Gordon Maguire. We won every race in our category, despite raising the judges' hackles by insisting on playing Sex Pistols songs on a ghetto blaster as we crossed the finish line, the sound of Johnny Rotten's howls floating surreally across the bay, rising above the flapping sails and colorful pennants until his keening voice became lost among the hungry cries of the seagulls. Gordon went on to become Ireland's most famous sailor, an internationally renowned yachtsman whose assignations with page-three models we followed in the pages of the tabloids. But I already knew what a sneaky seducer he was because the bastard went and got off with Grace Anne, my friend Ronan's sister, who I had coveted all my life but never built up the confidence to kiss. I had even taken her to the final school dance, where Bono turned up accompanied by Gavin Friday dressed in a silver glitter outfit and perilously high platforms on which he staggered around all night, getting outrageously drunk, leering at everyone and uttering inscrutable remarks. I, meanwhile, wore a dismal blue tuxedo with wide lapels and mooned around after my beautiful date. As the night came to an end I maneuvered her out into the hotel gardens to make my move—only to discover that my dad was already there, smiling helpfully. He was concerned that we wouldn't be able to get a taxi and so had come to drive us home, a ride spent listening to him mutter inane platitudes of the “I hope you kids had a good time” variety.
Kids
, for fuck's sake! But let us draw a veil over that episode. Missed opportunities and girls aside, it was summer and I was young and free and ready to take on the world.

In the diaspora of Mount Temple pupils, bits of information would drift back. I heard that Bono had finally passed his Irish exam and been accepted at university. Actually, I heard he got someone else to sit the exam for him, but I have never been able to get to the bottom of this rumor. But it wouldn't have mattered anyway, because he never did take up that place. U2 played a gig at McGonagles, Dublin's premier rock club, and Ivan and I trooped along to see them.

It was a scruffy little establishment, dim lighting barely concealing the decrepitude of the peeling black paint job. The unimpressive dimensions of the narrow stage were further reduced by the band's having to share space with incongruous plastic palm trees left over from the venue's previous incarnation as a disco. I seem to remember a glitterball. U2 were supporting Advertising, English exponents of power pop, the latest new-wave subgenre. Essentially it was souped-up sixties beat music, replete with harmonies and hook-lines, but dashed off with a bit more speed and aggression than would have been fashionable before punk. “Ah, they're nothing special,” said Bono, who refused to be impressed by their status as recording artists. “We're gonna blow them off the stage!” Bono had a competitive streak in him, driving him toward greater achievements, and that night his confidence was high. U2's set was growing in internal coherence and musical drama. They had a new song, “Out of Control,” written around the time of Bono's eighteenth birthday in May, which proved a bit of a show-stopper, an anthemic, soaring articulation of teenage epiphany, the moment you realize that life is bigger than you will ever be and your fate is not necessarily in your own hands: “One day I'll die / The choice will not be mine,” roared Bono. “Will it be too late? / You can't fight fate! / I was of the feeling it was out of control, the crazy notion I was out of control…” There was plenty of space left in the lyrics for Bono's usual “oo-wee-ooo”s and “oh-ey-oh”s but the song communicated his inner turmoil with impressive conviction.

Advertising were polished and sterile by comparison and later I thought I detected a smug grin on Bono's face as he watched the headliners from the shadows, Alison on his arm, various members of the Village gathered around. “They're good,” he said, his natural generosity reinstated by his own warm reception from the audience. “Tight. Musical. I can see what they're trying to do.” Was there a hint of condescension there? Because what Advertising were trying to do was make pop music that reached toward art, celebrating its own superficiality. Bono wanted to make art that reached toward pop music (only he would never use the word
pop
. Pop was for kids. To Bono, it was always rock, with all the connotations of serious, hard, grown-up sensibilities that implied). Bono felt that U2 were starting in a place already some way beyond the superficial. They may not have been as well drilled and musically accomplished as Advertising, but they had soul in abundance and, in front of an audience filled with local movers and shakers, they had more than held their own against the pros from across the water.

“What's going on with your band?” Bono inquired.

“There've been a few changes,” I said, glancing guiltily across to where Frank was chatting with Larry. Ivan and I hadn't actually kept our fellow Undertaker informed of all the latest developments. Like the fact that we had changed the name of the group, recruited a new bassist and decided Frank's particular talents were surplus to requirements.

After the debacle at school, we decided it was time to get serious. We spent long hours listening to records, studying the
NME
, struggling to write songs, enthusing, dreaming, plotting, arguing. Lots of arguing, though mostly with Frank. Ivan and I were very taken with the Jam, whose new mod sensibilities tied into our mutual fascination with the Beatles and the sixties. To Frank (who concurred with Bono's preference for things that rocked), it was all power pop, a genre which he considered a girly dilution of punk's principles. And for that matter, he informed us, the Beatles sounded suspiciously like power pop to him.

Now Ivan was rapidly becoming even more of a Beatles obsessive than me. He was currently engaged in a mammoth effort to learn every Beatles song on guitar, in alphabetical order, just because that's the way they were printed in
The Complete Beatles
songbook. Indeed, it would get to the point where the Beatles became a kind of plumb line he would drop into conversations to assess depth of character. If you were not intimately familiar with the Beatles oeuvre, Ivan would just give you a withering look of contempt, as if to suggest that your lack of taste precluded further fraternization. So when Frank said he preferred the Stones, his fate was sealed. It was agreed we'd dispense with his services. We carelessly neglected to inform him of this, however, preferring the cowardly option of making lots of excuses about missing rehearsals and suggesting, what with it being such a busy summer and all, we let things lie for a couple of months.

And so Frank became the first of many musicians to part ways with the McCormick brothers. Which was probably a stroke of luck for him. Like almost everybody else we ever played with, he would go on to have a more successful musical career than us (it would be hard to have a less successful one), eventually forming a short-lived but acclaimed rock band called Cactus World News who released one well-received album on MCA in 1986 and got to number one in the U.S. college chart. Frank now owns and manages Salt recording studio in Sutton, Dublin. We run into each other occasionally, usually backstage at U2 concerts, where we both get the measure of our actual status in the music business.

Since I'd insisted that I was going to be frontman, we recruited a neighborhood friend of mine, John McGlue, to play bass. John's distinguishing characteristic was his big Afro-style curly hairdo, a look never really displayed at its best perched atop the head of a skinny white Irish boy. John was exceedingly proud of it, however. He thought it made him look like Phil Lynnot (bassist and frontman of Irish rock legends Thin Lizzy) and I guess there must have been enough of an association in our eyes for us to take a chance on someone whose musical skills, to that date, extended to being just about able to tell one end of a guitar from another. John's sole recommendation was that he was desperate for stardom and pronounced himself willing to do anything to be in a band, including learn an instrument. I somewhat grandiosely promised I would teach him everything I knew; when he had mastered that in half an hour, I told him to take my bass home and work the rest out for himself. John fancied himself as a bit of a ladies' man (“They go for the hair,” he would explain), so was strangely flattered when we gave him the punk name Johnny Durex. His only concern was that it might upset his mother. “Your mother doesn't know what a Durex is,” I assured him. “Otherwise you wouldn't be here.”

“Up yer hole, McCormick!”

“Fuck you, McGlue!”

As you can probably tell, we were close friends.

Choosing a name for a new group is a task charged with excitement, anticipation and not a little tension. It carries with it a burden of responsibility to the future, like giving an identity to a baby before it is born, the very act of naming making the intangible appear solid and real. The name has to be capable of carrying the weight of dreams.

“The Taxmen.”

“That would really inspire people to come out and see us. Remind them how much money they owe to the government.”

“How about the Axemen?”

“No way. Guitarists don't get their names out front. How about Neil Down and the Shin Pads?”

“Neil Brown and the Shit Heads, more like it.”

“Johnny Durex and the Premature Ejaculators.”

“Fuck off!”

“ ‘Fuck off'. I like it. Fuck Off tonight in McGonagles. Fuck Off and buy the record!”

Vast amounts of rehearsal time were taken up with conversations like this. We made huge lists, then spent hours arguing the cases of our favorites and deriding each other's suggestions. We eventually settled on the Modulators, based on something Ivan had seen written on a keyboard in a music shop. To be honest, we had absolutely no idea what a modulator actually did but we were entranced by its inbuilt association with the currently fashionable mod movement.

Keith was still officially the drummer, though he would never actually turn up to rehearsals but would phone at the last minute with a series of increasingly lame excuses. Ivan and I remained focused on the task in hand, meanwhile, and wrote songs at a prodigious rate (sometimes knocking out two or three in a session)—the quality of which can be deduced by the fact that when I look at the titles absolutely nothing comes to mind: no lyrics, no riffs, no melody, no rhythm (this may well be an accurate reflection of the songs themselves). In Frank's absence, however, we did learn two Beatles songs, “Twist and Shout” and “Revolution.”

When we felt we had enough material for a gig, we went to see Rocky De Valera. Rocky's real name was Ferdia MacAnna. He was a bit of a star in the Howth firmament, a spidery six-foot-something rock 'n' roll fan with a black leather jacket, blue suede brothel-creepers and a louche manner learned from studying early Elvis Presley films. “Rock on, Rocky!” the kids would chorus whenever they saw him hanging about on a street corner. “Ah, feck off, ye little bastards!” he'd reply, assuming (correctly) that they were taking the piss. Rocky had a sidekick called Jack Dublin, an enormously overweight bassist. “It's a glandular condition,” he would explain, and everyone would nod seriously. No one took the piss out of Jack for fear that he might flatten them.