by Harry Browne
But how did Mother, and the associated distribution company Record Services, even manage to offer a plausible imitation of an enterprise established to kill off promising Irish acts? The answer is somewhat surprising, given how quickly and capably Paul McGuinness and U2 had professionalised the management of their own affairs in the early 1980s. The fact appears to be that, with Mother, U2 deliberately set their sights unusually low, then lacked the commitment and professional capacity to achieve even a modest set of notional targets. A label established in the mid 1980s to help young acts in Ireland ended up with its only really notable success being the Icelandic artist Björk in the early-to-mid 1990s. Indeed, Mother may be the only cause ever associated with Bono to have been allowed to fade quietly into obscurity.
One mark of Mother’s lack of ambition was its explicitly stated determination to limit its nurturing function to getting artists’ singles out on the label. Once an act was at the stage of releasing an album, the theory and practice went, it could and should move on to another label. This was a little strange given that U2 were already themselves recognised as the latest in the long line of quintessentially album-oriented rock groups, and the 1980s as an album-oriented era like no time before or since in the history of popular music.
Irish music-industry insiders don’t need especially complex explanations for Mother’s failure. U2 may have been helping to drag the business out of the showband era, dominated as it was by cowboy impresarios and their network of dance-halls around the country, with only a thin veneer of a recording industry slapped on to this live-music infrastructure. But the dragging was slow, and the priorities of those, like McGuinness, who were doing the dragging were understandably ruled mainly by U2’s concern for their own increasing global success. Given the structures that had proliferated in the previous era, limping weakly into the economic gloom of 1980s Ireland, industry insiders recall that there simply was not the record-label expertise in Ireland to spread around another dozen young bands in the hopes of leading one or two of them to international stardom. It would have been unrealistic to think that Mother could establish a competent version of Apple Corps in Dublin with the people available in the city to staff it. Limiting Mother to the early stages of an act’s development recognised the daunting complexity of mentoring and promoting musicians beyond those stages.
But given U2’s growing global riches after 1987, when The Joshua Tree reached the top spot on album charts all over the world, Mother could eventually have afforded to import the professional capacity to set a more ambitious agenda, or indeed just to do the early-stages work more competently; indeed, according to Magill magazine in 1987, Mother was being run out of an office in the London headquarters of Island Records (where U2 had acquired a 10 per cent stake) anyway.50 Its staff never grew past a handful; its spending was a drip-drip of thousands at a time. What emerges from an overview of its history is what may seem like a surprising description for any enterprise involving Bono: ‘half-hearted’. Or perhaps, given that U2 were always generous with rhetorical support, with ‘love’, to up-and-coming bands, but failed to invest in them adequately, ‘half-assed’ is the more appropriate term: Mother didn’t put the staff in place to deliver the uplifting boost that the Irish music scene was hoping for. The result is that a list of the Irish acts that Mother signed and promoted will lead Irish readers to nod in vague recollection of a series of one-time next-big-things, and most readers outside Ireland to stare blankly: In Tua Nua, Engine Alley, Cactus World News, Hothouse Flowers … When the revamped Mother released an album by Dublin-based novelty punk band the Golden Horde in 1991 – a good three or four years after that band’s Ramones-with-pretensions joke had started to wear thin even with their core audience – it was all too clear that, in Ireland, Mother would be no more than an amusing plaything, at most, rather than a serious developer of new talent. By that time, as a knowledgable Irish journalist has recalled, ‘Bono, U2’s point man on Mother, [had] stepped aside, and [Larry] Mullen took over, resolving difficulties brought about by the singer’s reluctance to say no to people.’51 Mother stopped functioning completely by the mid 1990s, and the company was finally wound up a decade later.
Mother comes in for remarkably little discussion in either official or unofficial histories of U2. In one long interview, with Michka Assayas, Bono refers vaguely to how the band had invested in loss-making enterprises after profiting from the sale of Island Records in 1989: ‘Losing money was not a nice feeling, and you’ve got to be careful because nothing begins the love of money more than the loss of money. But on the positive side it made us take more charge and interest in our business. This was, I guess, very early nineties.’52
He doesn’t mention Mother explicitly in that context, nor does he do so in another long interview in which he discusses the mid-1980s scene that Mother was launched to promote. But, reading between the lines, it’s easy to hear him blaming the scene rather than Mother’s inadequacy for the failure of a ‘next U2’ to emerge from Ireland, at least in the form of one of Mother’s early acts, Hothouse Flowers:
We were starting to hang out with The Waterboys and Hothouse Flowers. There was a sense of an indigenous Irish music being blended with American folk music coming through. The Hothouse Flowers were … sexy, they spoke Irish and the singer sang blue-eyed soul … but, you know, Irish music tends to end up down the pub, which really diluted the potency of the new strains. The music got drunk, the clothes got bad and the hair got very, very long.53
U2 were of course doing more than ‘hang out’ with Hothouse Flowers: they were the directors of a company that had briefly taken charge of the band’s career – and indeed sent them aloft to a middling international record deal and career that never realised its promise, including a miserable spell opening for the Rolling Stones. Unspoken amid Bono’s puritanical disdain for the drunken longhairs is the plaintive question: How could we be expected to make stars of such people?
PEACE OF THE ACTION: NORTHERN INTERVENTION
In the decades after 1986, U2 didn’t involve themselves very deeply in the political life of Ireland. Bono’s 2002 endorsement of a Yes vote in a referendum on an EU treaty, for example, was not only a relatively rare intervention, but also comprised his typical and easily ignored mix of self-praise and establishment boilerplate: ‘I go to meetings with politicians in Europe, they always bring it up … I think to vote No is going to make Ireland look very selfish.’54 U2’s cultural contribution is, as we have seen, also open to some question. They played gigs in Ireland, certainly, but scarcely any more than a major rock act with a huge Irish following might be expected to do, and always stadium-sized shows in a couple of big cities, mostly Dublin. In fact, they became something of a symbol of not-being-in-Ireland, the band that provided solace and an apolitical, uncontroversial form of Irish nationality abroad for the generation of emigrants who had fled the country through the 1980s and into the 1990s, Self Aid notwithstanding.
When, in the late 1980s, songwriter Liam Reilly came to write ‘Flight of Earls’, a sentimental emigrant ballad for that generation – which Reilly saw part-accurately as more educated and mobile than previous emigrants – he naturally mentioned what everyone knew to be the generation’s preferred musical badge:
Because it’s not the work that scares us
We don’t mind an honest job
And we know things will get better once again
So a thousand times adieu
We’ve got Bono and U2
And all we’re missing is the Guinness and the rain
Reilly’s allusion was somewhat ironic, given its clear implication that the 1980s emigrants cared more for arena-rock than for folk-pop balladeers like himself. The song nonetheless joined the playlist in countless Irish bars in the US and elsewhere, and was a substantial hit in Ireland in a version by singer Paddy Reilly – reaching number one and still in the charts when U2’s ‘Desire’ overtook it en route to the top. Indeed, for all the awkwardness of its lyrics – yes he did
rhyme ‘adieu’ with ‘U2’ – ‘Flight of Earls’ is more likely to get an Irish sing-along going than all but a handful of U2’s own songs, and even made something of a comeback among the new emigrants of the post-2008 era.
Bono was not a complete absentee superstar by any means. He lived in Ireland, and as an internationally recognised symbol of Brand Ireland, Bono could not resist getting involved when the Northern Irish peace process put Irish affairs in the global spotlight for the first sustained spell since the hunger-strikes. Since virtually all Irish-nationalist opinion, along with the British government and a substantial chunk of ‘moderate unionism’ in the North, was united in favour of the process and of the Good Friday Agreement that emerged from it; since elite figures in the American diaspora were on board, and Bill Clinton himself had shown strong, indeed disproportionately obsessive, devotion to resolving these Irish troubles; since there were no popular mobilisations in support of the agreement, North, South or among the Irish abroad (with their reputation for untrustworthy, uncompromising nationalism), and thus a dearth of images of enthusiasm; and since U2 had spent, by common consent, several years in the credibility doldrums with media-savvy political gestures in place of interesting musical ones (notably in Sarajevo – see Chapter 3) – for all these reasons and more, it was all too predictable that Bono would turn up for a photo opportunity at some allegedly crucial moment in the whole affair.
That moment came during the referendum campaign on the Good Friday Agreement. In May 1998, separate, simultaneous ballots were held in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland to approve the new institutional arrangements for governing Northern Ireland. The result was never in doubt – more than 90 per cent of voters in the South voted Yes, and the referendum was approved by 71 per cent of voters in the North, with the opposition coming mainly from diehard Protestant supporters of the union with Britain (‘unionists’) who opposed the agreement as a concession to IRA terrorists and a step toward a united Ireland. The main political ambition of the British and Irish governments, and of most others on the Yes side, was to see the No vote in the North beaten into a minority not merely of the whole electorate, but even of the traditional unionist side; this sort of sectarian arithmetic had no bearing on whether the referendum would be passed or not, but it might conceivably affect the credibility of the institutions to follow it, themselves reliant on power-sharing via further sectarian arithmetic. The leader of the then-largest unionist party, David Trimble, was supporting the agreement, which had arisen largely through negotiations that aimed at including Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, in the process and in future governing arrangements for Northern Ireland. But the convenient fiction adopted for the occasion was that the agreement was a settlement between ‘moderate unionism’, embodied by Trimble, and ‘moderate nationalism’, embodied by the leader of the North’s Social Democratic and Labour Party, John Hume.
The extent to which this was a fiction would be shown within very few years, with both men and their parties consigned to the political margins by the electorate. But it was already obvious at the time to anyone who was paying attention to reality, particularly to the extraordinary efforts that had been made by the Sinn Fein leadership to bring militant republicans and the community that supported them into the political process – without a split that would have seen a return to large-scale violence.
Nonetheless, it was to the convenient fiction rather than the extraordinary reality that Bono lent his support. According to a biography of Trimble, Bono himself was looking for a chance to visibly ‘bring the two sides together’. As Bono told the writer, Bono said to Hume: ‘John, I don’t feel that our value here is to reinforce you with the nationalist community … It’s to reinforce Trimble with the Unionist community. If you can put something together, we’ll be happy to interface.’55
And so it was that newspapers all over the world featured a picture of Bono interfacing: holding aloft the hands of two ‘long-time enemies’, Hume and Trimble, who he brought together on stage in front of a cheering, mostly young crowd. ‘I would like to introduce you to two men who are making history, two men who have taken a leap of faith out of the past and into the future,’ he declaimed. Bono wasn’t the only one who deliberately mistook these two increasingly irrelevant men for the heroes of ‘the future’ – the same was done by that reliably misguided body, the Nobel Peace Prize committee – and it would be churlish to deny they played a considerable role in the Northern Irish peace process. They were widely regarded as the acceptable faces of the process, and Hume in particular had played an honourable role over much of the previous decade by insisting that the key to the process was involving Sinn Fein and its supporters rather than attempting, as in so many previous attempts at agreement, to marginalise them.
But as the summary photo-op of the whole affair, the crowning achievement of the peace process, the Bono–Hume–Trimble moment was bullshit, and it seems it was bullshit of Bono’s excreting. Speaking before the concert, the singer had reinforced his ‘triumph of the moderates’ message: ‘… to vote “no” is to play into the hands of extremists who have had their day. Their day is over, as far as we are concerned. We are in the next century.’56 A few years into the real, as opposed to the imagined, ‘next century’, the former IRA man Martin McGuinness was the North’s deputy first minister, serving beside the Protestant bigot the Rev. Ian Paisley, who had opposed the Good Friday Agreement: two of Bono’s hated twentieth-century ‘extremists’, going so amiably about the business of governing Northern Ireland that the press corps dubbed them the Chuckle Brothers, after a pair of British slapstick comedians.
Bono and U2 continued in subsequent years to distort the reality of that 1998 intervention. In their magisterial 2006 ‘autobiography’, U2 by U2, they incorrectly state that the referendum was on a knife-edge – Bono says ‘the signs were not good’, and Edge says it was ‘won by a very small margin, two or three points’, only after a Yes swing prompted by the concert. The actual margin in the North was more than 42 per cent. (In the same book Bono adds ignorance to distortion when he goes on to misidentify the republican dissident group who bombed the centre of Omagh town a few months later as the ‘Continuity IRA’, when anyone in Ireland who had been paying attention at all knew it was the ‘Real IRA’ – though even those paying attention might have found it hard to explain the precise distinction between the two republican splinter groups.57)
In another interview for international consumption several years after the fact, Bono called that moment ‘the greatest honor of my life in Ireland’, and called Hume and Trimble, rather ridiculously, ‘the two opposing leaders in the conflict’. He added: ‘People tell me that rock concert and that staged photograph pushed the people into ratifying the peace agreement. I’d like to think that’s true.’58 No doubt he would love to think it’s true. However, the ‘people’ telling Bono that must surely be extreme sycophants even by rock standards: of all the myths peddled by Bono’s supporters, this surely is among the most obviously and egregiously untrue, refuted by a minute’s fact-checking.
By 2012 the myth of Bono the Peacemaker had grown to absurd proportions, with his close adviser Jamie Drummond telling BBC viewers that for ‘most of the Nineties Bono was very involved in campaigning on Northern Ireland’.59 This notion would come as a great surprise to anyone who was actually involved in the peace process there, and one would like to imagine that Drummond’s ludicrous assertion would embarrass even Bono himself.
The famous Hume–Trimble photo-op, and the subsequent fate of its two political subjects, is sometimes cited as evidence of the ‘Curse of Bono’. It is of course nothing of the sort. Cynical people might argue that it is just another example of the extent to which Bono remained a conventional-thinking opportunist who could spot the shortest distance between himself and some great global publicity. Perhaps, unlikely though it seems, he was too dense to see the underlying political reality, and the inevitable ascent and key role of Sinn Fein on the Catholic
-nationalist side and Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party on the Protestant-unionist side; it’s more likely that he was smart enough to ignore it, because he was never going to be able to get it into a photograph.
WHERE THE CHEATS HAVE NO SHAME: TAX TROUBLES
The desire to make lots and lots of money – just so as not to be tempted to succumb to the love of it, naturally – and the desire to visibly embody All That is Good, especially in Ireland, need not come into conflict as far as Bono was concerned. Despite Mother’s shortcomings, U2 were routinely praised extravagantly in the Irish media for their ‘commitment to maintaining their base’ in Dublin – Ireland was so gloomy for much of the 1980s and 1990s that staying there seemed counter-intuitive. The economic benefits enumerated for Ireland of having the band continue to live, record and run their businesses from their home city were never especially impressive, however.60 They were a big rock band, but that didn’t make them a particularly big business in terms of, say, employment, and no one could say if they actually attracted a large number of tourists to the city, though many visitors who came did make a pilgrimage to add graffiti to their old Windmill Lane base.
The fact is that Bono and the rest of the gang had very good reason for maintaining their base in Dublin. As an Irish journalist pithily noted: ‘Up until 2006 U2 enjoyed extraordinarily favourable tax treatment in Ireland.’61 Ireland has famously had, since 1969, an artists’ tax exemption, whereby Irish residents’ earnings from artistic work – published work, that is, not performance – were not liable to tax. This exemption was established by the notorious politician Charles Haughey, when he was minister of finance. Suspicions about how Haughey funded his lavish lifestyle trailed him through his career, and finally caught up with him in his final years in the 1990s, when a long trail of secret payments to him was revealed; the artists’ tax exemption, however, was one of the reasons that Haughey went to his grave with a ringing postscript to an epitaph that was otherwise that of a scoundrel: ‘But he was a great patron of the arts’. The artists’ exemption not only protected the meagre earnings of most Irish artists, but turned Ireland into a minor tax haven for various foreign rock stars and best-selling writers, from Def Leppard to Frederick Forsyth. Many British artists positively went native, making films and records in Ireland and engaging cheerfully with Irish public life. Given the aggressive business mentality of U2 and McGuinness, it would be surprising if this exemption were not part of the attraction of remaining in Dublin through all their years of international superstardom.