by Harry Browne
Geldof said in a 2012 interview that, of all the stars he approached, ‘the one who was most reluctant to do the record was this kid I knew from Ireland, Bono’.7 Geldof may be exaggerating for the sake of historical irony, but Bono himself has acknowledged some specific hesitation. In Bono’s telling, he arrived at the London recording studio, had a read of the ‘really good’ lyrics of the song, and thought ‘the only line I’m not going to sing is that one: Tonight, thank God, it’s them instead of you.’8 (The italics and the strange punctuation of the lyric, which casts ‘thank God’ as an aside rather than an imperative, come from the Bono-approved source material; that punctuation makes no sense, since this section of the song is an injunction to pray.)
This controversial line was of course to be the one that Geldof chose for Bono:
So I walked up to Bob and he said, ‘Listen, I want you to sing this fucking line here.’ I said: ‘Just please don’t tell me it’s this line.’ He said: ‘That’s the very line.’ ‘I can’t sing that, Bob.’ ‘Can’t sing the fucking line? What do you mean you can’t sing the line?’ I told him I didn’t want to sing the line. He said, ‘This is not about what you want, OK? This is about what these people need.’ I was too young to say, ‘This is about what you want.’ But it was his show and I was happy to be in it.9
It’s a typical Bono story, ostensibly self-mocking, but it all works to underline his essential if sometimes accidental genius: ‘It’s the most biting line, and actually reveals how selfish a mindset we all have underneath. I think Bob was trying to be honest and raw and self-accusatory. Rather than sing, “We’re lucky it’s not us” he was saying: “Well, when you say that, you mean ‘lucky it’s them’. Now look at it. Now look at yourself.” ’10
It’s questionable how many people were inspired to look at themselves by the line Bono sang in this Christmas hit, but as far as Bono was concerned, he came good. ‘I kind of did an impersonation of Bruce Springsteen, that was really what was in my mind.’11 Given Bono’s rather different vocal range from, and technical superiority to, Springsteen as a singer, it seems an odd claim, like he’s making an excuse for inserting such overt emotionalism into what he depicts as the smooth English setting. Certainly the line sounds more like a distilled version of himself rather than of anyone else. Perhaps his memory was playing tricks when he recorded those recollections some twenty years after the fact, and he was thinking of the following year’s ‘Sun City’, when he actually did have to work out how to do a non-imitative imitation of Springsteen, singing the same line as ‘the Boss’ when it came around a second time in the song: ‘We’re stabbing our brothers and sisters in the back’ – a line that one might perhaps regard as prophetic.
In any case, Bono cannot be blamed for the sins of Geldof and his appalling Band Aid song. It just so happens that Geldof’s lyrical vision – in which Africans are ‘they’, literally ‘the other ones’; Africa itself is essentialised as a nightmarish place of undifferentiated poverty (‘where nothing ever grows, no rain or rivers flow’); and Westerners are cast as their saviours, the people who will give them both physical sustenance and spiritual uplift (‘Let them know it’s Christmas time’) – bears a striking resemblance to the dominant themes of Bono’s African work in the decades that followed.
BAD: AT LIVE AID
The Live Aid concert, staged simultaneously in London and Philadelphia in July 1985, is sometimes depicted as U2’s breakthrough moment. This is an exaggeration, at least. U2 were already big stars, already Rolling Stone’s ‘band of the decade’, as their place in the day’s line-up attests. They were the first band onstage at Wembley after the Philly stage had got started up, and thus had a role in underlining the transatlantic link for the audience in the US, where they were so popular. And they were followed in London only by a handful of the biggest, longer-established acts in Britain: Dire Straits, Queen, David Bowie, the Who, Elton John, Paul McCartney. A measure of their standing is that U2’s young members were the only musicians born in the 1960s, or anywhere near that decade, to get close to the business end of that event.
It might nonetheless be fairly regarded as Bono’s personal breakthrough to a mass audience, as in: ‘Did you see what that singer from the Irish band did at Live Aid?’ The cameras loved his dramatic preening, even to the point of following him during the instrumental break of ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, when he pulled one cameraman over, apparently to get the best shot of his bandmates, but with his antics ensuring that there was in fact no shot of his bandmates.12 Not then and not later: there was hardly a moment in the band’s eighteen-minute spell onstage when Bono was not in the camera’s gaze, usually alone, and the climax came during ‘Bad’, when he leapt two levels down to the edge of the audience barrier, got three young women pulled from the heaving crowd, then embraced one of them in a sort-of slow dance – the woman’s back getting more camera time than did, say, drummer Larry Mullen Jr.13
What’s striking in retrospect is that, in those eighteen minutes, the man who later attached Africa so definitively to his image makes no effort to connect with the African mission of Live Aid, much less the Ethiopian famine for which the event was intended to raise relief funds. If it were not for the familiar dark silhouette of Africa on the stage backdrop, you could not differentiate this from any other performance – despite the fact that each of the songs U2 performed lent itself so well to a preaching break. ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ was rattled through efficiently, and referred, at least explicitly, to nothing more than familiar Irish war-weariness (see Chapter 1); the only significant ad lib was ‘We are so sick of it.’
It was U2’s plan, however, to perform ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’ at Live Aid, thus at least making an African-American connection via Martin Luther King. Bono blew that plan to pieces with his long foray off the stage during ‘Bad’, plus the snippets of Lou Reed and the Rolling Stones he dropped into the song’s greatly extended coda – no sign on this occasion, thank God, of ‘Candle in the Wind’. There was no time, as a result of all the carry-on, for another song in their allotted slot, though there was no visible hint of Bono being told this officially as he breezed offstage, leaving the rest of the band still playing, over and over and over, the repeating figure that is the distinctive mark of ‘Bad’.
The walk-off, with a wave and a white towel around his shoulders, like he was Elvis with an anonymous backing group, must have been the crowning insult for the rest of U2, who had already spent part of the long, long song wondering where on earth he had gone and if they should simply abandon their vamping.14 It is well-established U2 lore that they fought with Bono backstage afterwards, and, we’re told, an allegedly chastened Bono joined the rest of them in brooding for days – though it is hard to believe that the length of their brood is anything other than their memories enjoying some literary licence – about the career disaster they had brought upon themselves with this chaotic and self-indulgent performance.15
Except, of course, that they had done nothing of the sort, as they eventually discovered. Bono summed up the experience years later: ‘Crap sound, crap haircuts and we didn’t end up playing the hit “Pride (In The Name Of Love)” because the singer fucked off into the crowd – band wanted to fire me as a result – and it turned out to be one of the best days of our life. Explain that. Ask God, he probably knows.’16 God’s knowledge presumably rests, like everyone else’s, on Bono’s barrier-breaking huggy-dance down at the edge of the crowd, the moment when the whole event seemed that little bit less like some self-congratulatory rock-star extravaganza, what Frank Zappa famously called ‘the biggest cocaine-money-laundering scheme of all time’ and a ‘show-business-oriented bogus charity event’,17 and more like the natural fusion of music and love, or something like that.
Bono’s description of that moment in a twenty-first-century TV interview is only slightly more ridiculous than much of the hyperbole that burst out around it at the time: ‘I didn’t know that when I was holding on to her I’d be holding on to th
e rest of the world.’18 (In a franker moment he recalled: ‘I’d gone AWOL to try and find a television moment and forgot about the song.’19) It tells us all too much about the delusions fostered by Live Aid that an embrace between a rich rock star and a London fan could be constructed as somehow symbolising the unity of the world in this moment, a unity somehow connected to providing relief to the absent, hungry ‘they’ living in the dark continent outlined behind the stage. The idea that the girl in the crowd had been singled out for ‘rescue’ by him from an allegedly dangerous crush grew over the years, and added further messianic significance to the moment; in fact he had often pulled women from audiences to dance with them.20
Bono made his fame at Live Aid, but he was not responsible for the event as a whole, and this is not the place to consider all its pretensions, failures and ramifications. However, Bono’s moment of glory – hidden from the sight of most of the audience at Wembley Stadium but carried around the world to the (exaggerated) hundreds of millions of live television viewers – is worth dwelling on, because it can distil the meaning of so many of the charitable impulses he would surrender to over the following decades. Here is a moment that is ostensibly about making connections, about transcending segregation, about giving something of oneself. But it is ultimately so easy, so smug, so self-satisfied and exhibitionist; any connection made lasts a moment, if that, and then the generous ‘giver’ is returned to security and comfort, feeling better about himself; the segregation returns, nothing of significance really changes. Except perhaps the reputation and self-image of the giver, who now believes himself capable of embracing the world.
Bono, it hardly needs to be added, then went to Africa.
INTO ETHIOPIA: DISCOVERING AFRICA AND THE BLUES
It should be said, all the same, that Bono’s first trip to Africa looks positively modest and self-effacing at this distance. There is considerable debate within development organisations about the usefulness or otherwise of the armies of young and unskilled volunteers who descend on poor countries looking to help however they can – which usually isn’t very much – and maybe to brush up their resumés in the process. The best and worst that can be said about twenty-five-year-old Bono and his twenty-four-year-old wife Ali in Ethiopia in the autumn of 1985 is that they appear to have been unexceptional troops in such an army – in his words, ‘going under the wire, as regular volunteers’.21
While it is true that not every volunteer returns from Africa to publish a slim limited-edition volume of photos that sells for £1,000,22 Bono’s six weeks in Ethiopia were so low-key that they don’t figure at all in Eamon Dunphy’s 1987 band biography. They are described by Bono in some detail, however, in the 2006 book U2 by U2. His and Ali’s trip was arranged by World Vision, a California-based evangelical charity that has come in for criticism over the years for its marketing of ‘child-sponsorship’ as a means of fundraising. Bono didn’t discuss either that marketing issue or the Christian connection; and though the heavy emphasis on children in his account of the trip may remind the reader of the disproportionate use of kids in most famine-relief publicity, it should be noted, in fairness, that ‘we were put in charge [!] of an orphanage in north Ethiopia, in a feeding station at Ajibar’, so children were at the heart of their work.23
What is more striking is that, two decades after the fact, Bono still seemed quite impressed by the impact made by his young self.
[T]here was a lot of waiting around in the camps, not just by the children but also by the adults. So we developed a repeating educational programme with various one-act plays and songs to spread information on health, hygiene and other issues … in an entertaining way. One was called The Labour Play, it was about giving birth … We would teach the kids a song and they would go round the camp singing it and educate their parents … I learned some of the language and wrote simple songs … So the children would sing We can’t eat the seeds because they’re for next year / If we plant them right there will be no more tears. It wasn’t poetry but it sold the idea. I still remember the tune. I have heard that some of the ideas lived on after we left. I hope that is true.24
We can only assume the facts laid out in his telling are true. The significance with which he imbues them is more revealing: Bono, despite all the careful work he had done in the interim in African-development circles, appeared fully comfortable with the idea that two childless young urban Europeans could make such a lasting impression on the childbirth and agricultural practices of rural Ethiopians, a shockingly colonial notion. (By his own account, his language-acquisition skills appear to have been truly amazing – ‘I learned some of the language and wrote simple songs’ – though they have not surfaced in his later life.)
In among all the talk of being ‘humbled’ by the dignity and struck by the ‘regal faces’ of the natives, of the one boy whose suffering he has taken with him all through the years, Bono did, at the end of his recollection, partly transcend the merely charitable and pictorial:
The thing I came away with in the end was a sense that there was a structural side to this poverty. There had been a civil war in Ethiopia as well as the natural calamity that had caused this particular famine but the story of starvation and poverty in Africa is not always war and natural disaster. A lot of it is corruption, as I discovered later, and not just theirs but our corrupt relationship with Africa – trade agreements and the like, old debts we keep making them pay. My awareness of all this started on that trip.25
Apart from the somewhat confusing conflation of what he learned then and what he ‘discovered later’, and apart from the fact that he doesn’t appear to have acted on any of this knowledge about Africa for many years, this is a fairly unimpeachable piece of quick analysis. The likelihood that it is something other than post-facto rationalisation is supported by other evidence that he was drawn at this time toward leftish analysis of international relations – namely his work with Amnesty and trips to Central America (see Chapter 3). Indeed, his capacity to speak the language of global justice while advancing policies that do little to advance it might be regarded as the central political fact of Bono’s subsequent career.
Interestingly, in reality and in the flow of his recollections, he came straight back from what he would later call ‘the terrible beauty that is Africa’ to find himself immersed in the African-American heritage of rock ’n’ roll, of which he had been so ignorant. The story of his enlightenment is another typical Bono mix of self-mockery and self-aggrandisement, since the person who took the trouble to turn him on to the blues was none other than Keith Richards, one of the genre’s most famous white interpreters.
In his telling, having been invited into a Rolling Stones recording session, Bono shocks Richards and Mick Jagger by his ignorance of musical history.
That is when I realized that U2 had no tradition, we were from outer space. There were no roots to our music, no blues, no gospel, no country – we were post-punk. Our starting points were the NME, Joy Division, Kraftwerk, Penetration and The Buzzcocks … Keith said, ‘You don’t know the blues?’ I said, ‘Not only do I not know the blues, I object to it.’ He was taken aback. ‘What do you mean?’ I told him, ‘Anyone who ever played the blues, where I came from, it was just twelve-bar laziness and it meant they were fresh out of original ideas.’ … Sometime over the next few hours, Keith got hold of some vinyl and put on some John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson. I was already in awe of Keith just as a songwriter and a rock figure; that he was taking time out to turn me on to the blues was something I was never going to forget. He played me these records and it sounded like the end of the world – more punk rock than anything I’d grown up on.26
The rhetorical disdain for his young self in Bono’s twenty-first-century recollection of events in 1985 is almost overwhelmed by the residual contempt for Irish traditional music – not even referenced as a potential ‘root’ – and for the rather rich tradition of Irish blues-playing. And the story’s punch-line is that Bono was, again, such a brilliantly
quick learner that he went back to his hotel ‘with my head in a spin’ and wrote a blues song, ‘Silver and Gold’, for the Sun City anti-apartheid album.27
Neither the intolerably mannered version of the song that Bono contributed to that album – with help from Richards and Ron Wood – nor the bombastic approach to it by U2 released three years later, in the 1988 album and film project Rattle and Hum, would mark ‘Silver and Gold’ as among Bono’s finest achievements. Nonetheless it is one of his most interesting lyrics – typically sloppily structured, but mixing the story of the slave trade with that of apartheid. It refers to ‘the captains and the kings’ (a phrase previously borrowed from Kipling in Brendan Behan’s devastating anti-imperialist ballad of that name, so Bono had actually listened to some Irish music), and makes a rather pointed plea for economic sanctions against South Africa: ‘Hit where it hurts: silver and gold.’ In his preaching break during the song in Rattle and Hum he explicitly suggests that the song sympathises with the impulse to armed revolt: ‘This is a song written about a man in a shanty town outside of Johannesburg. A man who’s sick and tired of looking down the barrel of white South Africa. A man who is at the point where he is ready to take up arms against his oppressor.’28
In the Rattle and Hum documentary, this onstage speech comes just a few minutes before the ‘fuck the revolution’ speech about Irish America in ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, which (as noted in Chapter 1) pours angry scorn on those who support a faraway rebellion of which they have little immediate knowledge. Any irony in this juxtaposition is apparently lost on Bono and the film-makers.
It is an interesting coincidence, at least, that Bono came to an appreciation of African-American music, and to an attempt to write in a blues idiom, just after visiting Africa, and in the course of his first African ‘advocacy’ work. Indeed, for the next several years, which delivered unprecedented levels of success, the aesthetic explorations would take precedence over the humanitarian – U2 weren’t even able to take part in the star-studded Amnesty International ‘Human Rights Now’ roadshow that played in Zimbabwe and Ivory Coast in 1988, though they had performed on Amnesty’s short US ‘Conspiracy of Hope’ tour in 1986. The outcome of the bluesy musical experiments was, eventually, that embarrassing Rattle and Hum film, in racial terms a cornucopia of clichés, from its (mostly) black-and-white cinematography, Harlem gospel choir and street singer to the spectacle of B. B. King turning up to lavish praise on Bono’s lyrics for ‘When Love Comes to Town’. The film’s less overtly racialised clichés of ‘discovering America’ – staring out over the darkening Mississippi, playing in the Sun studios in Memphis, visiting Graceland – are no less ridiculous.