Killing Bono: I Was Bono's Doppelganger

by Neil McCormick

  While the school’s official policy on religious matters seemed nebulous at best, there was a curious, almost fundamentalist, born-again-style subculture among a section of pupils known as the Christian Movement. Loosely organized in an unofficial capacity by Miss Shirley, they held regular prayer meetings to which a sign on the door announced that everyone was invited. Everyone except me, that was. One day I stopped by to see what was going on and was informed by a literally holier-than-thou classmate (one of Miss Shirley’s leading disciples) that my confrontational approach to matters of the spirit meant I would not be welcome at their mysterious jamboree.

  “That’s very Christian of you,” I commented as he barred my way at the door.

  “Ah now, Neil, don’t be like that,” said my flustered classmate. “You know you’d only sit at the back making trouble.” Which was, to be fair, my intention, but I still felt it hypocritical not to give me the benefit of the doubt.

  Excluded from an organization I had no intention of joining, I made it my business to antagonize them at every opportunity. The thing that really perplexed me, and indeed intellectually infuriated me, was that the group’s members included many of my closest friends, not to mention some of the most attractive girls and coolest guys in the school. Paul and Alison occasionally attended the meetings, where they apparently studied the Gospels, unencumbered by secular ritual, and found solace, harmony and truth there. Yet when I read these same books I found nothing but illogic and contradiction, fairy tales passed off as history. The apostle I identified most with was Doubting Thomas. While his skepticism about the appearance of the risen Christ was presented to us as a weakness of character, I always thought that insisting on poking his fingers through his ghostly leader’s stigmata was the only sensible course of action under the exceedingly strange circumstances.

  I was genuinely baffled as to how such a dynamic and evidently intelligent individual as Paul Hewson could be so committed to these ancient myths. He never became infuriated by my regular challenges to his convictions, however, but would always indulge my penchant for argument. “I like a good fight” was one of his mantras. “It’s good to ask questions,” he told me once. He would listen to my barrage of misgivings and criticisms of Christianity in all its guises and try to persuade me that the leap of faith required to open yourself up to God was worth it. “When you look around,” he insisted, “you see the oceans, you see the sun, you see a storm, a beautiful girl; don’t you think there must be something above man? Apart from women?!?!” He would keep coming back to the issue of faith, although he himself was not immune to doubt. He didn’t like organized religion or empty ritual and seemed to be engaged in a struggle to quell his own demons. Paul had a temper which could suddenly flare up, his face going red with rage, although I never felt it directed toward me. In the aftermath of his mother’s death the year before, there had, apparently, been little explosions in class, with tables being tipped over and chairs kicked across the room. He told me once that there was a period of two weeks about which he could remember nothing; he drew a total blank. He was undergoing some kind of existential crisis and almost buckled under the psychological pressure. “I faced ideas of suicide,” he admitted. “I was very unhappy; my mind was speeding.”

  The school’s response had been exemplary. Paul was told he could attend whatever classes he wanted, could come and go as it suited him until he found his feet again. One teacher in particular made himself available to talk and listen: Jack Heaslip, a counselor to the pupils and responsible for overseeing classes in career guidance and social issues. Heaslip was a gentle, thoughtful, soft-spoken, bearded man with strong spiritual leanings, who would eventually leave teaching to become a Protestant minister. Now Paul evidently had some strong childhood experience of “otherness,” a sense that there was something bigger than mankind. He once told me he had been full of questions about existence and had called out, as he put it, and a voice had answered from inside. But it had not been enough to change his life. “I just wandered on,” he said. “I refused to believe in God. Why should I? I’d go to church and there just seemed to be people there singing psalms of glory, but they didn’t seem to feel anything—it seemed all wrong.”

  The death of his mother was undoubtedly what tipped the balance. “It shocked me into the insignificance of human life,” he said. “One minute you can be alive, the next you’re gone. I could not accept that people would just disappear. If life meant being on the earth for sixty or seventy years, I’d rather go now!” It is an argument that never impressed me. The notion that there has to be a God because there’s no point otherwise is emotive rather than rational. But I hear myself saying this and I can see Bono gently smiling, chiding me about my preference for logic over faith. Somehow Paul had made a huge leap of faith and found himself standing on a rock of belief. He didn’t have to question the past. He didn’t have to let his own mind chase him around in circles of torment. He could pick himself up and move forward. God, in a sense, became the defining ground to his character.

  Oddly enough, my RE teacher was unable to demonstrate quite the same sense of equable conviction. I would sit at the back of the class, flicking through a Bible, seeking out anomalies to bring to her attention. Miss Shirley would be in the middle of some happy-clappy sermon when my hand would shoot up. “Miss! Miss!” She would visibly stiffen while my fellow denizens of the back row stifled their giggles.

  “Yes, Neil?”

  She had a way of saying my name that conveyed both long-suffering irritation and nervous apprehension. I never got the impression that she much enjoyed the cut and thrust of scriptural debate. One day, faced with another unanswerable contradiction from the good book on which she had based her life’s work, she simply burst into tears. We all sat staring at her in stunned silence, a few of my more devout classmates casting dirty looks in my direction. Miss Shirley eventually managed to control herself enough to say, “If you don’t want to be here, Neil, you should feel free to spend these periods in the library.”

  Well, cast thee out, Satan! I didn’t know whether to feel triumphant or disappointed, because I did actually enjoy the hurly-burly of these classes, where I got to pit my skeptical wits against a member of the religious establishment, however lowly. On the other hand, a free library period every week was not to be sniffed at. I gathered up my books and made for the door. Whereupon the malcontents from the back row started sticking up their hands and asking if they could go too. “Anyone who wants to spend RE in the library should feel free to do so,” declared Miss Shirley sharply.

  One by one we filed out of the class, leaving a rather forlorn-looking teacher preaching to the converted, all six of them.

  I spent a lot of time in the library, and not just because I was a voracious reader who had been dismissed from RE classes. I was also excused from Gaelic, which was a relief: under the nationalistic ordinances of the era, if you failed your Irish exams you failed everything.

  The library is where I became properly acquainted with Dave Evans, the boy who would become known to the world as iconic guitar hero, musical boffin and the coolest bald man in rock ’n’ roll: the Edge. Having been born in London of Welsh parents, Dave had also managed to wangle his way out of Irish classes. Though his family had relocated to Malahide, north of Dublin, when Dave was aged one, so strictly speaking he should have been trying to get to grips with the ancient language of Eire along with the rest of the poor native suckers, Dave somehow convincingly masqueraded as a Welshman, born and bred.

  I have to say, there was nothing particularly Edgy about Dave in those days. He had hair, a big, dark mop of it as I recall, but this would not have been considered worthy of note at the time. We all had hair, most of it pomped up in appalling, blow-dried seventies bouffants that made our heads look twice the size they actually were. Dave was quiet and somewhat studious, more inclined to use his library time to do his homework than to sit and argue with me about whatever was the latest controversial concept percolating
in my hyperactive brain. I remember him being respectful to adults, poised and serious, but with a quirky and sometimes cutting sense of humor. We were civil rather than intimate. I was probably too rebellious and argumentative for his disposition, while, for my part, I felt intimidated by his perpetual air of intellectual superiority. I felt certain that he took a dim view of many of my antics, such as my prank of loosening the library bookshelves so that they would collapse whenever somebody returned a weighty volume. Dave’s skepticism toward me was probably not much helped by the fact that he held strong religious beliefs and was close to the school’s Christian Movement, with whom I, for some reason, had a bad reputation.

  Dave and I were rivals for the affections of certain schoolmates of the female persuasion. He caused me considerable torment when he succeeded in snogging Denise McIntyre, the unwitting object of my adoration, whom I made a point of sitting next to in most classes. My distress when Denise blithely informed me of their brief encounter was only mildly mollified by her appraisal of my rival as a “sloppy kisser.”

  Adam Clayton arrived at Mount Temple in 1976 and made an immediate impact. There was his dress sense, for one thing. The school did not have a uniform policy but among the pullovers and anoraks that passed for teen fashion in Dublin in the late seventies Adam’s long Afghan coat with shaggy trimmings and decorative stitched flowers certainly stood out. He would, from time to time, sport a caftan beneath this beloved garment and went through a phase of wearing a yellow workman’s helmet on top of his mop of blond curls.

  Adam was a gangly, upper-middle-class English boy with an insouciant line in faux sophistication that seemed to implicitly suggest he had already “been there, seen that, done it” at the age of not-so-sweet sixteen. He had certainly been to more places and seen and done more than most of his contemporaries at Mount Temple, arriving at school fresh from a holiday in Pakistan, where he had hung out with hippies, smoked joints and engaged in a torrid romantic affair (or so he claimed). Adam had a rebellious, confrontational attitude toward authority that was only mildly disguised by his broad smile and impeccable manners. He carried a flask of coffee around with him, from which he would pour himself cups during lessons. When asked by exasperated teachers what he thought he was up to, he would politely explain that he was having a cup of coffee, always remembering to add “sir” or “miss’ where appropriate. Adam was unfailingly courteous but determined to go his own way—which was often straight to detention.

  The last of the future superstars was Larry Mullen. He was in the year below mine, and was a handsome, self-contained blond kid who, at that stage, simply did not register on any of our consciousnesses. But Larry was the start of it all.

  In autumn 1976, during my second year at Mount Temple, a notice appeared on the board in the Mall, the corridor that ran the length of the principal school building where we used to hang out. “Drummer looking for musicians to form band. Contact Larry Mullen, third year.” At thirteen, my brother was a year below Larry, but, as the proud possessor of a Teisco Stratocaster–copy electric guitar, Ivan was invited to audition. On Saturday, September 25, 1976, he turned up at Larry’s modest semidetached house in Artane along with Paul, Adam, Dave and his elder brother, Dick Evans.

  So that’s Ivan McCormick, right? Despite spending most of his life as a musician, being present at the early rehearsals for the group that would become U2 is Ivan’s sole claim to anything approaching fame. And then a sloppy biographer handed it to his older brother, robbing him of even this footnote in rock history. So I am happy to have this opportunity to set the record straight. My brother was the loser who let superstardom slip through his careless fingers, not me.

  The assembled ranks of would-be rock stars crowded into the Mullens’ kitchen to discuss their plans over tea and crackers. It was, as Ivan recalls, quickly agreed by everyone present that they were ready and willing to form a group. The names of groups such as Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Fleetwood Mac—all of whom Ivan had only the faintest conception of—were bandied about as worthy influences. Ivan felt nervous and out of his depth, being by some way the youngest person present, but his trump card was that he had the most handsome guitar, clean and modern with a bright white and red body, which everyone admired. Dave Evans, meanwhile, had a small white acoustic which his mother had bought secondhand for the princely sum of £1 (without strings). But, using Ivan’s electric, Dave demonstrated that he could play the solo from Irish rock hero Rory Gallagher’s “Blister on the Moon,” which put him in pole position for the role of lead guitarist.

  His brother, Dick, was the eldest, at seventeen. He had left school the previous year and, as if to signify his adult status, sported an outcrop of facial hair which he unconvincingly attempted to pass off as a beard. He had brought along a strange-looking object with a body shape that was apparently supposed to resemble a swan in flight, hand-painted bright yellow. Dick had constructed this instrument himself in the shed at the bottom of his garden, following instructions in an issue of Everyday Electronics magazine. The resulting instrument sounded about as convincing as it looked but at least Dick could play chords and hold down a rhythm. This was more than could be said for Paul, who had a big, battered acoustic which he tackled with energy and gusto rather than anything approaching skill or finesse. But Paul made up for his lack of musical skills with his sense of passion and conviction, already talking as if they were a band and not just an ill-sorted gathering of schoolboys.

  With four guitarists squeezing in between the fridge and the bread-bin, the designated rhythm section comprised Adam (who owned a cheap Ibanez-copy bass, which he couldn’t actually play but could certainly talk about) and Larry, who had opened the kitchen doors to create space in which to set up his drum kit, half in the kitchen and half in a small conservatory precariously attached to the back of the house. In these odd circumstances the meeting concluded with a chaotic jam session involving wobbly renditions of the Rolling Stones classics “Brown Sugar” and “Satisfaction.” There were too many guitarists, not enough amplification and no consensus as to the correct chord sequences of the songs being played, but none of that seemed to matter. A new star had appeared in the rock ’n’ roll firmament. For these plucky individuals—well, some of them, anyway—nothing would be the same again.

  Ivan returned home on the 31 bus to announce that he had joined a new band. They were going to be called Feedback (allegedly a reference to the whining noise that emerged when Adam plugged his bass into a guitar amp). I noted this news with only a modicum of concern. If the name was anything to go by, this lot were going to be even less impressive (if perhaps more audibly so) than Electronic Wizard.

  My thespian career was advancing, albeit at a much slower pace than I would have liked. I attended drama classes on Saturday afternoons and experienced a moment of encouragement when I won an acting competition known as the Father Matthew Feis (pronounced “fesh,” Gaelic for “entertainment.” I have no idea who Father Matthew was but presumably he liked to have a good time). It was a hideous affair, characterized by rampant overacting, with starry-eyed juveniles racing energetically about every inch of the stage as if convinced the theatrical arts were a branch of the Olympics. When my turn came I stood stock-still in the central spotlight. I would like to say that this was a carefully contrived dramatic device, but actually my legs were trembling so much I was afraid that if I moved I would fall over. It was my first time in front of a large audience and when the applause began my ego took a direct hit from a bolt of lightning. I staggered off dazed with happiness, physically buzzing from the adrenaline rush. This was everything I had ever dreamed about, especially when the results were announced and I was beckoned back on stage to receive a medal for first prize. The principal judge, an obscure drama critic whose authority was undisputed simply on the grounds that she had come all the way from England, whispered to me that my performance was the only interesting thing she had seen all day. Could it get any better than this? Well, yes, actually. On the cita
tion I received she had written: “A performance of powerful understatement and great control. This boy has immense talent—please look after him.”

  But nobody did look after me. Nobody would ever look after me. Not that I guessed that then, otherwise I might have had the good sense to jack it all in and concentrate on my technical drawing or some other useful subject. I remained convinced that stardom was my destiny, although I was a little disillusioned to discover that a commendation from Father Matthew counted for very little in Hollywood.

  Ivan continued to attend rehearsals for Feedback in the school music room after hours. He was tolerated by the older boys primarily because of his guitar, which Dave would liberate him of for the duration of the sessions, leaving Ivan to strum inaudibly on Dave’s cheap acoustic. Dick had been told he could stay in the fold on the proviso that he got himself a decent instrument, preferably one not constructed in his garden shed. Adam had his bass and therefore his position was assured—all he had to do was learn how to play it. But Adam, at least, had attitude, confidence and all the right buzzwords. With a cigarette dangling from his bottom lip, he would talk about sorting out some “gigs” by making the right “connections.” They needed “good management” and to “go on the road,” apparently, if they were ever going to “land a deal.” It all sounded good to the others, even if they had only the vaguest idea what he was banging on about.