Killing Bono: I Was Bono's Doppelganger

by Neil McCormick

  The sessions were good fun, with Paul acting as ice-breaker, cracking jokes and filling the room with his energy. While Dave was initially very quiet and Dick seemed to the girls intimidatingly older and somewhat detached, the atmosphere lightened as Paul hustled proceedings along, making sure everyone was involved. To add to their Peter Frampton and Beach Boys numbers, Feedback were rehearsing an eclectic bunch of popular rock songs, including some Rolling Stones, Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold,” the Eagles’ “Witchy Woman” and the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin.” As well as angelic harmonies it was decided that the latter would feature a flute solo by Orla. The group were having some problems, however, getting the instrumental interlude to work. Or rather, to be more specific, getting Adam to come in on time.

  After the second chorus, the song broke down for a few bars of strummed guitars and flute (played by Orla) before a little bass lick presaged the rest of the band kicking back in. Except, to the initial amusement and eventual exasperation of everyone present, Adam missed his cue every time. His absence of rhythm became a running joke, amusing to all but the bassist himself. At the appropriate moment, everyone in the band would shout “Now!” and Adam, startled, would come in half a second behind. Nothing could solve the problem. It became Larry’s responsibility to cue Adam. “Just watch me,” he’d instruct him before they played the song. It made not a whit of difference. Adam would come in late and the song would bump awkwardly along till everyone fell in with the laggardly bassist.

  Years later, Stella watched U2’s documentary Rattle and Hum. The band, now considered the most popular and important rock group in the world, were waiting in the wings of an enormous American stadium, preparing themselves to play before a crowd of 80,000. As they walked toward the stage, Stella was astonished to see Larry turn to Adam and repeat the phrase he had employed all those years before: “Just watch me.”

  “I thought, ‘My God,’ ” Stella told me afterward, “ ‘he still can’t do it!’ ”

  The hall at St. Fintan’s was a cavernous affair, a concrete shed that acted as school gymnasium-cum-theater, ill suited to the acoustics of rock ’n’ roll. It was the venue for a regular Saturday-night disco, which, in Ireland in 1976, meant a pasty-faced DJ playing a well-worn selection of prog- and heavy-rock records (Zeppelin, Rory Gallagher, Yes) while boys in denim jackets headbanged energetically. The limited numbers of girls who had been persuaded to attend would hug the wall and wait for a slow song (usually Zep’s “Stairway to Heaven” or something equally unromantic by Eric Clapton). The headline band, Ratt Salad, were a typical Dublin covers mob, pumping out twelve-bar boogies with lots of lead solos and lyrics name-checking American cities the participants had, in all likelihood, never visited.

  This was all new to me, however. I had never been to a disco before, let alone one with live bands, and I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to behave. I walked down to St. Fintan’s with a neighborhood pal, Ronan, and we huddled against a back wall, shoulders hunched, the collars of our bomber jackets pulled up around our faces, waiting for something to happen. Experience had taught us to be wary of the older local boys, who would seek out eye contact only to challenge you to a fight. “What you lookin’ at?” was a question from which you were unlikely to escape unscathed, so mostly we just looked at our feet.

  A very small crowd from Mount Temple had turned out to support the band and we acknowledged each other with the wariness that comes with being on hostile territory. Alison was there, along with Bono’s out-of-school gang, a close-knit group of misfits from Ballymun who called themselves (for reasons lost in the mists of childhood self-mythologizing) Lypton Village. I found the Village, with their stance of self-conscious weirdness and plethora of dryly delivered in-jokes, a somewhat intimidating presence. They were friendly toward me (particularly after I received a welcoming pat on the back from Paul) but I was so out of my element I sensed danger everywhere. If a fight was going to break out, it was likely to be between the Village and the locals—and thus I judged it better just to pretend not to know anybody. I waited for the gig to start in a state of quiet agitation, an undercurrent of fear heightening my sense of anticipation.

  Feedback’s second show was an almost unmitigated disaster. The sound was poor, with the drums echoing off the back wall and the instrumental mixture criminally out of balance. The cover versions were hackneyed and lumpen, lacking both the finesse of faithful reproduction and the energy of inspired reinvention. While members of the Village threw themselves about in front of the stage in a physical display of support, the rest of the denizens of the hall stood frozen in skeptical silence, gauche teenage boys determined to project seen-it-all-before machismo. Eager to bridge the gap opening up between band and audience, Paul responded by talking too much, babbling away between songs, determined to elicit a response. The response he got, however, was not especially encouraging. “Play the fuckin’ song, ya eejit!” someone yelled after a particularly verbose introduction.

  And then they played “Nights in White Satin.” The girls launched heartily into their oohs and aahs but couldn’t hear themselves through the PA. Neither could anyone else. When Orla began her flute solo, it at last became clear that the backing microphones had mysteriously ceased to function. Paul, guitar slung around his neck, dragged his mic and stand across to Orla and, after a few bars of complete musical confusion, Dave recommenced playing the instrumental section for the second time while Paul crouched in front of Orla, holding the mic to her flute. Then, just as the band seemed to be finding their groove, everyone turned to Adam for his all-important lick, whereupon the startled bassist commenced playing, late and out of time. Despite the exaggerated applause of the Village, there were no encores. Stella felt like crying. All that practice only for the performance to be such a mess.

  Years later, Bono told me that the girls had thought the band could be good without him, and tried to persuade the other members to kick him out. My sister, however, vehemently denies it. “I never thought they could be any good,” she insists.

  Probably the only person who walked away from the St. Fintan’s gig in a state of high excitement was me. I hadn’t seen or heard enough live rock to be any judge of quality but my ears were buzzing from the volume, my heart was pounding from the release of tension and I was more convinced than ever that I had to get my own band together. I even liked Ratt Salad.

  In a postmortem of their performance, Feedback agreed that the experiment with backing singers had been a failure. Paul, however, remained inspirationally upbeat about the group’s prospects. He had seen a “spark” and was convinced that the group could build themselves around it until they would set their world ablaze. Concerns, however, were raised about the band’s name—which, it was gloomily pointed out, could be construed as a joke at their own expense, suggesting a less-than-professional standard of musicianship. Adam (whose musicianship was perhaps the most suspect) proposed that they become the Hype. It was a word he had come across reading the British music papers, where journalists frequently accused the music business of “hyping” bands, essentially creating a publicity storm out of all proportion to the band’s actual abilities. As a group name it seemed modern, knowing and aspirational, an ironic comment on the music scene. It certainly suited a band whose ambitions currently far outweighed their actual abilities.

  Something was happening in the music scene, an urgent new movement taking shape in the rock underground of the U.K., the faintest of reverberations being just about distinguishable across the Irish Sea. You had to be almost psychically alert to detect the signs. You had to be hungry for something new. You had, in essence, to be a music-obsessed, Anglophile, neophyte teenager in the grip of an identity crisis with existential overtones. But, amid the sonic soup of corny show-band schmaltz, ersatz country and western, earnest folk ballads, self-aggrandizing heavy rock, slushy pop and chintzy disco that formed the sound track to Irish life, the first subtle hints of a brutally pared-down, compellingly aggressive rock rev
olution could be detected.

  There was no national pop radio channel in Ireland but if you lived in Dublin, on the east coast of the country, you could tune in through the static to the late-night John Peel show on BBCRadio One, broadcast from transmitters across the sea in Wales. Peel played an eclectic concoction of recordings from the outer limits of the musical stratosphere, to which I somewhat masochistically subjected myself as part of my ongoing musical education. I would lie in bed, in a state of baffled incredulity, listening to portentous, meandering, fey-psychedelic instrumentals and dissonant, distorted experimental metal epics by bands with names that sounded like mystic invocations to some mad old God of music, driven by a conviction that there was something going on here that I was just too young and inexperienced to understand. I listened intently, passing through waves of amusement, frustration and irritation, all the while searching for a key to unlock the door to this arcane world.

  And then, one wonderful night, spitting out of my tinny transistor came a sound that almost physically jerked me to attention. A high-pitched squall of keening, angry vocals spilled asymmetrically across an urgent, rhythmic bass and drum barrage, swamped in a thrashing blur of overdriven guitars. “I am the anti-KRRIST-a! / I am an anar-KYST-a!” I felt like I was listening to the aural equivalent of an avalanche. “Don’t know what I want but I know how to geddit…” The lyrics invoked an almost incandescent, fearfully righteous anger at the state of the world. “I wanna destroy the PASS-A-BOY…” Something physical seemed to shift inside me. This, I knew instantly, was my music, before I even knew what kind of music it actually was. In his characteristically understated fashion, Peel announced that we had just been listening to the debut single from the Sex Pistols, a group at the vanguard of the punk-rock scene. And so it was that, at fifteen years old, I discovered that I was a punk. Now all I had to do was find out what a punk actually was.

  If you read the rock-history books, they will tell you that punk rock was either: a) a sleazy New York pop-art scene of the mid-seventies; or b) an aggressive, sociopolitical London youth movement circa 1976. Whatever, punk’s originators and instigators, jealously guarding their role at the core of the phenomenon, tend to argue that it was all over bar the shouting, spitting and pogoing by 1977. Well, it might have been over for a tiny King’s Road elite. But for those of us out in the sticks, far removed from the pulse of the metropolitan underground, it was just getting started.

  I initially approached with great caution. The (very) few punks occasionally featured in slightly bemused TV reports or hysterical tabloid newspapers looked a dissolute bunch: spotty oiks with the dress sense of psychotic hobos. The whole punk aesthetic was designed to provoke, annoy and upset and those elements of society inclined to knee-jerk reactions were duly twitching away like demented Cossacks. My own principal concern at that early stage was from the perspective of a hormonally active teenage boy: would girls go out with me dressed like that? Not that they were exactly queuing up to run their fingers through my curly locks or make admiring comments about the cut of my flares. But, in 1977, the only people who did not seem to find punks stomach-churningly disgusting were other punks. And, frankly, there weren’t a lot of them about in Dublin. A few of the older blues bands (notably the Boomtown Rats) swapped their denim for leather, shaved off their mustaches and played their songs a bit faster, but that was about it. Punk simply had no real presence in Ireland. It was not played on radio or television. It could not be heard in the discos. The groups were not welcome in the show-band halls. And even if they had been I would have been too young to gain entry. Apart from tuning in to John Peel’s show, the only place I could actually hear punk rock was in Advance Records, a dingy, independent basement record shop in the city center, where I would sometimes hang about for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, staring at the posters and listening to the latest releases on the in-store speakers until the owner told me to buy something or fuck off.

  My first purchase was the Ramones’ debut album. With their power chords and floppy fringes, the Ramones to me were irresistible, like a buzz-saw Beatles. Afraid my parents would disapprove, I hid the sleeve under my bed and slotted the precious vinyl into the back of a Don McLean album my granny had given me.

  Despite punk’s cultural invisibility in Ireland, there was one invaluable source of information: the British weekly the New Musical Express. You could not buy this periodical in the local newsagents, so I had to make a bus trip into the city center to pick it up. It was worth the journey. The NME (and sometimes, if that was sold out, its rivals Sounds and Melody Maker) was my gateway to a parallel universe populated by bands with strange names and stranger haircuts. I read it from cover to cover, running my fingers over pictures of snarling young men in leather jackets splattered with painted slogans and girls in torn fishnets and badly applied makeup, their faces apparently held together by safety pins. My weekly engagement with alternative rock culture was an almost visceral, physical experience for me. People used to refer to the British music papers as “the inkies” because by the time you had finished reading them your hands and face and anything you might have touched was usually covered in black smudge. I slavered over the ornate prose, rabid sloganeering, speculative philosophizing and outlandish polemic of writers who treated rock ’n’ roll as if it was not just another strand of show business but a matter of life and death.

  It would be an exaggeration to say that everything I know about music I learned from the NME, but not much of an exaggeration. I followed the careers of groups whose music I had never heard and reveled in an arcane insider language I barely understood. Such was the plethora of acronyms employed that at first it seemed to me to be written in code. It took me a while to decipher the meaning of terms such as R’n’B (rhythm and blues), AOR (adult-oriented rock), MOR (middle of the road) and woofers and tweeters (I still have no clear understanding of these). For an inordinately long time I thought a BOF was some kind of extremely clever boffin (and not, as it turned out, a Boring Old Fart) and that “gobbing on” was slang for “chatting with”—embarrassingly, I didn’t grasp the latter until I was fully immersed in the local live rock scene and suggested to a friend during a gig that we should go and gob on a rather attractive girl in the corner; naturally, when he explained that this would involve covering her in spit I pretended that that was exactly what I’d meant.

  In school, there was a handful of fellow travelers and we were beginning to identify each other, exchanging scraps of largely bogus information. We followed the careers of groups we had never seen and passionately debated the merits of records we had never heard. It was almost better that way. Reviews were written in such vivid, passionate, evocative, polemic prose that just to read them was to hear music in your head, an imaginary sound of almost apocalyptic scope, make-believe compositions that could alter your very sense of reality—when in fact, more often than not, the records were just some tinny, speedy, three-chord, pub-rock thrash with someone yelling cheap revolutionary slogans over the top. Punk excited every fiber of our teenage beings because the very idea of it mirrored the changes our bodies and minds were going through, a physical revolt into the independence of adulthood. That the music all too rarely lived up to that promise hardly mattered. We imagined it did, and that was enough.

  A new school term commenced in September 1977, the final year for my class, with the dreaded Leaving Certificate exams ahead. The pressure was now on to buckle down and work, and this seemed to me like incredibly bad timing. My results up till then had been good but, at sixteen, my innate rebelliousness was becoming even more pronounced, fueled by my identification with punk. Just when it was supposed to matter most, I lost all interest in school. I had other things on my overactive mind—such as the meaning of life, and how to impress girls.

  One day in September, I was surprised to come across Paul Hewson in the school corridor. Being in my sister’s year, he should have departed for university that summer. It transpired, however, that he had failed the cr
ucial Irish-language exam that every schoolkid in the country was expected to pass, and consequently his place to study for an arts degree at University College Dublin had been withdrawn. So Paul was back at Mount Temple for another year, with nothing to do but study Irish. He didn’t seem to mind too much. He had the group, he had Alison and he had the chance to make some mischief.

  With typical boldness, Paul was the first to physically cross the line and appear in school dressed in the new garb of punk rock. Having raided his older brother Norman’s wardrobe for some secondhand sixties clothing, Paul turned up one day in creased, tight-fitting purple drainpipes, a sharply cut, thin-lapelled suit jacket and a pair of scuffed black Cuban heels. He had a fresh, tightly cropped haircut that was, in itself, positively shocking in an era when attractiveness corresponded with hair length; and to top off the whole outrageous effect he was wearing a thin chain that stretched from an earring to a safety pin through his mouth.

  The response was electrifying. As he strode purposefully through the Mall, a gaping crowd, simultaneously fascinated and abhorred, retreated shrieking before this strange vision. Teachers emerged from the staff room to see what the fuss was about and stood in openmouthed horror. “Hewson, what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  The lack of dress code at Mount Temple meant that they were left spluttering ineffectively as he continued his walkabout. He cheekily approached Alison and asked for a kiss. She was all too aware of her boyfriend’s propensity for pulling stunts, but his new look genuinely upset her. “Get away from me,” she yelped, repelling his advances. “What have you done to your face?”