Killing Bono: I Was Bono's Doppelganger

by Neil McCormick

  “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.

  Six

  School 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 Bon
o, 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.

  Despite fronting a band called Rocky De Valera and the Gravediggers (a name considered in some quarters to be a slanderous insult on the saintly patriot President Eamon De Valera, a cranky survivor of the 1916 rebellion), Rocky was not a punk. He favored old R’n’B standards, which he would deliver with maximum showmanship and minimum tunefulness. Although skeptical about any musical style developed post-1959, Rocky and Jack were amenable to the idea of encouraging local talent and lent us microphones for rehearsal and dispensed lots of free advice. “Forget this punk-rock power pop whatever ya wanna call it new-wave shite,” they’d say. “Stick with the classics. That’s all Irish audiences wanna hear. You can’t go wrong with good old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll.”

  The Gravediggers, who were quite successful on the Irish pub circuit, occasionally performed all-ages shows in the large hall at Howth Community Centre. Despite their skepticism about our oeuvre, the Modulators were invited to make their debut as a support act in September 1978.

  It wasn’t a huge surprise when Keith called to say he couldn’t make it to the final rehearsal before the gig, since he hadn’t made any of the other rehearsals either. But his prolonged ab
sence was plainly becoming a serious issue, especially in the light of our forthcoming concert. “You’ve got to make the gig, Keith!” we said, our sense of desperation precluding us from the usual threats and abuse. “We’re counting on you.”

  “I’ll be there, lads, I swear,” he assured us.

  The morning of the gig, he duly called to say he couldn’t make it.

  I’ll spare you the expletive-laden insults and increasingly pathetic entreaties that greeted this announcement. At least for once he had a good excuse. Indeed, he finally explained what had been going on the whole summer. Apparently he’d got into unspecified trouble with the local constabulary and had probationary restrictions that forbade him leaving his area. I am still not sure if this story was true, but it did contain a crucial ingredient for a middle-class new-wave group: street credibility. Our drummer had fought the law! And now the law was going to stop us playing a gig! Well, there was just no way we were going to let that happen. The man could not keep us down! Yeah! Fuck the pigs!

  Once we got that out of our system, we called Larry Mullen.

  “No problem, lads, I’ll sit in for you,” announced U2’s drummer. Larry, however, seemed to consider himself a pro helping out a bunch of amateurs (Us?! Amateurs?! Wherever did he get that idea?) and there were limits to how much effort he was prepared to make. “I don’t want to come down and rehearse. I’ll just see you at the gig. We’ll busk it.”

  Since we had never even rehearsed the set with Keith, this arrangement was perfectly acceptable to us.

  “See you there,” said Larry. “It’ll be nice to catch up with Frank.”

  I put down the phone. Shit! We hadn’t even told Frank he was no longer in the group, so it was hardly surprising that his friend didn’t know. It was perhaps time to address this situation. I called Frank.

  “Hey, Neil! Long time no hear! What’s going on?”