Killing Bono: I Was Bono's Doppelganger

by Neil McCormick

  Back at the flat, I had a long chat with Ivan about what we were going to do. It was pretty clear to both of us. We had to form another band. And we couldn’t afford to mess about. We would only accept the most brilliant musicians. We would create something that was undeniable. That was the key word. This band had to be so good that no one could turn their back on us.

  Fourteen

  With a keen sense of our priorities, we immediately set about the task of coming up with a new band name. We loved Yeah! Yeah! and wanted something that maintained a sense of continuity, eventually settling (after the usual rounds of surreal word games) on another phrase from rock history: we would be Shook Up! (fondly retaining an exclamation mark).

  We placed a small ad in the back of Melody Maker, the established forum for contacting musicians. The phone did not stop ringing for five days. It began to dawn on me that we weren’t alone in our ambitions. Like a musical Hollywood, London draws in every dreamer in the land. Entire industries are apparently staffed by people in a state of occupational denial. Shop assistants are getting a band together; waiters are working on demos; builders are talking to publishers. We met and auditioned hundreds of our fellow wannabes, musicians of wildly varying degrees of ability, putting them through rigorous tests in our pursuit of greatness.

  Our method of whittling down the numbers of bassists was rather cheeky. We would ask what they thought of Adam Clayton. If they expressed admiration for U2’s bassist we immediately struck their name off the list. If, on the other hand, they said something like, “Forget it, man. The guy still uses a plectrum!” then they got invited to audition.

  Looking back, it’s hard to avoid seeing this as a first sign of resentment at U2’s success. I did not think of it in that way at the time because I loved U2, admired Adam as an individual—he was always very courteous and friendly to me—and knew that his idiosyncratic but inventive approach to his instrument was an integral part of the group’s distinctive sound. Still, he was probably the only bassist in a band of that world-beating stature who could be counted on to make mistakes in every gig he played. I suppose that identifying this as a weakness, a chink in U2’s incredible armor, imbued Ivan and me with hope that we could still, against all odds, somehow equal and even (dream on) better our old associates.

  Our first new recruit was a bassist called Vlad Naslas, who passed our test with flying colors. “You must be joking!” he said, when Adam’s name was mentioned. In his very first phone call, Vlad told us it was fated that we work together so there was no point in auditioning anyone else. He had learned this information from his girlfriend, who was psychic. She also told him we were going to be one of the most successful groups in the world, so of course we took her predictions seriously.

  Vlad immediately struck us as a rather strange bloke. He was extremely tall and gangly, utterly deadpan in expression, with no discernible sense of humor and imbued with a quality of inner confidence that was almost preternatural. Meeting us for the first time, he shook our hands and said, “We’re going to go a long way together.” It was almost embarrassing pointing out to him that he still had to audition, but somehow not in the least surprising when he turned out to be the most fluid, modern and stylish bassist we had ever heard.

  The rest of the crew were not so easy to come by. In that synth-dominated era, keyboard players were much in demand. Anyone who could combine serious musical skills with the knowledge of electronics, computing and sequencing required to operate the kind of multilevel keyboard setup we envisaged was in a position to charge a small fortune for their services—money we did not have. Drummers posed another problem. It occurred to us as we listened to around 150 of them play that very few can actually keep time. Perhaps that was why most studio work was being delegated to machines.

  There was a kind of musical tyranny at work in the eighties, an impossible and in many ways self-defeating quest for mechanical perfection. Up until the end of the seventies, records related to what musicians could actually play. Technological advances in studio recording equipment, synthesizers, samplers, sequencers and drum machines, along with the advent of digital recording (allowing sounds to be moved around with no loss of quality), meant that rhythm tracks could now be laid down with metronomic precision and musical arrangements constructed with mathematical exactitude. You could have plotted out many of the era’s recordings on graph paper. Add to this an obsession with sonic crunch, so that every individual sound was tailored for maximum dynamic impact (drums, in particular, began to take on the qualities of percussive battering rams), and the effect was musical overload. The apotheosis of this trend were Trevor Horn’s astonishing, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink productions for Frankie Goes to Hollywood (actually not a very technically proficient live band), but the same devices were employed for every two-bit pop, rock and dance record, turning the charts into a kind of sonic assault course.

  Standing somewhat forlornly against this trend was the rise of what was known in Britain as “indie” (for independent), a dogmatically nonconformist movement who retained a human dimension to their recordings even if it meant sometimes being out of time and out of tune. Indie’s spiritual godfathers may have been the dark, dirgelike Echo & the Bunnymen, its prime exponents the jangly, lyrical Smiths. The peculiar thing is that, if one was to count the survivors of new wave among these nonconformist ranks (such as the Pretenders, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Dexys Midnight Runners, Squeeze and, indeed, U2), then this is the music that I preferred, even as I enthusiastically embraced Shook Up!’s participation in the fashionable quest for the perfect beat. In the first indication of a divergence of our tastes, Ivan was a fan of the good-time, cocktail pop of Wham! and pretentious posturing of Duran Duran (both of whom I detested). We found common ground, however, in Prince, the Minneapolis wonder whose remarkable musical skills brought a human dimension to the hi-tech. Purple Rain replaced Thriller on the household turntable as the very model of a modern pop record.

  It was against this background that we started making demos with Vlad. He had a decent 8-track home-recording setup in his house in Walthamstow and he quickly assumed the role of producer, although Ivan and I had learned enough to pull our weight. Recording on this limited facility was a painfully slow process, but, through the intense work involved in building up an entire set’s worth of material, the three of us forged a strong bond.

  After much painful auditioning, we found a further recruit, a charming Welsh psychology graduate, Steve Alexander, who was the most technically accomplished drummer we had ever heard. He had a double bass drum and a huge, sprawling kit mixing synth drums with real drums. Steve could play the kind of complex jazz-funk arrangements that get musos stroking their beards with excitement and he could rock out like John Bonham on speed. And he had something else going for him, a quality I’ve rarely come across before or since, certainly not in someone who wasn’t rich or famous or even particularly handsome (although he did have a big, twinkly smile). Steve had an utterly magnetic appeal for the opposite sex. Perhaps it was pheromonal. Girls buzzed around him, wherever we went. Indeed, all our girlfriends lobbied us to take him on, which was mildly disturbing.

  We still did not have a keyboard player but (guess what?) we had a plan. We would entice all the record companies with our new demo and then invite them to a showcase, hiring extra musicians for the event as necessary. The fact that, once again, everything depended upon our sheer talent was not seen as a possible flaw. We were back on the beat and our confidence was riding high.

  One thing we had learned was that there was absolutely no point sending tapes into A&R departments. We knew we had to do this eyeball to eyeball, which meant getting into their offices and being physically present when our tape was played. Record companies don’t particularly like this but I soon discovered that if you absolutely insist they will let you. Especially if you tell them who else you are seeing. For as much as they really don’t want to be bothered by pesky musicians they are also afraid of being left
out. Nobody wants to be Dick Rowe, the A&R man at Decca who notoriously told the Beatles that guitar groups were on the way out.

  “He’s probably kicking himself now,” Paul McCartney later remarked.

  “I hope he kicks himself to death,” John Lennon snapped back, neatly summarizing most musicians’ attitude toward the company men who hold our fate in their hands.

  Using every contact I had, I wangled my way into the offices of all the major (and many minor) record companies in London. Well, all of them except MCA, where Lucien Grainge had become head of A&R and refused to see me. I had some new photos of Ivan and me (the band, for the moment, would remain in the background) taken by Joan, and very handsome we looked too. And I had a nicely packaged demo featuring the songs we wrote for Billy Gaff and a new track about a bitter one-night stand, called “Sweets from a Stranger,” which Bono had phoned up raving about, describing it as a “pop classic.” Bono suggested we see his A&R man, Nick Stewart, which seemed a good place to start.

  At Island Records, I found myself in the most enormous office I had ever seen, floor space being an indication of status. A tall English gentleman politely ushered me into a seat opposite his desk and asked if I wouldn’t mind terribly if he had a quick listen to something that had just come in before we got down to business. “Of course,” I said, graciously. He then stuck on a test-pressing of a new Grace Jones track produced by Trevor Horn. At full volume. I sat there pinned to my chair by the sonic blast, listening to something that had probably taken six weeks to record in a £1,000-a-day studio. It was utterly mind-blowing. When the opus was finished (some twenty stupefying minutes later), Nick turned the volume down halfway, muttered, “That was rather good,” and put on my cassette.

  Minds were not blown. Hair was not even ruffled.

  On my travels around the A&R departments of London I learned something truly extraordinary. A&R people don’t understand what a demo is. They know what it looks like, all right. And they know it features the songs and performances of an unsigned act. But they don’t know what it is.

  “That’s a good song but I’m not sure about the production” is a fairly standard A&R comment. What production? No one seems to be interested in how on earth you managed to squeeze that much life out of a cheap, out-of-date and probably faulty 8-track machine. Instead they want to know why you didn’t go for a tougher drum sound and more backing vocals. They don’t approach demo tapes the way an art teacher might look over his pupils’ sketches. They don’t listen out for the shape of things to come. They want to hear something that can compete with the records that are blasting out of office stereos all day. They sit in their chairs waiting to be knocked out.

  Only, in most cases they don’t sit in their chairs at all. While your demo is playing away, they wander around the office talking. Or they read a newspaper. Or make phone calls. Or watch cricket on TV with the sound turned down. It is all too rare (and hugely heartening) for someone to listen conscientiously. Most often they barely pay attention and then have the presumptuousness to comment as if they were the world’s greatest authority. Play half a song, talk throughout and then say, “I don’t think much of the lyrics.”

  The first few times that happened, I just sat on my hands and tried to be polite, because no matter what rubbish they spouted almost everyone was promising to come to our next gig. But by the time I got to WEA records my edges were beginning to show. I sat in the cramped cubicle that passed for an office of the company’s most junior A&R person, who read the NME while playing our demo at low volume on a cheap, muffled hi-fi, reaching up to hit the fast-forward button halfway through each song. “Frankly, I don’t think it sounds particularly interesting,” this oik sniffed at the end.

  I snapped. “Not interesting?!” I yelped. “It sounded completely crap!”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go that far but…,” he stuttered. I cut him off before he could come out with any more rubbish.

  “I can’t believe you actually listen to music on that shitty stereo,” I said. “Your cassette player needs its heads cleaned, which is something you might have noticed if you had actually been fucking listening!”

  He gaped at me in shock. Perhaps he’d never had a musician do anything but kiss his spotty behind before. “Give me back my tape,” I demanded.

  “What?” he gulped, evidently having difficulty adjusting to this dynamic shift in the nature of our relationship.

  “Just give it back,” I said. “I’m going to find someone else around here to play it to. Someone who’s got more than wax between his ears.”

  “Look, I didn’t like it,” he snapped defensively. “And if I don’t like it nobody else here’s gonna like it either.”

  “Just give me the tape, shithead,” I snarled.

  He nervously handed my package back. I stormed out of his office, cheeks burning with outrage and humiliation.

  And then my luck finally changed. Walking down the corridor came the familiar figure of Bill Drummond. “Hi, Neil,” said the Teardrop Explodes’ former manager cheerfully. “What brings you to WEA?”

  It transpired that Bill had a label called Korova, to which his bands (including Echo & the Bunnymen) were initially signed. Bill had sold a controlling interest to WEA, where he now operated as an independent A&R man. He would be paid a percentage of the company’s earnings for any new bands that he picked up. He took me into his office (a much more impressive affair than the A&R hack’s cubicle) and, out of politeness, listened to the tape that had just been rejected. He listened carefully, at high volume, with growing enthusiasm. He stopped the tape after each track and asked questions before continuing. He played some parts twice. By the end he was grinning widely, declaring that he was eager to see us perform.

  We needed money to effect this next step so we did what we always did under such straitened circumstances: went running back to our daddy. Thankfully, he remained convinced, against all evidence, that the McCormick genes were abundant with talent. We hired the Clarendon Ballroom in Hammersmith for the night of Friday, June 14, 1985. We hired a PA and lights and a dry-ice machine. We printed posters and tickets. We engaged the services of a professional keyboard player and booked a rehearsal studio. We could afford only a week but it was all the time we needed. After all, we had been getting ready for this our whole lives. This was an ensemble of high-calibre musicians and, fired by our enthusiasm, they pulled out all the stops. After years of vainly trying to flog demo tapes to a disinterested music business, I had almost forgotten the pure joy of performance. Because something amazing takes place every time musicians play together, from the rehearsal room to the stage: melodies and rhythms emerge as if from nowhere—complex patterns of sound spontaneously created by the intermingling of even the most simple ingredients. By the end of that week we were really cooking. Other bands would stop by to watch our set. We had three-part harmonies, choreographed moves and one highly drilled monster of a modern, funky, hard-rocking multifaceted pop group firing on all cylinders.

  We inveigled all our friends, and friends of friends, to come to the gig. We invited everyone we knew in the music business, from the post room to the boardroom. And then we waited, nervous enough to puke, to see if anyone would actually turn up.

  Slowly, the venue began to fill. By nine o’clock there were at least 250 people in the ballroom. At nine thirty the lights went down and, under a cold blue spot, dry ice started to pour off the stage. The sound of a Gothic church organ spiraled up to the rafters as we filed out in the darkness. I hadn’t been on a stage in two and a half years. But, as I looked out into the faces before me, I knew this was where I belonged.

  What a gig that was. We went out all guns blazing, performing as if we were playing for our very lives. And the audience reacted in kind. We brought the house down, ending with two loudly requested encores—and, while the audience may have been sympathetic, I have been at enough other showcases to know that this is not always the case. Afterward, I walked out into the crowd, accepting the cong
ratulations of our friends. Dad had made it over for the gig and was grinning from ear to ear. “I always knew you had it in you,” he said. “That was fantastic, boys.” But there was one thing uppermost on my mind. I had to check the guest list. When I got to the entrance, Ivan had already beaten me to it, eagerly scouring the pages for the crucial ticks that would show us who had attended. There were almost a hundred names on the list. But something was definitely wrong. He handed the sheets of paper to me without a word. All of two people from the music business had shown up. And one of them was a secretary from Virgin who had taken pity on us. Of all the A&R people we had seen, only Bill Drummond had been there. But he had not hung around after the show.

  Let me pass on another piece of wisdom to any aspiring musicians reading this sorry saga. Once you actually get into an A&R man’s office he will say almost anything to get you out. Promising to come to your gig is one of the easiest ways.

  A spontaneous party broke out in the flat that night, a kind of wake mixing celebration and despair. The gig had been a triumph, no doubt about it, but we had put all our eggs in one basket…and dropped it. I crashed out, drunk out of my mind, about five in the morning. Somebody had videoed the gig and it was still playing on the TV set in my bedroom, with the sound turned down.

  I woke to static on the TV screen and a phone ringing. Sunlight poured in through the windows. My head was spinning and when I lurched to my feet I thought I might throw up. I staggered into the kitchen. There were bodies all over the place. What the hell had been going on here? It looked like a massacre.