Killing Bono: I Was Bono's Doppelganger

by Neil McCormick

  And I thought, “Rock stardom couldn’t have happened to a nicer and, frankly, more deserving guy. He’s certainly put it to a lot better use than I ever would have.”

  Twenty-Two

  Bono’s father, Bob Hewson, passed away at four a.m. on Tuesday, August 21, 2001, aged seventy-five, after a long battle with cancer. Bono was at his father’s bedside when he died. But that very same day, he flew to London to perform with U2 at Earl’s Court on their All That You Can’t Leave Behind tour. Kneeling down on stage in front of 17,000 strangers, Bono made the sign of the cross. “This one is for my old man,” he told the crowd, his voice heavy with emotion.

  I’ve seen a lot of U2 shows over the years, all of them special in their own way, but that show was something else, a whole other level of rock ’n’ roll, life and death riding on power chords and a howling voice. Songs already imbued with intense qualities of spiritual yearning gained whole new dimensions of meaning, overflowing with terrible poignancies and heartbreaking ironies. “I will be with you again,” sang Bono at the end of “New Year’s Day,” evoking the aching rawness of his bereavement. “I’m a man, I’m not a child,” he wailed on “Kite.” “I know that this is not good-bye…”

  The atmosphere in the arena was crackling with unseen forces. Primal energies were being unleashed, feelings too great to be contained within any one person were somehow transmitted and shared between thousands. Bono leaned out to the crowd with grief, love, loss, hope, anger, unfailing optimism. And they reached back to him, a sea of hands, reaching up to let him know they cared.

  Afterward, I went backstage with Gloria, where I was greeted by the Edge. “We were wondering if you had made it to the show,” he said, a comment that made me feel valued, especially in front of Gloria, who had never quite got over her suspicions that my relationship with U2 was largely in my mind. The Edge looked exhausted and shell-shocked, sweat glistening on his brow. “That was a tough one,” he admitted. “I don’t know how he got through that.”

  There was no need to resort to clichés about how the show must go on to understand what Bono was doing on stage that night. Those who knew him understood that he wanted to be there, perhaps even needed to be there, working out his innermost feelings in the place he feels most at home. “Great performers are supposed to play to the back of the hall,” he once told me. “But really driven performers, I think you’ll find, are playing to one person. It might be a lover. But it might be your father.”

  Bono had never talked to me much about his dad. It was the death of his mother that seemed to loom large in his psyche, the unseen force that was always driving him on, but the peculiar thing was that he once admitted to me he could barely remember his mother. “I even forget what she looks like,” he confessed, almost as if ashamed. The key parental relationship was with his father but it was a deeply frustrating one. “Trying to talk to my old man is like trying to talk to a brick wall,” he would complain. Discussing the effects of his mother’s sudden death, he said it was as if “the house had been pulled down. After the death of my mother that house was no longer a home. It was just a house.” And it was a house of suffering men, who could not communicate. But toward the end of his father’s life Bono seemed to have reached a kind of emotional rapprochement with the distant figure with whom he had such a complex, yearning relationship. After he was gone, Bono would love to tell stories about his father, laughing at the recollections with genuine affection, despite the harsh emotional kernels that often lurked at their core.

  “I had an amazing moment with my old man the first time he came to America,” he told me, chuckling at the memory. “I picked him up in a limousine. Now, I don’t like limousines but I knew it would have the reaction it did. He wouldn’t get in it! So we had to take a taxi! It was in Texas and at sound check I organized with the lighting people to put a spotlight on him during the encore. I said ‘I wanna introduce you to somebody, it’s their first time in the United States,’ Holler! ‘It’s their first time in Texas!’ Bigger holler! ‘This is the man who gave me my voice; this is Bob Hewson!’ The light came on, twenty thouand Texans hooting at him, and he stood up and he just waved a fist—at me! After the show, usually I’m left on my own for a minute just to calm down, but I heard these footsteps behind me and I looked around and it was my dad and his eyes were watering and I thought ‘This is it! This is the moment! Finally, he’s going to tell me something! This could be very interesting. This is a moment I’ve waited all my life for.’ My father was going to tell me he loved me. And he walked up, he put his hand out, a little shaky, a little unsteady, he’d had a few drinks, looked me in the eye and he said, ‘Son…you’re very professional!’ ”

  It’s the kind of tale where you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Right there, almost tangible, was the emotional gulf that separated Bono from me, the star from the wannabe. “If you are trying to fill that kind of hole, music and being a performer is an obvious route,” he admitted. “Ultimately it won’t be satisfying, but insecurity is at the root of most interesting endeavors, I find. If you’re totally secure in yourself and you were told all your life that you were the bee’s knees, well, you’re probably gonna wind up with a respectable job in the city or something! And that’s what I want my kids to feel, by the way! I don’t like being the Boy Named Sue!”

  Bono and Ali have four children. Two young teenage girls, Jordan and Eve, and two infant sons, Eli and John. “I’m so glad I was able to give Bono sons,” Ali once told me. “He’s great with the girls but the relationship between father and son is very special and I don’t think he really had that in his life.”

  We were out at dinner in Dublin one night, just me, Bono, Ali, Jordan, Eve, a large posse of the girls’ teenage friends, Gavin Friday, Guggi, Edge and, well, whoever else might turn up. Bono led his entourage into the restaurant at the Clarence Hotel. We had no reservations and the restaurant was looking rather crowded, but the waiters were impressively accommodating, providing two secluded balcony tables for an unspecified number of people, and graciously responding to Bono’s rather airy instruction to “bring food!” with a choice selection from the menu. But then, U2 do own the hotel. We settled into a discreet alcove where we could observe the activity below without ourselves being under scrutiny. “Do you like this?” inquired Bono. “I designed it myself!” As we ate, friends kept appearing, Bono bidding them to sit at the tables and join us, until there were at least twenty people gathered around, eating and drinking. There were familiar faces from the old days and a smattering of Dublin’s rock glitterati. Shane McGowan, alcoholic songsmith, lurched in to find that Bono, anticipating his arrival, had already ordered his favorite whiskey. Sinead O’Connor settled down at one point and looked at me curiously. “Have we met?” she asked. I denied everything.

  Ali was looking stunning, with her lustrous black hair, knowing eyes and smooth skin. The years had been extremely kind to her, perhaps aided by the kind of luxurious lifestyle that massive wealth can provide. Not that Ali lived a particularly pampered existence. Besides being mother to four and wife to a force of nature, Ali had studied politics at university, attaining a social-sciences degree, and had become a noted activist in environmental causes. Talking politics with Ali, though, was a slightly surreal affair, since she and Bono were acquainted with so many world statesmen. When she said, “I really like Tony Blair,” you were never entirely sure if this was a policy or personal endorsement. Discussing the American presidency, she said, as if it were the most unremarkable aside, “We flew to Africa with the Clintons last week to see Nelson Mandela.” As you do. “Chelsea’s the one to watch,” advised Ali. “Bill and Hillary are incredibly smart but Chelsea’s got both their brains.”

  Her own daughters seem to have been blessed with their mother’s looks while exhibiting something of their father’s social fearlessness, happily talking to anyone who spoke to them and holding their own in the midst of an increasingly unruly assembly. “A woman asked me for my autograph today,”
revealed Eve, with a mixture of pride and incredulity. “I said, ‘What do you want my autograph for? I’m only twelve! Ask my dad!’ ” They both sat pressed up against Bono, excitedly relating their day’s incidents to their father, who seemed somehow able to pay attention to everyone—his daughters, their friends, his own friends. Sitting at the head of the table, Bono struck me as a king among his courtiers, yet he appeared oblivious to this effect, almost willfully unaware of the central part he played in so many lives.

  “You know, Neil, your life and my life are not so different,” he said to me, as we chatted about events in London, where I had bought a terraced Victorian house to accommodate the impending arrival of my first baby. I may have snorted at his comment. I felt in debt up to my eyeballs, in the midst of rapidly mounting domestic chaos, and couldn’t help thinking that the bill for the evening’s soiree, which Bono would generously pay without a glance, would probably amount to more than a week’s earnings for me, a sum that could quickly sort out a few of my more pressing creditors. But that wasn’t what Bono had on his mind. “You might think I live in some kind of rarefied atmosphere, but I’ve got all the same concerns as you. When you spend time in the Third World, the gap between an ordinary life there and a life in the West is enormous, almost unimaginable. But the gap between where you are and where I am is microscopic. It’s just degrees of luxury.”

  He told me about a recent family holiday to a château in France that he shared with the Edge. “It is gorgeous. Beautiful gardens. Fantastic views. It is everything you could imagine. And I was standing in the garden, watching the sunset, and it suddenly struck me, ‘I own this! This is my house! This is my life!’ In all these years, that thought had never occurred to me before. Really. Because I’ve always been in the middle of it. And the house, the money, that’s not what’s important. It’s never been important. It’s the family and the work. It’s the same things you care about. It’s the same things everyone cares about.”

  We clinked glasses. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot, lately,” he said. Bono was in cheerful, gregarious form. Still, it was hard to escape the impression that his father hovered like a ghost behind our conversation. He was orphaned now, as we all someday will be, and perhaps forced to address the psychological engines that made him tick. “I’ve been thinking about what really matters. What can I do that will make my kids proud. What can I do to make a difference.”

  “I think you’ve made a difference,” I said. “Most of us are lucky if we’ve touched a few lives. You’ve touched millions. Aren’t you the man who saved the world?”

  “Oh, fuck off!” roared Bono amiably, perhaps suspecting that I was poking fun at him. Was it that obvious?

  “I don’t know how you find time to actually fit in your family and U2 around all the charitable causes,” I said.

  “You’re starting to sound like the Edge,” said Bono. “Debt relief is not a charity. Seven thousand Africans dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease is not a cause. It’s an emergency!”

  “See. There you go again!” I laughed. “You can’t help yourself!”

  I know that Bono sometimes despairs of his image as some kind of latter-day saint. “I am not in any way at peace,” he told me on another occasion. “I think the world is a really unfair and often wicked place and beauty is a consolation prize. And it’s not enough for me. It just isn’t. There’s always been a kind of rage in me and it does still bubble up.”

  We were propping up the bar of the Clarence, being liberally supplied with drinks we didn’t have to pay for. “I have some influence here,” Bono told me, waving the barman over again. It was late in the evening, we were waiting for Ali to arrive before heading off to a party, and we were quite drunk. Talking about God, fame, politics, pop: all the usual subjects. Solving all the world’s problems over a pint. Or five. And there may have been some whiskey chasers involved. And a couple of cigars. And this was after Bono had told me he had given up drinking and smoking because it was playing havoc with his voice. But that was another conversation. Right now, Bono was talking about the burden of fame. Not the usual stuff about autograph-hunters and stalkers and paparazzi and oh it’s lonely at the top. But about the moral burden that he just could not shy away from.

  Jubilee 2000 was supposed to have been a year-long campaign leading up to the new millennium but it was so tantalizingly close to achieving its incredible goals that the deadline kept being stretched. It had turned into an ongoing Drop the Debt campaign, to which Bono’s personal commitment threatened to dwarf all his previous charitable efforts. Its demands on him were huge. He was so much more than a figurehead. He and Geldof could get things done. They could mobilize popular consensus. They could get world leaders like Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Jacques Chirac and Vladimir Putin to engage with the issues and make substantial commitments. And, behind the scenes, they could get into the offices and homes of all the less noted senators and governors and ministers and financiers whose cooperation was essential to turn the platitudes and promises of politicians into a functioning reality. Because, as Bono put it, “between the agreement we’ve managed to secure to cancel a hundred billion dollars in debt and actually getting the money to build hospitals and schools, immunize children against malaria, educate people about the HIV virus, is a lot of red tape and bureaucracy and it’s of Kafka-like proportions, everyone passing the buck and people hiding in the small print. And we’re going after each one of them! But it’s very frustrating. And I keep thinking there must be people more qualified to do this than me!”

  “Maybe there aren’t,” I replied. “This is where you find yourself at this place in time. I used to think, ‘How are they going to solve the Northern Ireland problem?’ They needed an individual to rise above the mire. They needed a Nelson Mandela. And they got…”

  “John Hume,” said Bono.

  “So the debt idea came into focus and they needed a figurehead. You put a politician up there and nobody is going to pay any attention. You put a concerned movie star like Richard Gere up there and it falls apart. He can’t carry the world with him. People would be suspicious. They’d mock him. But you’re one of the most famous people on the planet and look at what got you to where you are. You’ve got the passion, the intelligence, the faith, the conviction and twenty years of history that says this guy really believes in what he does. You are the right man, in the right place, at the right time.”

  Bono laughed. “You could talk a blind man into crossing a motorway.”

  “And never forget you’ve got God on your side,” I said.

  “You mean the lifelong argument I have with my maker?” he smiled, ruminatively. “I’m not sure if we’re on speaking terms at the moment.”

  “Welcome to the club,” I said.

  “The belief that there is love and logic at the heart of the universe is a big subject. If there is no God, it’s serious. If there is a God, it’s even more serious!” He laughed. “Sometimes I think it takes a lot more courage not to believe. I don’t know what gets you through the night.”

  “I haven’t quite given up on finding God,” I said. “I’m keeping my options open for a deathbed conversion.”

  “You have always been such a crank!” laughed Bono. “Even in school. What I always kind of looked up to in you was that you were just a nagging question! Just rooting and scratching for whys and wheres and whos and hows. You were more curious than I was, back then. I think maybe I’ve caught up with you.”

  It took me a while to digest this. “You looked up to me?” I finally blurted out. The possibility had never occurred to me that I might ever have been, in some small way, my hero’s hero.

  “Have I ever told you, if I hadn’t become a rock star I always thought I’d like to be a journalist?” said Bono.

  “Any time you feel like giving it a shot,” I said, “we can swap places.”

  Epilogue

  There may yet be a twist in this tale. Whether it is just another twist
of the knife buried between my shoulder blades remains to be seen.

  I never stopped writing songs. Never stopped playing my guitar and singing. I just stopped trying to foist my efforts on the rest of the world. I stopped looking so far outside myself for validation. My songs were my poetic diary, an emotional record of my life with Gloria, our ups and downs, my struggles with stepfatherhood, my state of perpetual existential crisis in my ongoing search for meaning and purpose. They were probably the best songs I had ever written but they were only ever played to myself, my family and my closest friends. To my own surprise, I found that was audience enough. Just about.

  And maybe that was further evidence that I never really had that God-shaped hole Bono talked about, that dark engine of stardom, that motherless black hole of naked desire sucking in all the attention it can get. “If you were of sound mind you wouldn’t need seventy thousand people a night telling you they loved you to feel normal,” he admitted to me once, before adding, reflectively, “It’s sad, really.”

  But still I had the music. It may even be true to say that music meant more to me than ever. Because once you have dived into the stream of music that flows like a torrent through the history of mankind, once you have truly surrendered to its power, immersing yourself in its nurturing force, only a fool would crawl to the bank and shake himself dry. Playing a musical instrument is not just a conduit to the latent joy within you, it is a vehicle of release from all the constricted emotions and petty frustrations and little disappointments of everyday life. Music is a channel to the spirit. It is a gateway to yourself. I don’t know how I would get by without my guitar.

  And then, for my fortieth birthday, Gloria bought me an electric Custom Telecaster and amplifier. Big mistake.

  To celebrate the occasion, I assembled a motley crew of musical contemporaries to perform in a local pub under the name Groovy Dad (because we are dads, and we are groovy). One of my fellow rock rejects, Reid Savage, now a graphic designer, was lead guitarist and musical director. We had a set-builder on drums. An astrophysicist on bass. Ivan came along and joined in on backing vocals. We opened a short but lively set with a version of Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll.” Which seemed appropriate. It really had been a long time since I rock-and-rolled.