Killing Bono

by Neil McCormick

  I watched all this activity with a surge of pride. Punk rock had finally reared its ugly head in Mount Temple. Attempting to escape the hullabaloo, Paul ducked into the prefects’ room. I followed. (Neither of us were prefects but the room was considered an ideal hangout by the more insubordinate pupils, the experience being immensely enhanced whenever a prefect tried to make us leave.) “Where did you get that?” I said, admiring his chain. I had seen such things in the NME but it was hard to believe that someone would actually mutilate their cheek for the sake of fashion. “Dandelion Market,” said Paul. “Look.” He winked at me and removed the safety pin, demonstrating that you did not actually have to pierce your skin to keep it in place. Listening to the calamity outside the door, he seemed mightily pleased with the response his appearance provoked. Except for one thing. “Ali’s finished with me,” he revealed.

  The romance was patched up later the same day, when Paul promised to leave safety pins for babies’ nappies. His flirtation with punk as an antifashion movement was short-lived. (As the Edge remarked to me years later: “Bono was never a punk. He just looked like one ’cause he didn’t know how to dress!”) Likewise, the Hype never became a fully fledged punk band, but punk certainly affected their music. They arranged a gig on a Friday night in the unlikely environs of the Marine Hotel, a posh beachside establishment at Sutton Cross (close to St. Fintan’s). This was their first proper headline set for their own crowd, performing on the floor of a small bar packed with inebriated teenagers. The atmosphere was like an after-hours party, with gangs of schoolkids, unleashed from the restraining influence of authority, scooping down pints with an urgency born of the fear that at any moment the barman would realize they were under eighteen and turn the tap off. Alcohol held no appeal to me but I watched with nervous amusement as my contemporaries melted into drunkenness, lurching about, slurring words and apparently delighting in their growing clumsiness. Everyone was determined to have a good time.

  The group had been practicing every Saturday in the school music room and were growing in confidence and ability. Dave’s guitar playing was becoming sharper and this imbued the shy boy with new confidence onstage, where he would whirl his arms and throw rock ’n’ roll shapes. Paul was coming into focus as a frontman, pouring every ounce of his excess energy into performance. This crowd was already on his side and he fed off their goodwill, urging his band on. Alongside the usual rock standards, their set included tougher material by Thin Lizzy and David Bowie and a host of punk covers, including the Ramones’ “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment” and Tom Robinson’s rabble-rousing “2-4-6-8 Motorway.” Paul waved his arms about and stomped his feet as he bellowed the chorus, leading a noisy sing-along. They played their first original composition, an incongruous country rocker called “What’s Going On.” They banged out the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK,” a ridiculous song for an Irish band to perform, but with Paul aping Johnny Rotten and the band hammering away at the power chords, the effect was exhilarating. Stella and Orla and the soft-rock trimmings were gone. Instead, Paul’s friend Fionan Hanvey, a sometimes scarily intense character from the Village, stepped up to deliver unpolished backing vocals on a furious, high-speed version of Bowie’s “Suffragette City.” “Hey,!” he drawled as Paul countered, “Oh leave me alone, ya know!” Paul was still playing guitar on many songs, not always making the same chord changes as his bandmates but thrashing away so hard that he cut one of his fingers. Blood streamed down the body of his guitar. This was rock ’n’ roll. The room was in a frenzy. As the band finished their set, a pretty blonde in a blue dress, absolutely sodden with drink, staggered into a plate-glass window separating the bar from the hotel swimming pool, collapsing in a heap of broken glass. Kids gathered around to gape at the blood and wreckage. The management had had enough. They shut the bar and began ushering the rowdy teens out of the establishment. An ambulance was on its way.

  I hovered on the edges of a throng around Paul, who was sodden with sweat, basking in the praise and admiration of friends, a huge, gormless grin stretched across his face. He looked dazed, lost in the emotion of the moment. Something had been born that night. Something true and undeniable. Everybody in the room could feel it. Oh, how I longed to be part of it.

  Four

  Perhaps still feeling somewhat guilty about the manner in which they had dismissed Ivan from their ranks, Larry approached my brother one day in the school corridor. He was accompanied by a friend and classmate, a tall, gawky fellow with short, choppy hair and dark, sorrowful eyes, wearing a T-shirt with a loosely knotted school tie hanging incongruously in front. “You two should get together,” Larry genially suggested. “You both play guitar. You could form a group.”

  “I’m Frankie Corpse,” announced the gawky kid as he shook Ivan’s hand.

  Actually his name was Frank Kearns but, as a demonstration of his allegiance to punk rock, Frank had given himself a new identity. He was not alone in this. One boy in my class, Garret Ryan, insisted on being referred to as Garret Rancid and did everything possible to live up (or down) to that name. The various members of the Lypton Village gang invented names for one another, which once decreed could not be rejected. Fionan Hanvey became Gavin Friday. There was also Guggi, Strongman, Pod, Dave-Id and Reggie Manuel the Cocker Spaniel (also known as Bad Dog). Paul Hewson showed up at school one day wearing a Lypton Village badge, which he insisted had miraculously appeared on his black turtleneck overnight. Henceforth, he revealed, he was to be known as Bono Vox (a name that could be pidgin Latin for “Good Voice” although it was in fact appropriated from a hearing-aid shop on O’Connell Street). Truth be told, it took a while for this name to catch on but, in the interests of narrative clarity, Bono he shall be from this sentence forth. Bono, in turn, named Dave Evans “the Edge,” apparently on account of the shape of his head, though I don’t know how he could have detected any edges underneath the tangled mop that passed for a haircut in Dave’s schooldays.

  Personally, I wasn’t overly keen on this pseudonymous business. The name I wanted to see up in lights was my own. That aside I was becoming an ever-more-committed member of Dublin’s small punk-rock fraternity. I went to see the Boomtown Rats perform a free concert at St. Fintan’s. Enraptured by Bob Geldof’s outrageous exhibitionism, I rushed into town to buy their single, “Looking After No. 1,” the first great Irish punk record. My album collection was expanding weekly, to include the Clash’s eponymous debut, Elvis Costello’s “My Aim Is True,” the Jam’s “In the City,” the Vibrators’ “Pure Mania” and the Sex Pistols’ “Never Mind the Bollocks.” Having become bold enough to leave the record sleeves out in the living room, I was starting to become mildly irritated by how unperturbed my parents were about the whole punk phenomenon. When I announced that I was going to cut my hair short, my dad proposed that, instead of wasting money at the hairdresser, he would do it for me. Given his lack of skill in this department, he easily achieved the requisite chop-top effect, but, still, there was something not quite right about this parental endorsement of teenage rebellion. My mum even took in my flares on her sewing machine (straight-leg trousers being an essential component of the punk look) and helped me dye various items of clothing lurid shades of green and red. When I came home one day to find my dad listening to a Ramones album and nodding his head in approval, I was silently fuming. What did a guy have to do to get a reaction around here?

  Ivan and Frank began practicing together. I would arrive home on Saturdays from drama class to find the pair hunched over Ivan’s guitar amp, both clutching guitars, with Ivan painstakingly teaching Frank the chords to “House of the Rising Sun” and “Johnny B. Goode.” Not very punk rock, I know, but Frank was still a novice and dependent upon Ivan’s repertoire of rock standards. His passionate advocacy of punk was beginning to have an effect on Ivan, however, who adopted Frank’s sartorial style and gave himself a punk name: Ivan Axe (a terrible pun revolving around rock slang for guitar). Despite the fact that there were only two of them, they b
egan to refer to themselves as Frankie Corpse and the Undertakers. I felt a stab of envy when I heard that. But given that they needed at least another two Undertakers to make a full set, the question was broached about whether I would join. The fact that I had no musical ability was never even a consideration. This was punk rock, after all.

  I asked Adam Clayton how I could go about buying a bass guitar. “I’ll sell you mine, man!” he responded, with an undisguised delight that should have raised my suspicions.

  The reasons I chose the bass guitar were prosaic. Drums held no appeal, on the grounds that drummers tended to sit at the back of the stage, obscured by their kit. I wanted to be at the front and I wanted to sing. Keyboards seemed like too much hard work. Not only were there all those black and white keys, there were knobs and switches to consider too. The bass guitar, however, had only four strings, each of which was thick and easy to get your fingers around. And anyway, from watching Adam play, I reckoned at least two of those strings were superfluous. I chose bass because I thought I could just about get away with it.

  The Hype were becoming legends in their own lunchtime. During noon break one day they played a gig in the sixth-year common room. It seemed like every kid in the school tried to crowd in, the overspill jamming the corridors as the group hurtled through a breakneck set, including a punked-up version of a popular television superhero theme, with Bono leaping into the air to yell “Batman!” at the apposite moments.

  They were starting to look like a rock band now. Bono wore black turtlenecks and black jeans and affected a sleek, new-wave look. Dave Edge had taken to sporting stripy T-shirts and red jeans, offset by a ludicrously outsized black blazer, complete with naval insignia. Adam had always looked like a rock star and Larry was so pretty-boy handsome it didn’t matter how he dressed. The younger kids in school treated them like celebrities, following them around the corridors, giggling and pointing.

  I went along to the Hype’s next weekend rehearsal. The school was eerily deserted as I strolled in, with just the strange echo of distant electric guitars and the clatter of drums rising up above the playground. They were in full flow in the music room, guitar and bass amps positioned either side of Larry’s kit, everyone ranged in a circle so that they could watch each other play. Bono, who had by now abandoned attempts to play guitar and had assumed the role of lead vocalist, was the center of attention, a whirl of energy and activity, one moment frantically waving his arms as if conducting the Edge’s and Dick’s guitars, the next squeezing his eyes tightly shut to extemporize vocals, as if summoning them from the ether, talking in tongues like his friends in the Christian Movement. “Someday…Maybe tomorrow…New direction…Hello…Oh, no, no, no…,” he half spoke, half sang in a Bowie-esque drawl. They were working on a song of their own. It bore scant resemblance to the derivative country rocker from the Marine. This was an amorphous, sprawling rocker, built around fast, punchy bass and drums with Dick scratching a choppy rhythm while the Edge concocted a spiraling lead. Bono, meanwhile, groped about at the center of this often chaotic noise, grasping for words. The phrases that emerged were elliptical, elusive, barely making sense. “I walk tall, I walk in a wild wind…I love to stare, I…I love to watch myself grow…Some say…Maybe tomorrow…Resurrection hello…Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no…”

  They must have played that song for over an hour, with the groove constantly breaking down and slowly coming back together, interspersed with bursts of excited chatter—mostly between Bono and the Edge—about where it might go next. Sure, the playing may have verged on the shambolic, while the song itself somehow stubbornly resisted their best efforts to manipulate it into shape, but the mood throughout was inspiring: five young musicians struggling to carve out their own sonic terrain and discover what it was that they wanted to express. The chorus itself was revealing, Bono repeating a single phrase over and over: “Street missions…Street missions…Street missions…Street missions…” I could picture Bono as a preacher, standing on his soapbox in the park, trying to bring his message to the world. First he had to work out what that message was, of course. Whenever in doubt, he would sing, “Hello, oh no, oh-oh-oh-oh.” I think those phrases could be found somewhere in every one of the group’s early songs.

  Afterward, Adam cheerfully sat down to show me his bass guitar. It was a shit-brown Ibanez copy, physically ugly and of piss-poor quality. Not that I knew the difference. He told me that he would reluctantly let it go for £70, just to help me out. This was probably twice what it had cost him but sounded plausible to me. I was completely out of my depth, a fact that I am sure had not passed Adam by. I sat around and plonked away at the strings, listening to the satisfying low rumble emerging from his amp. Adam took it from me and, cigarette dangling, began to pick out a riff. “It’s got good action,” he declared, encouragingly. “Yeah, it sure has,” I knowledgeably agreed, wondering where the action was and if there was a switch to control it.

  I handed over the wedge of £10 notes. “A pleasure doing business with you,” smirked Adam. Thirty pounds represented my entire savings, extracted from my Post Office account. The rest had been borrowed from my dad, with the assurance that he would get it all back with interest when I was rich and famous. To be honest, I think Dad was as convinced as I that this was a sound investment.

  We recruited a drummer. Keith Edgley was in Ivan’s year, a ruddy-faced fifteen-year-old who could usually be located lurking behind the science lab, where self-styled undesirables tended to congregate for quick fags and other acts of private insurrection. He became Keith Karkus, a name that appealed to his inner hoodlum. In keeping with his macabre taste, Frank wanted to call me Neil Nasty, but I was having none of it. “Nothing really goes with the name Neil,” I said, trying to wheedle my way out of the whole business.

  “Neil Down!” blurted out Ivan, while the others guffawed with laughter.

  And so it was that, despite my protestations, my rock career was launched as a bad pun.

  On a weekend in January 1978, the full lineup assembled in front of the lace curtains in Frank’s tiny living room for the first time. Guitars and bass were plugged into two small practice amps. A microphone was routed through the family hi-fi. Frank’s mother floated about, reminding us not to put our feet on the sofa and tutting anxiously as Keith’s kit expanded around her three-piece suite. “Don’t break anything, dear,” she fretted, mussing her son’s hair.

  “Mum!” groaned Frankie Corpse. I knew how he felt. It was hard to be a punk rocker at home.

  Ivan had taught me the rudiments of a twelve-bar riff sequence. So, when everybody was ready, Frank shouted out “One-two-three-four” (the Ramones always counted in like that and so we would too) and we launched into a ridiculous, high-speed version of “Johnny B. Goode.” Oh, how to explain the thrill of that moment? The drums were clattering away, a noisy collision of messy hi-hat and rattling snare, my bass playing was plonky, frantic and out of time, Frank’s rhythm guitar was a fuzzy blur and Ivan was yelling the words of the song in a voice still squeakily unbroken, but when it came to the lead solo we all looked at each other and broke out in grins.

  For sheer, adrenalinized, sonic exhilaration, it is hard to surpass the noise an electric guitar makes, especially with the volume turned up full on a valve amp and the mysterious “gain” switch creating a background bed of distortion. When you hear it buzzing close up and loud, generating strange harmonics amid the random multiplications of colliding notes, it sounds like ten instruments at once, a noise you can never quite capture on a record. And when that seems to be coming from configurations of your own fingers, it is almost impossible not to be transported by it.

  That first rehearsal was simultaneously frustrating and exhilarating. We were constantly coming bang up against the limits of our amateur abilities and everything would just fall apart, petering out in a cacophony of twanging strings and flatly thumped drums. But at other moments, even at this most primitive of levels, we would suddenly lock together and the music wou
ld just explode and proliferate, becoming something much greater than the sum of its rather humble parts. Such is the wonder of amplification. The primal force of rhythm. The divine glory of melody. And the simple beauty of three-chord rock ’n’ roll.

  Believe me, I am under no illusions about what the first rehearsal of Frankie Corpse and the Undertakers actually sounded like. But I know what it felt like. And it felt good.

  We would rehearse whenever possible, usually at home in Howth (where the parental regime was more favorable to teenage punks) but sometimes at school, putting in a couple of hours on the Hype’s superior equipment. At Frank’s behest, we started off by learning “Glad to See You Go,” which was track one, side one of the Ramones’ latest album, Leave Home. Having mastered that (or at least a frantic approximation of it) we moved on to track two, “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment.” We were having problems with this one, until the Edge kindly offered to write out the chords. The trouble was, following his instructions didn’t make the song sound any more authentic. “He’s got the right chords but in the wrong order,” Ivan finally worked out. “Look, he’s going A to G instead of G to A, see?” We tried it and, lo and behold, Ivan was right. The Hype, who also included “Shock Treatment” in their set, were playing the song back to front.

  I think we all felt a little glow of professional pride over this discovery, as if it somehow put us on the same level as our more experienced schoolmates. It does throw an interesting slant on the oft-remarked originality of the Edge’s guitar playing. But the Hype were beginning to move beyond covers now, anyway. Adam was hustling support gigs by ringing venues and, in his sophisticated English tones, presenting himself as the manager of a hot, up-and-coming band. They traveled sixty miles to the market town of Mullingar to play in a bar for a sum that would barely cover petrol costs, only to be confronted by a local demanding to know what was the point of coming all that way to play bad cover versions. “If we wanted to hear cover versions,” he sagely remarked, “there’s plenty of bands around here who can play them just as badly.” At least, that is the story the Edge told as he attempted to persuade his bandmates that the only way forward was original material.