Killing Bono

by Neil McCormick

  They were debuting new songs in rehearsal at a fairly prodigious rate—although, given Bono’s extemporizing process of composing lyrics, the material rarely seemed completely finished, with lots of “oh-oh-oh”s being sung over Edge’s slippery chords. Bono’s imagery tended to the abstract, even when his subject matter reflected the sometimes banal realities of teenage life. “White walls, morning eyeballs / A thousand voices echo through my brain / School daze, new directions,” he sang on a blustery little number apparently based on his unhappy experiences in his final exams. The chorus was constructed around an appalling pun comparing school to the Nazi Holocaust, all delivered in a jerky, hiccuping new-wave style: “C-C-C-Concentration Cramp! Ha ha ha!”

  “The Fool” was more promising, a yearning epic that quickly caught my attention. I loved the opening lines, although I had no idea what they meant (and I am not convinced Bono did either): “Alive in an ocean / A world of glad eyes…Insane / Walk a wall backways / It’s all just a shameful game.” The chorus had Bono bullishly declaring, “I break all the rules / They call me a fool.” He spoke excitedly about creating a character he could portray on stage, someone to represent the outsider, an idiot savant capable of piercing illusions. “Just a fool, a street jester, the hero of society,” he sang over the song’s rambling end piece. “Just a fool, a street jester / Look at me, now can’t you see?” It wasn’t exactly subtle but it spoke volumes about the grandiosity of his ambition.

  Meanwhile, Frankie Corpse and the Undertakers set about learning another Ramones song. It was gradually becoming clear that Frank’s idea for the group was to learn the whole of side one of Leave Home and then, when we had accomplished that, move on to side two. Frank loved the Ramones.

  To be fair, the Ramones were ideal start-up material for a young rock band: their chord progressions were simple and arrangements essentially boiled down to everyone playing the same notes at the same time as hard and loud as possible, yet the overall effect was fantastically dynamic. Joey Ramone had a gulping, weeping voice that could break your heart even when he was singing about murder and mental illness. I heard entire symphonies of electric sound in the buzzing of Johnny Ramone’s guitar. Their songs made me laugh and rage and jump around my bedroom, punching the air. At sixteen, I was so enraptured by the whole Ramones oeuvre that I never even questioned their comical self-mythologizing, taking it on trust that Johnny, Joey, Tommy and Dee Dee were, indeed, the inbred bastard spawn of some mutant geek family from the industrial wastes of New Jersey who had stumbled across the secret essence of rock ’n’ roll but were actually too dumb to ever fully comprehend their own worth. I was devastated when I learned from the NME that the Ramones were not actually related. It was like a child discovering that Santa Claus never existed: your whole inner world tips on its axis for a moment, as you are compelled to realign to a harsher and more banal reality. I felt betrayed, cheated, abused and utterly foolish…for about five minutes, anyway. Then I just started pretending I had known all along, making myself feel better by puncturing other people’s illusions, starting with Frank. “What? You thought they were really brothers? Come on, Frank, how gullible can you be?”

  Anyway, Frank needed to be put in his place. He was starting to behave as if he was our leader. “It’s Frankie Corpse and the Undertakers,” he declared one day in an attempt to settle an argument, as if having his name out front entitled him to an extra vote. He was quickly disabused of that notion. His attempts to install himself as lead vocalist were also given short shrift. After a particularly gruesome rehearsal, Ivan and I quietly discussed how we would break the news to Frank that his vocals had all the tunefulness of a deaf dog howling for his supper. In any event, we decided to give it to him straight.

  “The thing is, Frank,” my brother said nervously, “you can’t really sing.”

  “It’s punk rock,” he replied.

  This was Frank’s answer to everything. His wholehearted commitment to the cause was inspirational to us. We had each of us been harboring secret dreams of stardom for so long it was an incredible relief to be able to share them. Just to speak our desires aloud without fear of being mocked created a powerful bond. Together Frank, Ivan and I could dare to believe that we could make something of our music. But there was no getting around the fact that if Frank had been charged with singing for our supper we would all have starved to death.

  In a display of band democracy we elected to share vocal duties, although that didn’t turn out a great deal better. We were a ridiculous triumvirate. I’d start off the song, which was definitely a bad idea. My timing was abysmal, my pitching not much better, and, although I could just about hold a tune, once I had located the key (which usually took me a couple of bars), I really didn’t have much idea what else to do with it. Then Ivan would come in for the next verse with his squeaky pubescent voice, sounding like a choirboy on helium. And then Frank would round things off with some indecipherable barking, sounding like he was singing something else entirely, in a completely different key than the rest of us.

  So Ivan and I wrote a song especially for Frank, geared to his distinctive vocal inadequacies. It was titled, without irony, “Punk Power.” Over three simple power chords, the chorus went:

  I’m a punk, I’m a punk

  And I’m blasted on junk

  Won’t take no for an answer

  And I can’t stand the funk

  I’m a punk, I’m a punk, I’m a punk

  Oh, I’m a punk

  To be fair, there aren’t a lot of words that rhyme with punk. I wasn’t actually entirely sure what “junk” was but I knew it was slang for something nasty that you could, apparently, get “blasted” on. And as for being unable to “stand the funk,” we had gleaned from the NME that punk stood in direct opposition to disco—but, unfortunately, disco didn’t rhyme with punk.

  Frank loved it, howling through rehearsals with a passion we all found preposterously impressive.

  The Hype arranged a gig on a Friday night in February 1978, in a basement room in the old school building, a Gothic, orange-brick monster that loomed over the modern complex where we attended lessons. We were invited to play support. Mysterious posters started appearing around the school, bearing the legend “THE UNDERTAKERS…are coming to take you away” beneath cartoons of four severed heads. OK, they weren’t really that mysterious. I was drawing them in art class, to choruses of mocking from my classmates. “Is that supposed to be you?” But there was an atmosphere of excited anticipation on the night. Attending a rock concert in school seemed impossibly exotic, with the air of real, grown-up entertainment.

  There was a stage at one end of the low basement room where the Hype set up their equipment. There were even some colored disco lights. I suppose we did a sound check. I really don’t remember. We were all so nervous everything went by in a haze. In the hours we had to kill before the actual performance, Frank, Ivan, Keith and I went for a stroll in the winter evening and ended up walking miles from school, down to the windy seafront, chattering in the cold as the sky grew black, talking about our hopes and dreams for the future, reminding each other of musical cues, geeing one another up.

  When we got back the place was full, with a mobile disco entertaining the audience. We slipped into an upstairs room where instruments were being stored and sat with the Hype, waiting to go on. They were relaxed and chatty, discussing set lists and plans. We were nervous and withdrawn. Mr. Moxham appeared at the door. “Good crowd tonight,” he boomed cheerfully. “You ready, lads?” I thought I was going to be sick.

  We trooped down and pushed our way through the crowd, clutching our instruments, clambering on to the stage to plug in. In the glare of the spotlights, everything was, quite literally, a blur to me. I am incredibly nearsighted but I hated the big, ugly glasses I was compelled to wear. Moments before going on stage, I suddenly decided I could do without them and instead borrowed a pair of cheap children’s blue plastic toy sunglasses from Garret Rancid. Consequently I was shroude
d in an out-of-focus, blue-tinted world. We had all adopted Frank’s T-shirt-and-tie combo, the uniform of punk rock, and in addition I was wearing a pair of tight jeans (specially adjusted by my mum) and a tiny blue corduroy jacket that had shrunk in the wash. There was an expectant cheer that sounded to me as if it might contain a hint of sarcasm. Amps buzzed into life. We plunked strings, making sure we were in tune. Frank stood up to the mic. “Wan-two-tree-faw!” he yelled.

  And we were off, in a blizzard of thumping bass strings, thrashing guitars, clattering drums, playing the Vibrators’ minimalist thrash “Yeah Yeah Yeah.” The shot of adrenaline to my system was dizzying. We were jumping up and down, scissor-kicking, colliding with one another as we rushed about the stage, constantly swapping position to take our turn at the front and yell into the mic. The gig went by in a flash. A planned half-hour set was over in about twenty minutes as we shot through songs at double speed. I am sure the whole thing was a ridiculous mess but the crowd was cheering, the amps were cranked up loud, my heart was pumping and my head felt like it might explode in ecstasy.

  There was only one major cock-up. In the middle of the set, we played “House of the Rising Sun” (the punk version). This had been added at the last minute, to pad things out. The problem was, I had never actually learned it. In rehearsal, I watched Frank’s fingers move up and down the fretboard and I would play the root note of whichever chord they landed on. Of course, in rehearsals I was wearing glasses. On stage, I couldn’t see a thing, so (living up to my nickname) I had to kneel in front of Frank, face shoved as close to his guitar as possible, screwing up my eyes to try to make out what he was doing. If that wasn’t bad enough, my proximity panicked Frank, who began playing open chords. Now I was in uncharted territory, just plucking random strings that I hoped approximated his chords.

  But none of that seemed to matter. Like me a year earlier, most of the people in the room had probably never seen a live rock band before and were simply enthralled by the noise and spectacle. The crowd went mad. We ended the set with “Punk Power,” for which we had prepared a theatrical conclusion. During woodwork class, Ivan had made a thin plywood guitar body, painted to look like a yellow Stratocaster. Frank swapped his guitar for the fake, pretending to play as he barked the words of the song.

  At the climax, with Ivan coaxing feedback from his amp and Keith trying to demolish the drum kit, Frank started to trash the fake guitar, banging it repeatedly off the stage until it splintered and broke, screaming all the time “I’m a punk! I’m a punk!” He tossed the broken remains into the crowd, who were screaming encouragement. I came off the stage, dazed and dripping in sweat, my schoolmates patting me on the back as I pushed my way toward the dressing room. If there had ever been any doubt in my heart, now it was all over. It was rock ’n’ roll for life.

  “That was fantastic,” Bono declared magnanimously as we entered the room. “Well done! Well done!”

  We flopped down, exhausted, laughing with relief and joy.

  “Sorry about the kit,” said Keith to Larry. “I think I knocked over a couple of cymbals.”

  Larry rushed from the room, looking like he could commit murder.

  The Hype went out and really rocked the crowd. I stood at the back of the room and watched them, full of admiration. As a group, they were still in flux, playing cover versions of songs like Thin Lizzy’s “Dancing in the Moonlight” followed by their own odd creations, sharp-edged, yearning mini-epics, full of quicksilver guitar bursts from Edge and stammering, elliptical vocals from Bono. He was not the singer he is today, his thin, young voice hiding in the folds of the songs rather than staking a claim to be heard, up front and loud, yet he was already compelling to watch, jabbering away as much between songs as during them, trying to reach out, and always holding eye contact, staring at the audience as if daring us to look away first. His desire was transparent, his energy undeniable. He seemed heroic to me.

  Afterward we sat around talking in the dressing room, enthusiastically complimenting each other’s performances. I was still on a high, my mind dizzy with possibilities.

  “I like your bass style, man. Simple and direct,” said Adam, kindly. He was probably just happy to have discovered a bassist even worse than him.

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding in agreement. “I don’t go with all that fancy stuff.”

  “Me neither,” said Adam.

  This was the life! Just a couple of pros, sitting around, shooting the breeze.

  Five

  Adam was kicked out of school in February 1978. He had to go quite far to upset a broad-minded regime who had tolerated his cheerful insolence, apathetic approach to schoolwork and deliberate flaunting of convention. The day he turned up for classes in a long, flowery dress, he was merely told to go home and change. But streaking naked down the Mall finally did him in.

  I don’t think exclusion particularly bothered him. The group still practiced in the music room and Adam could frequently be spotted around the premises. He assumed the role of manager and was busy trying to get them gigs. Adam developed a habit of casually dropping the names of significant figures from the local music scene into conversation, mentioning chats with members of the Boomtown Rats and Thin Lizzy.

  The truth eventually emerged: that he was cold-calling people, often drawing them into conversation by pretending to be someone else. But we were nonetheless impressed.

  Membership in the rock fraternity bonded us all. We were allies, united by a common cause, like a secret resistance group working behind the enemy lines of the conservative Irish cultural scene. I remember a party in Howth when a large group of us just gathered around the record player, listening with startled awe to Patti Smith’s newly released Easter album. Her astonishing lyrical flow was admired and discussed, with individual lines seized upon and dissected in an attempt to expose their secret meaning and, perhaps, bathe us in their magical power. The cover, showing the elegantly gaunt, androgynous figure of Smith with bare arms raised to reveal large sprouts of body hair, was held up by Gavin Friday as if it were a religious object. “She is the epitome of all that is beauty,” declared Bono, in half-comic, half-serious veneration. “The ideal of femininity! Behold the power of woman!” Other disgruntled partygoers would nervously approach to suggest changing the record, complaining they had heard this screeching banshee wail four times already and wondering if it wasn’t time for a bit of Queen or Saturday Night Fever, but they were given short shrift. “Be off, Howth pigs!” snarled Gavin, putting the needle back to track one, side one as the petitioners retreated. I was terrified of the Village and their deliberate provocations, uncertain how much of their pantomime alienation was a humorous pose, but as long as I was with Bono they tolerated my presence.

  The rare visits of international punk bands were major occasions for punk’s growing local fraternity. I saw the Buzzcocks, the Clash and the Jam, guitars drilling right through my head, losing myself in the reverbations of the huge speaker stacks. In the heart of the crowd watching the Ramones, I experienced a moment of real epiphany, the realization that there is community in the audience of a great rock gig, a blurring of interpersonal boundaries, unity in a song, the sense that, in this moment, right here, right now, everyone is experiencing exactly the same thoughts and emotions. We are all one. “Gabba gabba we accept you, we accept you, one of us,” as we all chanted with Joey during “Pinhead.”

  One weekend, when my parents were away, my sister threw a party, giving me express instructions beforehand not to monopolize Bono. “I don’t want the two of you sitting in a corner all night talking about music!” she decreed. “And stay away from the record player!” Bono’s home did not actually contain a record player, only a large, old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape machine, so he never passed up an opportunity to explore other people’s record collections. Sure enough, come one a.m., Stella was casting me dirty looks as Bono, Edge and I crowded around the hi-fi, sorting through my expanding collection of records, forcing her friends to endure a steady d
iet of new-wave weirdness. “Ah, now, Stella,” Bono said, with a cheeky, seductive grin, when she tried to wrest back control of the stereo. “You can dance to the Buzzcocks, see!” He got up and did a comical little pogo. At least Adam was mingling, guzzling wine and regaling Stella’s friends with stories of his rock-star acquaintances. Mind you, Adam had been quite specifically not invited, Stella having expressed the fear that you never knew when he was going to do something to upset people, like getting his penis out.

  I noticed that Bono was sporting a new badge on his jumper, identical to one on Edge’s blazer. It was a large white disc featuring the mysterious alignment of a single letter and single digit in green, computerized script: “U2.”

  He tapped it proudly. “That’s us,” he said. “We’re changing the name of the group.”

  I was incredulous. “U2? What does that mean?”

  “Whatever you want it to,” shrugged Bono.

  I shook my head discouragingly. “The Hype’s a great name for a band. I love the Hype! U2 just sounds like an old submarine! Actually, it’s like something you’d see stenciled on the side of a container. ‘Stick that over there, between U1 and U3!’ ”

  Bono was not to be discouraged. The new name had been coined by Steve Averill, who operated under the punk alias Steve Rapid. He was the former lead singer of one of Dublin’s first significant punk bands, the Radiators from Space, and a prime mover in the tiny alternative rock scene. More significantly, as far as Adam was concerned, he was an alumnus of Mount Temple. Steve had been dragged along to watch the Hype play a support slot in a pub and had seen enough to convince himself they were an interesting prospect. The name, though, had to go. Steve thought it cynical, old-fashioned and dreadfully affected, striking an ironic pose in direct contrast to the band’s passion and idealism. U2 was…Well, what was it? Vagueness was a bonus, the band decided. The name had connotations of inclusiveness (You Too) but it did not pin the group down. The audience could bring to it whatever they wanted.