Killing Bono

by Neil McCormick

  However, it did not escape my attention that, on the longest nights, various exhausted members of staff would discreetly disappear into the editor’s office, only to emerge minutes later with a spring in their step and a glint in their eye, merrily chattering away. One day I burst in and found them all poised around a table on which sat a small, square mirror with several fine lines of white powder arranged upon it.

  “I knew it!” I declared, although in truth I only had the vaguest idea what was going on. I was an avid reader of Hunter S. Thompson but he was stronger on amusing euphemisms for illicit substances than on the techniques employed in their consumption. I insisted that I be included in this particular ritual and refused to be dissuaded by several parties apparently concerned with my youth and naïveté. So I was handed a rolled-up £5 note and instructed that the correct procedure was to put one end of it to my nostril and the other on the mirror, then inhale deeply. I followed my instructions to the letter, resulting in gasps of either horror or admiration from my fellow members of staff.

  “He’s had the bloody lot!” shrieked one malcontent.

  “You’re only supposed to snort one line,” someone explained, a little too late.

  “Bloody hell, Neil. We’ll have to call you Hoover Factory!” said another (a reference to an obscure Elvis Costello B-side).

  But hey, I wasn’t complaining. I bounced out of the office with the spring of a kangaroo spoiling for a fight and threw myself into the creation of pages (not just pages! Works of art!) with renewed zest.

  Actually, I am not sure how productive this period of cocaine consumption was. Certainly it would lift spirits but usually this would result in Liam and myself standing around blathering, making hats out of record sleeves, Frisbeeing unwanted vinyl out the window, firing off jokes and pursuing surreal lines of thought that would have the office in stitches. Then Niall would inevitably emerge from his office to suggest that perhaps it might be in our best interests to get some work done, at which point the mood of euphoria would collapse and we would all sink back to our desks to contemplate the gruesome immensity of the task still at hand.

  The worst was the launch of that first British issue. By then, my huge posters of Bono were pasted all over the London Underground, anticipating our arrival. I remember going in to Hot Press’s offices on Friday and not getting home again till Tuesday morning, having snatched a few hours’ rest over the weekend on the floor of Niall and Mairin’s apartment. When we finally put the issue to bed we all stood out on the balcony, looking over sleepy Dublin in the washed-out colors of the early-morning sunrise. The exhaustion felt good, though. We felt as if we had really achieved something. We were wearily optimistic about the future.

  By some process of bad planning, one particularly challenging production weekend was immediately followed by the first Hot Press awards ceremony, sponsored by Stag (a brand of cider) with a presentation in a hotel and a party in McGonagles. To my dismay, there was no marching powder left in the office to sustain our flagging spirits. Someone from what was optimistically known as the advertising department (despite the fact that staff numbers rarely exceeded two) volunteered to procure alternative stimulants and quickly returned with a large bag of speed. This was a new substance to me but what the hell, I considered myself an expert at narcotics consumption by now. I was handed an individual wrap, which I tossed out on the table and snorted in one go. My advertising colleague’s mouth was agape. “That was enough to last you a week,” he spluttered. Fuck that! The Hoover Factory was ready to party!

  I don’t remember a whole lot about the occasion, apart from the disaster with the statuettes. I had designed the award—a figure of Elvis in full hip-swiveling pose—and drafted in an art-college friend, Grainne, to manufacture the actual figurines in painted ceramics. They looked lovely but were extremely fragile; thus as the great and good of the Irish music business stepped up to collect their awards, the figures kept detaching from their bases and generally falling apart. U2 picked up two awards, for Best Band and Best Album. “Are you trying to tell me something about my career prospects?” Bono joked, after I had helped him reassemble a broken statuette.

  The night flashed by in an amphetamine blur. I recall hitching a ride back on Ivan’s motorbike from a postparty celebration. Not being in possession of a helmet and not wishing to be stopped by the police in my present condition, I strapped a fruit bowl to my head with my trouser belt.

  Just say no to drugs, kids.

  I thought it was about time I got myself some transport. My dad (himself a former biker) had bought my brother a motorbike but I was discouraged from following suit. For some reason, it was taken as a family truth that, while Ivan was sensible (a damned lie! But he was good at pulling the wool over my parents’ eyes) and physically graceful, I was impulsive and uncoordinated, apparently not a good combination on two wheels with a couple of hundred horsepower. “Anyone who rides a motorbike has to be prepared to face the fact that they will crash it,” according to my father, whose own biker days had come to an end with a write-off that grew more spectacular with each retelling. “The trick is not to hurt yourself. The way you carry on, you could hurt yourself getting off a bus!” I couldn’t really argue with that because, in fact, I had once hurt myself quite badly getting off a bus, my attempt to disembark while the bus was still moving having been interrupted by a car traveling behind.

  Being a skilled mechanic and a compulsive DIY enthusiast, Dad offered not to buy me a car but to build me one instead. My mother had an old Mini Cooper which had broken down and was rusting in the driveway. Dad arrived home one day with another dilapidated Mini he had picked up for fifty quid and announced that out of these two Mini wrecks he was going to create one Super-Mini. Disregarding my ungrateful skepticism, he went to work in the garage, where he labored for most of the summer.

  Meanwhile, he financed a trip to Setanta studios in Dundalk for Yeah! Yeah! to make our first demo. Like most bands venturing into a studio for the first time, we had absolutely no idea what we were doing, but we took along a local sound engineer to guide us through—though I am not convinced he had much more studio experience than us. The band simply set up and played three songs live, to which we later added a smattering of overdubs. Timing was the most obvious problem. Leo was an inventive drummer who worked hard at his skills, but he was having difficulty playing to the relentlessly steady clicks of a metronome and in the end we had to abandon it, settling for backing tracks of wildly varying pace. But the bass was plump, the guitars were sparkly and the singing…

  Fuck it! The voice I heard in my head was pure of tone, abounding with melodiousness, pulsating with energy and bursting with emotion. The voice coming back through the huge studio speakers was, well, “adequate to the task” was about the best you could say.

  “Ah, we’ll just whack the reverb up on that; it’ll be grand,” suggested our engineer.

  Of course it would be!

  We played our first headline gig at the Summit Inn in Howth, somehow selling a couple of hundred tickets in advance. Mind you, the tickets did promise an appearance by “the tempting Bumpkin Betsy” who (rumor had it) would be performing an outrageous (and entirely illegal) striptease. Betsy was, in fact, a fellow called Anto, whom even his closest friends would cheerfully describe as “mad as a March hare.” Anto took to the stage in full drag, slowly divesting items of clothing to roars of encouragement until it became apparent that Betsy was not exactly as advertised. We thought this would be a merry jape but hadn’t reckoned on a bunch of squaddies from the Irish army who had made a special trip all the way from their barracks in Dublin. They became so outraged at the absence of bona fide tits and ass that they attempted to storm the stage and assault the hapless Anto, who was quite willing to take on the lot of them. The ensuing mêlée was settled by the extraordinary diplomatic skills of Leo’s friend Hughie O’Leary, who persuaded the squaddies that they should be satisfied with appropriating Anto’s bra and stockings. “I think you’ve got
to learn to respect your audience,” Hughie cautioned us later—advice we took very seriously since Hughie’s mother was Maureen Potter, Ireland’s best-loved comedienne.

  The evening might have been messy but it wasn’t a disaster. We had pulled in a crowd, made some money and felt ready to step up a gear and start doing headline shows in Dublin. But before that there was a planned trip to the country. I had taken delivery of my handcrafted Super-Mini, which, much to my surprise, was a thing of beauty—painted letterbox-red with a tasteful leopardskin interior. The plan was for Yeah! Yeah! to take the car on its maiden voyage to the West of Ireland, where we would attend a rock festival at which the Pretenders and Ian Dury were performing. Ivan could not make the trip, because he was due to take his motorbike license test that weekend, so his spot in the Mini was appropriated by Hughie.

  My dad had made it clear he did not approve of this trip. He appeared to be finding it hard to fully entrust his creation to me and repeatedly cautioned me about making long journeys before it was properly run in. But since my parents were currently enjoying a fortnight’s vacation in France, I figured what they did not know could not hurt them. So off we went!

  There was much carousing on the journey. The car had been loaded up with tins of beer, of which my passengers liberally availed themselves. Not to put too fine a point on it, Hughie, Leo and Deco were soon pissed as a trio of farts, singing, joking and hurling abuse at passing pedestrians. I was completely sober, of course, not because I was taking my duties as driver seriously (for I too was singing, joking and hurling abuse) but simply because I didn’t drink. We raced down potholed country roads, rattling along at a fine old speed, with Dad’s engine holding up much better than predicted. The sun was out. The roads were clear. Life was good.

  We almost made it, too.

  We were about fifteen miles from the festival, high with anticipation, picking up speed as we drove down a steep hill. And then something happened. The steering wheel jerked in my hands. We were slewing off the road, the car moving in a different direction than it should have been. I had lost control of the vehicle. I slammed on the brakes. We weren’t stopping.

  “We’re going to crash!” I said. Cold inside.

  “What d’you say?” asked Hughie, in the passenger seat.

  “We’re crashing,” I said, with the dead calm of utter hopelessness.

  The Mini went off the road at the bottom of the hill, smashing head-on into a vertical grass bank.

  Ten

  I suffered a concussion, so I have to rely on the reports of others to describe what happened next. Apparently, I got out of the car, which was savagely crumpled, and slowly walked around it, examining the damage, tutting and muttering, “Hmm…I see,” while inside my passengers groaned. My spectacles had flown up during the collision, and I had smashed my face against the steering wheel, crushing my broken glasses into my forehead. Blood was pouring out, running down my pale face, getting in my eyes.

  I vaguely remember the inside of an ambulance. I have an image of myself lying on a gurney in the corridor outside a busy emergency room, making a call from a public telephone. Apparently I spoke to Leo’s father. I told him everything was fine.

  I came to in a hospital ward, head heavily bandaged, the world a complete blur without my glasses. Deco was in the bed next to me, suffering only from a chipped tooth. Hughie was opposite, one broken leg in a cast. Leo was next to him and he was not in a good state. He had badly broken the ball joint of his right hip. He was moaning with pain. Hughie was calling out on behalf of his friend. “Nurse, nurse, we need some fuckin’ drugs here. We need them now!” In the distant background, bizarrely, we could hear an echoey wash of rock ’n’ roll from the festival.

  “Well, at least we’ll get to hear Ian Dury,” sighed Hughie. We all started to titter.

  “Fuck it, Hughie, don’t make me laugh,” complained Leo. “It hurts.”

  “Maybe youse should record that Liverpool anthem: ‘I’ll Never Walk Again!’ ” suggested Hughie. “You could all go onstage in motorized wheelchairs! Leo could play his bongos with a pair of customized walking sticks. It’ll be fantastic. When you go onstage people’ll be saying, ‘Break a leg…Oh, sorry, you’re way ahead of me.’ ”

  “Stop it, Hughie, it hurts,” laughed Leo.

  We listened to that distant music for two days, laughing with mounting hysteria as Hughie fired off lines of increasingly black patter about our situation, although every cry of pain from Leo would send a chill through the ward and an arrow deep into my heart. Was I responsible for that?

  “The misfortunes of others are not a source for humor, Mr. O’Leary,” a nurse complained after one of Hughie’s comic outbursts.

  “I think it was Shakespeare who said that life is a comedy of fuckin’ errors, nurse,” countered Hughie. “Though I may be mis-quoting.”

  I’m sure the nurses were glad to see the back of us. Deco and I were informed we were free to go after two days, while Hughie and Leo would be dispatched back to Dublin by ambulance. My clothes were returned to me, unlaundered and caked with dried blood. I put them on and, looking like a refugee from a World War I battlefield, went to have my dressing removed. The young doctor who peeled off my bandages stared at me aghast. “Uhm, it appears someone forgot to stitch you up,” he gulped, apologetically. I looked in a mirror. There were huge flaps of skin hanging off my bruised forehead.

  So they stitched me up and released me and I went wandering off into some strange country town, sewn up like Frankenstein’s monster, with a jagged, bulging, purple scar on my head, dressed in bloodstained clothes, unable to see more than a few inches in front of me, with only Deco and his chipped tooth for company. We found our way to the Gardai (the Irish Police) station, where I had been asked to report. “What the blazes happened to you, boy?” declared the shocked officer in charge.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’ve come about my Mini.”

  I was led into the yard, where the bent and broken remains had been towed. I peered in, through windows of shattered glass. Even with my bad eyesight, I could see that every surface of the car was littered with squashed, empty cans of lager, but the Gardai made no mention of that in their report. “The marks left on the road indicate that you suffered a spontaneous blowout to the front-left tire, son,” the officer told me. “It was just an unfortunate accident. Have you got insurance?”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied, feeling a weight of guilt lift off my shoulders.

  “It’ll be put down as an act of God,” he said.

  I might have known that bastard would be behind it.

  We had to take a train back to Dublin. The tickets were £15 each. I had only thirty quid on me and Deco was flat broke, so we weren’t able to afford so much as a cup of tea during the journey of several hours. Nor could we find a seat, so we stood all the way back to Dublin, watching the Irish landscape pass in silence, the shock of the past few days finally sinking in.

  This brush with mortality had the effect of quickening my resolve. Leo had metal plates inserted into his hip to hold it together. We visited him in hospital, pledging our loyalty and receiving his pledge in return. As soon as he was fit, we would be back on the road. It would take more than an act of God to stop this band.

  U2 released their second album, October, in October 1981. I tend to think now that of all their albums this has weathered least well but back then I was an uncritical fan and I wrote a glowing, excitable review in Hot Press. I was utterly thrilled by the way they had expanded their sonic template, enriching the potential of their sound. Everything was bigger, brighter, shinier, with the addition of Edge’s ringing piano chords to the mix. Even Bono’s voice had started to fill out, strengthened by a year of relentless touring. The record’s principal weakness, in hindsight, are the lyrics, or lack of them. Bono’s notebook had been stolen backstage at a gig and so, while they had been recording over the summer in Dublin, he had to rely on his improvisational skills in the studio. The subject matter of October w
as spiritual faith, as indicated by the epic opening track, an all-cylinders-firing rock hymn, “Gloria,” in which Bono calls out, “I try to stand up but I can’t find my feet / I try to speak up but only in you I’m complete / Gloria in te Domine.” I wonder if my article had played a part in this, releasing Bono from fear of criticism about his Christianity? But if he was calling on the Holy Spirit to animate him in front of the microphone, the line to Heaven must have been faulty. This represented a curiously inarticulate speech of the heart, with Bono supplanting his former “oo-ee-oo”s with the oft-repeated phrase “Rejoice!” After Boy, Bono had talked to me with typical ebullience about making an epic album about the struggle between good and evil—their Sgt. Pepper, he’d called it in a moment of particularly extravagant enthusiasm. Well, this wasn’t it. October ends with “Is That All?” in which Bono repeats the question “Is that all you want from me?” He may have been addressing God but a demanding listener’s answer would surely have to be a resounding “No!”

  I now know there was a fierce debate going on within the band about their Christian commitment, with members of Shalom bringing pressure to bear about how they should behave. Gavin Friday had been the first to leave, reacting incredulously to suggestions that his band change their name to the Deuteronomy Prunes and desist from wearing eyeliner. Guggi and other Prunes had not been long in following. Larry was the first member of U2 to leave Shalom, fearing that he was in danger of turning into a bigot. Bono and Edge struggled somewhat longer, at times questioning whether God and rock ’n’ roll were compatible, but all eventually severed their links with the Bible group. “I’ve never found a church I was comfortable in,” Bono admitted to me years later. “Religion holds the church above the spirit of God. I think that religion is often the enemy of faith.”