Killing Bono

by Neil McCormick

  That same month, Yeah! Yeah! started gigging again, playing a riotous set in the Asgard Hotel in Howth. It was such a relief to be back on stage, with Leo perched (a little gingerly, perhaps) behind the drums. A number of our more dedicated fans accompanied us back home, where a spontaneous party broke out. Deco and I ended up in my bed with a girl (whom we shall name Viva for the sake of her dignity) sandwiched between us: now this was definitely the kind of behavior I had signed up for! We were startled, however, by a knock on the door, which swung open to reveal my dad, who wanted to congratulate us on our performance (I should stress that he was referring to the gig). Viva hid under the covers while Declan and I sat bolt upright next to each other, naked, in my double bed, none of which seemed to bother my dad in the least. He chatted for a while, then said, “All right, time to hit the sack. Good night, Neil. Night, Declan. Night, Viva.”

  She stuck her head out of the covers as the door closed. “How did he know I was here?”

  “I have no idea,” I confessed. “How do parents know anything? They just do!”

  When I slipped out of the room to go to the toilet, Dad caught me on the landing. “Just try to keep it quiet in there, OK?” he said. “I don’t mind what you get up to but I don’t want your mother being upset.”

  On my return journey from the toilet, there was my mother!

  “I know what’s going on in there,” she said, coyly. “Better not let Dad find out; I don’t think he’d approve.”

  What kind of fucked-up family values were they teaching me?

  We gigged relentlessly throughout the following months, a headlining show at a packed community center confirming that we had ascended to the same dizzy heights of local stardom occupied by the legendary Rocky De Valera.

  In December, we landed the support for the Teardrop Explodes’ tour of Ireland. The Teardrops were from Liverpool and were being hailed as one of the most exciting bands of the era, along with stablemates Echo & the Bunnymen. Their manager was a young, energetic, bespectacled Scotsman named Bill Drummond, whose sometimes eccentric enthusiasm for the possibilities of rock music was immensely engaging. “It doesn’t matter if you can play,” I heard him opine. “Musicianship is very overrated. Belief should come first. Greatness will follow.” It was a philosophy I could identify with. Julian Cope, frontman of the Teardrop Explodes, was well-spoken, polite and friendly, with a kind of puppyish enthusiasm. (‘All right, guys?” he said to us, thoughtfully popping into our dressing room before our set. “Just go out and enjoy yourselves, because that’s what it’s all about.”) Yet on stage at McGonagles he was an entirely different proposition, bouncing fearlessly around with little thought for personal safety, colliding with objects with a force that made the audience wince, berating his band for not giving enough and urging the crowd to give more. At one point, out of mounting frustration, Julian appeared to have an onstage nervous breakdown, collapsing with frustration at the proceedings, screaming at his bandmates to stop playing while he launched into a frantic monologue about how important it was to make this moment real, make this gig matter. I was mightily impressed. Then, at the Cork Opera House the following night, he suffered an identical breakdown at the exact same point in the show. Standing at the sound desk, I asked Bill, “Does he do this every night?”

  “How else do you get to become a legend?” replied Bill.

  Learning such lessons as we went along, Yeah! Yeah! worked hard to make every gig an occasion, with new songs, new gags, new gimmicks. We drafted in comedians to support us and showed videos on TV sets at the back of the stage. In February 1982, we started a Thursday-night residency upstairs at a Dublin bar called the Magnet. We had finally unveiled our demo, wittily packaged as The Tape of Things to Come. The Magnet gigs slowly started to draw an audience. There were thirty people the first week. Seventy the second. More than a hundred on the third. We received our first review in Hot Press, from which we liberally quoted in a press release:

  Yeah!Yeah! create “the atmosphere of a youth club hop,” receiving a reaction of “uninhibited, all-enveloping enthusiasm,” wrote Liam Mackey in Hot Press music paper. Liam went on to say, “And certainly Yeah! Yeah!’s music inspires and deserves a suitably abandoned reaction…if the Yeah!Yeah! ethos baits such critical shorthand as “good-time dance pop,” then that is neither to suggest they are one dimensional nor simplistic…they strive to inject originality, intelligence and modest adventure into an established methodology.”

  Liam was none too happy when he saw what I had done, my judicious use of dots neatly excising the criticisms that had been at the heart of his review. “That might be what I said but it is not what I meant,” he chided me. “You should get a job writing press releases for the government.”

  So, for the sake of historical probity and to allow readers a more objective analysis of this pilgrim’s musical progress, let me restore some of the missing sections.

  Creatively their ambition is always true but their aim is sometimes right off. As the group’s sole lead instrumentalist, back-up vocalist/guitarist Ivan tries to shoulder more musical weight than he can, as yet, handle. When he allows a note to slip through his fingers or fails to nail down a chord with anything less than complete authority, Yeah!Yeah!’s whole sound suffers as a result. And if the Yeah!Yeah! ethos baits such critical shorthand as “good-time dance pop,” then that is neither to suggest they are one dimensional nor simplistic. Indeed, it is entirely because they strive to inject originality, intelligence and modest adventure into an established methodology that their mistakes clang louder, their sloppiness is all the more disappointing.

  Liam concluded that we needed to take more time and trouble perfecting our craft if Yeah! Yeah!

  wanted to move beyond the admittedly enjoyable but ultimately self-deceiving kind of gig, where the crowd is sympathetic to their mistakes.

  My usual response to this would have been “Ah, what the fuck does he know?” But I was well aware that Liam knew his stuff. We were going to have to redouble our efforts in the rehearsal room.

  We had to take a break in March anyway, when Leo went into hospital to have the plates removed from his hip. Ivan and I kept ourselves busy by looking up the addresses of every record company in Britain and Ireland and duly mailing off cassettes. After a few weeks we gave up checking the post for replies. The music industry had not apparently been gripped by a feverish conviction that the next big thing was lurking in an Irish fishing village. Perhaps the tapes had gone astray in the post.

  On March 31, 1982, I turned twenty-one, an occasion chiefly notable for my first imbibement of alcohol. My parents threw a big party at the Summit Inn. Ivan, Deco and I performed a set of rock ’n’ roll standards with members of Deaf Actor and the Gravediggers. I was drunk. Pissed. Bladdered.

  One lousy half-pint bottle of cider, that’s all it took.

  “Go on, Neil! Fuckin’ get it down ya!” yelled my friends.

  So I did.

  And what a glorious time I had. I felt relaxed and free. Un-shackled from any lingering chains of internal inhibition. What had I been so afraid of?

  After that there was no stopping me. I fell in with a bad crowd, Your Honor. Principal among my corruptors were a pair of students, Ian and Clanger, much given to the demon weed, who made it their business to teach me how to inhale. They lived in a rented house with a shifting cast of other reprobates, with a pool table in the living room and a tankful of piranhas in the kitchen, which they fed with live mice bought from a pet shop. I remember the first time I drank myself legless, at a midnight beach party at the bottom of Howth cliffs. Somebody had been handing me mugs of port, saying they would keep me warm, as we sat around a fire in the cold Irish air, singing and joking, the black sea lapping up around us. Watching the local drunks, I had always assumed some kind of mental fugue enveloped them, clouding their brains and slurring their thoughts. But I was fine, rabbiting away, not a bother on me. Until I tried to stand up and promptly fell over. Ian and Clanger propped me
between them as they walked me around the stony beach, trying to sober me up for the journey home, which involved ascending a rope ladder up a sheer cliff face. Finally my custodians explained that I was just going to have to puke it all up. I assumed the position and disgorged the wine-red contents of my stomach. Oh what joy! I felt a cold shiver of relief spread through my body. And here was me, all these years, thinking the drunks throwing up in the gutters were sick and miserable. Vomiting was fantastic!

  Leo came out of hospital. He had to use a walking stick to protect his hip but, with some adjustments to his drum stool, found his musical capabilities undiminished. Ivan and I proposed that we all take a year off regular employment. We wanted Yeah! Yeah! to turn professional, which would mean rehearsing every day and effectively treating the band as a full-time job.

  Deco was easy to persuade but Leo was skeptical. He already had a full-time job, working in a junior position at OKB advertising agency, the facilities of which we frequently availed ourselves of to create our zany posters. And he wasn’t sure if he wanted to give that up to spend all day in a rehearsal room with the monumental egos and intense ambitions of the McCormick brothers. It was not all fun and laughter, as anyone who has been in a band with siblings can probably attest. We could—and did—argue over everything, from whose name went first on the songwriting credits to what color shirts we should wear in a photo session; from what tempo we should perform a song to who got to drive to and from the gig.

  This is about average for the brotherhood of rock ’n’ roll. Around that time I met one of my heroes, Ray Davies, backstage after a Kinks concert in Dublin’s RDS auditorium. “I like your shirt,” declared the rock legend, admiring the purple, patterned, turtleneck, shoulder-buttoned psychedelic creation I had picked up on a trip to Carnaby Street (the very shirt I had fought with my brother about during a photo session). Ray was then married to Chrissie Hynde, and introduced me. “I’m sure I used to have the exact same shirt when I was younger,” said Ray.

  “The classics never go away,” said Chrissie, drolly.

  Not about to let a networking opportunity like this slip through my fingers, I told the couple all about the group I had with my brother.

  “It won’t last,” was Ray’s gloomy prognosis.

  “Why?” I said, startled.

  “Brothers shouldn’t be in groups together,” said Ray, whose own brother, Dave, was lurking on the other side of the room. “You both want what the other’s got and you just wind up trying to outdo each other all the time. It’s a recipe for great unhappiness.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Chrissie reassured me. “He’s been fighting with Dave for twenty years and the Kinks are still together.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m happy about it,” said Ray.

  The sibling band is a more common phenomenon than you might think. Apart from the famous family bands (the Jacksons, the Osmonds, the Neville Brothers, the Allman Brothers Band, the Isley Brothers, the Beach Boys and the Bee Gees), there were brothers in AC/DC, the Black Crowes, INXS, Styx, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Spencer Davis Group, Ten Years After, the Stooges, Crowded House, Dire Straits and Spandau Ballet. And then, of course, there were the Everly Brothers, whose relationship became so poisonous they actually broke up on stage in 1971, when Phil smashed his guitar and stormed off complaining about Don’s performance. This tradition has been warmly revived by the squabbling siblings in Oasis, who have broken up on stage so often people think it’s part of the act.

  I have always thought that Cain and Abel represent a more realistic model of brotherly relations than television’s all-for-one Waltons. As growing boys, you spend your childhood locked together in a love-hate battle for domination, competing for the attention of your parents, struggling to become individuals when the whole world behaves as if you are joined at the hip. And then, when you are old enough to forge a life for yourself, you elect to form a band with your closest rival and spend your adult life fighting over chord changes instead of toys.

  There are, of course, certain advantages. Bands play together for years before achieving the kind of telepathy that comes naturally to siblings. A commonality of nature and nurture enables you to predict each other’s next move and instinctively play to one another’s strengths. Voices blend effortlessly through shared tone and timbre. And you don’t have to take out an ad in a music paper to find your first group member.

  But there is always another, darker side. I think Ray Davies was right when he said that you both want what the other’s got. I remember how threatened I would feel when Ivan would, occasionally, write a song on his own. If he could write, play and sing lead vocals, what did he need me for? For my part, I could barely string four chords together on the guitar but I would insist on doing just that at every opportunity, composing at least a triple album’s worth of material around those chords, arranged in every conceivable order. At our best, Ivan and I were more than the sum of our parts. But at our worst, we were in danger of canceling each other out.

  Leo took his concerns to Barry Devlin, the erstwhile leader of the Irish folk rockers Horslips. The group had recently (and acrimoniously) split up and Devlin had taken a job as an art director at OKB. The former rock star came along to one of our Magnet gigs to judge our prospects for himself. Afterward, Leo introduced us.

  “You’re not the same Neil McCormick who works for Hot Press?” inquired Devlin, suspiciously.

  “No way,” I said, without blinking. “It’s a common name.”

  “That bastard stuck the knife in Horslips and twisted it,” grumbled Devlin, with tangible bitterness. “He slated our last album. Destroyed it. You’d think Hot Press would support a band like Horslips after everything we’ve done for the Irish music business, not let some pompous prat who doesn’t know his arse from his elbow trample all over us with his facile drivel.”

  “He sounds like a complete shit,” I agreed. “I’ve always been a big fan of Horslips myself.”

  We must have passed the Devlin test, because Leo decided to throw his lot in with us. My dad also offered his assistance. The motor industry was going through crippling problems and he had accepted voluntary redundancy, with a large payoff. He was in no great hurry to find another job and in the meantime was taking a keen interest in our musical progress—turning up at gigs, where fans referred to him as Mr. Mac. He felt we could achieve our goals if we kept focused and suggested he might manage us.

  To be honest, I was not happy about this development at all. On a purely selfish level, I worried that it would curb the potential for debauchery. How could you snort drugs off the naked bosoms of rampant bisexual groupies while your dad was in the dressing room? Not that this had ever happened, but I lived in hope. And besides, being managed by your father seemed to go against the entire rebellious spirit of rock ’n’ roll. Surely I was supposed to be offending my parents, not collaborating with them? We would be in danger of becoming a laughingstock, the Partridge Family of the Irish music scene. But Dad quickly demonstrated his potential by organizing the purchase of a Hi-Ace van and setting up a packed gigging schedule. Over two months in summer, we played sixteen shows, including dates as far afield as Wexford, Rosslare, Cork and Swords.

  A small hardcore of friends and fans followed us wherever we played, the same faces turning up in the front row from one side of Ireland to the other. The gigs were rowdy, joyous affairs. Something clicked for me on stage. I would be consumed by the moment and the song. Time would expand and contract, as if moving in sync with my own consciousness. I could feel when attention was slipping away and it was as if I was able to reach out and draw the attention back in. I felt confident that I could cope with anything up there in the lights, that I had the ability to ensure a good time was had by all, whether there were ten or two hundred people in the room. We always got encores. Gigs regularly ended with a stage invasion, with our most ardent female fans joining in the backing vocals on “Twist and Shout.”

  One of these girls was Joan Cod
y, my new sweetheart. Joan was attending university with some of my friends and had been coming to Yeah! Yeah! gigs for a while. One friend thought we would be well suited, commenting that he had never met two people so utterly obstinate, controversially opinionated and willfully contrary. I am not entirely sure if such characteristics were solid grounds for romantic compatibility but Joan was a pouting, beautiful blonde, much sought after by my contemporaries, and I enthusiastically joined the pursuit. Despite having legions of admirers, the object of our desires remained resolutely single, so naturally it was rumored that Joan must be a lesbian. How else could she resist all those overtures from hot-blooded Irish males? In fact, she was fiercely proud and secretly insecure, not the most approachable combination. But I chipped away at her defenses over the course of a long year until she finally surrendered, one moonlit night, in the romantic setting of a brown, secondhand, rusty, beaten-up and decidedly not-very-super Mini I had recently purchased for the princely sum of £100.

  Did you know that, technically, you cannot commit rape in a Mini? This is a peculiar item of trivia I picked up from newspapers following the dramatic failure of a sexual-assault case in the Irish courts. Apparently, the interior of a Mini is too cramped for anything but consensual sex. And even that, I can testify from experience, tends to be of a complex and uncomfortable nature, requiring a great deal of physical flexibility and a willingness to overlook the potential dangers of the gear stick.

  I remained art director at Hot Press, in a part-time capacity. Which actually did not change my working arrangements all that much; it just meant I wasn’t hanging around the office when there was nothing to do. Hot Press was in a state of crisis, lurching eratically from issue to issue with mounting debts. The British launch had not gone well, having been poleaxed by industrial action from civil servants in the U.K. which commenced almost immediately afterward. Lightning strikes seemed designed specifically to thwart the distribution of Hot Press. Entire issues ended up stranded in customs depots. Several early issues never made it on to the streets, money was being poured down a black hole, advertisers were refusing to pay their bills, Hot Press’s credibility in the U.K. was fatally damaged and, after a year of trying to regain lost ground, it reached the point where even pulling out of Britain was not enough to save the magazine. Publication dates became increasingly unreliable, with matters hitting rock bottom when Niall had to borrow from his poorly paid staff to keep the magazine afloat. I put in my £500 savings but there was no guarantee that bankruptcy could be staved off for long.