Killing Bono

by Neil McCormick

  But Niall had made a lot of friends in the Irish music business and a few of these rallied around when it counted. A concert was organized at Punchestown Racecourse, outside Dublin, with performers donating their services free and proceeds going to the magazine. I designed a poster, featuring coheadliners Rory Gallagher and U2. It still seemed strange, putting schoolfriends in the elevated company of someone who had been a rock star as long as I could remember. I watched the show from the side of the stage with Ali and wondered how long I would be able to get up this close. Were U2 going to leave us all behind? As Bono perilously clambered the scaffolding and the audience roared their approval, I thought, “Well, at least I’ll get my money back.”

  Our new professional status meant that Ivan had to turn down an enticing job as recording engineer at Eamon Andrews, a tiny studio usually used for radio voice-overs. He recommended our roadie, Ivan O’Shea, for the position instead, who returned the favor by wangling us a day of free recording time. It was only an 8-track, yet still contained a desk covered with a quite bewildering array of knobs and switches. I could not begin to comprehend how recording a sound could have so many potential variables. Sadly I think our engineer felt the same way. And what were we supposed to do with all these tracks? We put drums on one track, bass on another, guitar on another, lead vocals on another, backing vocals on another…And found that we had three tracks left over with nothing to go on them. We recorded everything live and each musician had a hand in setting up the mix—which meant Deco called for more bass, Ivan for more guitar, Leo for more drums and me for more vocals, until all the faders were up full and there was no room left for negotiation. We blasted through something like eighteen songs and left mighty satisfied with our day’s work. It was about the same amount of time the Beatles had taken to record their first album, we noted approvingly. What people were doing for three months in 24-track studios was a mystery to me. Lots of drugs, probably.

  We packaged a demo of four songs and sent it out into the void where our previous demo had vanished without trace. Some of the songs had begun to get play on Dublin’s pirate radio stations and we were convinced that this time the record industry could not ignore us.

  When responses finally started arriving, the content of the letters was so standardized we weren’t even sure which tape they were referring to. “Dear Sir / Madam,” they began (though sometimes they had the group’s name hastily scribbled in the required space), “Many thanks for sending your material for our consideration…”; “Thank you for sending your demonstration cassette, which we listened to with interest…”; “Thank you for giving us the opportunity to hear your material…”

  So far so good.

  “Unfortunately…”

  Things invariably took a turn for the worse at this particular juncture.

  “At the present time…”; “after careful consideration…”; “having listened with great interest…”; “we do not feel…”; “we have decided to pass…”; “not what we are looking for…”; “not interested…”; “not suitable…”

  Still, there was hope near the end.

  “If you would like to send any further material…”; “in the future…”; “we would be very pleased to consider…”; “do not hesitate…”; “please feel free…”

  And finally…

  “Thank you very much for your consideration.”

  Oh, it was nothing, really.

  The really disillusioning thing for us at the time was the fact that these were all form letters. Though couched in encouraging language, there was no comment on or criticism of the music other than to inform us of its unsuitability. At the present time.

  Of course, I understand now why there was no attempt to address the actual content of our tapes. Because the chances are that no one in the A&R department had actually listened to them.

  A&R stands for “artists and repertoire.” A record company’s A&R department’s functions can include a great deal of involvement with its acts (booking them into studios, arranging producers and so on), but the principal responsibility of A&R is discovering and signing new acts. These people are the talent scouts charged with dealing with the unknown singers, songwriters and bands who fill the vast, uncharted depths of the bottom end of the music business. They deal with the hopefuls and are themselves the focus of an almost unimaginable amount of hope. It is not an enviable position to be in.

  Record companies receive hundreds of demos every week, each containing three or more songs, recorded in wildly varying conditions by people with even more wildly varying degrees of talent, all screaming for attention. Senior A&R people are not interested in the time-consuming, tedious and largely unrewarding task of listening to these tapes so they are passed straight to the most junior members of staff for sifting. Any enthusiasm with which the junior initially approaches this job soon evaporates when faced with a constant influx of perhaps twenty-five or thirty demos a day, many of truly apalling standard and virtually none with the sound quality of an average record. So they flick through, listen to the music in short stabs and move on. And then they sign another rejection slip.

  They may come across something interesting and put it aside for further appraisal but the very process severely restricts the likelihood of this. A junior A&R man (now managing director of a major label) once told me, “Off the record, I listen to only about half the tapes. I’ll eliminate them by presentation, name, song titles, anything. As far as I know we’ve never signed anyone based on a demo sent in on spec anyway. There’s always been something else—press reviews, radio, independent success—to draw attention to them.”

  This is what I have learned about A&R over the years: it is essentially a glorified system for keeping musicians out of record companies.

  Yeah! Yeah!’s gigs were getting wilder and stranger. There was an edge to the band’s performances, perhaps from a sense of growing desperation. Some of this was coming from Leo, whose hip joint was gradually disintegrating. Doctors were intimating that they would have to cement it into place, a process that would require extensive operations after which he could expect to walk with a limp for the rest of his life. Whether or not he would be able to continue playing drums was another big question. All of this was preying on him; he was drinking a lot, doing reckless things, bringing an element of hysteria to the band’s wacky presentation.

  At the Summit Inn before a show in September, one of the local troublemakers muttered “Cripple” as Leo passed on his way to the stage.

  “I heard that!” said Leo, spinning suddenly and smashing the loudmouth across the face with his wooden walking stick.

  The howling miscreant’s friends hurled themselves at Leo, who went down under a rain of kicks and blows. Huey piled in to the fray, battering all around him. Someone’s shirt was ripped off. Huey somehow found himself at the bottom of a scrum of bodies, his hands and legs pinned. At which point there was a god-awful scream of pain, then Huey’s assailant leaped to his feet, clutching his chest, bellowing incredulously: “He bit my fuckin’ nipple off!”

  The troublemakers were hustled out of the venue. Huey was treated as a hero. “It was nothing, really,” he said. “I just saw this pink thing floating in front of my face and clamped my jaw around it!”

  The gig was suitably intense. One of the best. And one of the last. We seemed to have reached a plateau. We had an audience but it wasn’t growing; we didn’t seem to be making a real impact on the local scene. Record companies clearly weren’t interested. There was still a feeling that we needed to shift up a gear but in reality this group was already screaming along in fifth, with nothing more to screw out of the engine.

  Leo decided to leave. Ivan and I did not try to dissuade him. Declan threw in the towel as soon as he heard the news. I think we were all, secretly, quite relieved. It was time to move on.

  Eleven

  It was 1983. New wave was old hat. Pop was mutating, spawning new genres and subgenres with amazing rapidity, empowered by the increasing soph
istication and adaptability of the synthesizer. No longer was it solely the preserve of sci-fi geeks (though there were plenty of them about, dreaming of electric sheep in the dreary sub-Bowie monotones of Gary Numan). Synths were at the flamboyant heart of the gaudy new-romantic movement; they provided the trashy settings for exponents of eccentric electropop such as the Human League and Soft Cell and the plastic extravaganzas of state-of-the-art bubblegum by Eurovision winners Bucks Fizz and blow-dried glamour duo Dollar. Synths could replicate banks of strings, percussion, horns, bass—entire orchestras of sound—with individual settings for pretty much every instrument you had ever heard of and some that had never even existed before (space bass? Ambient pads?). They had things with names like oscillators, arpeggiators and pitch-benders and functions like programmable patches, polyphonic voices and filter sweeps. It seemed to us that to make modern pop records in the eighties you no longer really needed a band. But you definitely needed a synth.

  It was relatively easy to persuade Dad to invest in a Roland Juno 60, a high-performance analogue synthesizer. His faith in the unproven talent of his offspring was almost as blind as our own. I had a vision of a new kind of pop music. It would bring together apparently incompatible ingredients. It would take the glossy, sonic, ultramanufactured, soulless perfectionism of Dollar (I really had a soft spot for this airbrushed couple, whose records dripped with hi-tech luxuriousness) and marry it to the lyrical complexity and emotional substance of Elvis Costello. It would take the driving propulsion of modern dance beats and fuse them to the melodic songwriting template of the Beatles. It would take the twisted rhythms, scintillating arrangements and hard-assed marketing force of Michael Jackson (whose Thriller was our turntable hit of the year, uniting the often divergent tastes of Ivan and I) and add a twist of Dylan to the mix. It would be designer pop: remorselessly, relentlessly, unabashedly commercial. But it would not be trite.

  Actually it would not be all that original either. ABC had attempted something similar with Lexicon of Love, even down to using Dollar’s producer Trevor Horn. But they went badly awry with the follow-up, the self-produced Beauty Stab (which was anything but beautiful and was roundly panned in the press). I was dispatched to interview their leader, the soft-spoken and usually rather mild-mannered Martin Fry, and ended up in a loud slagging match in a pub. His mistake was to ask me what I thought of his new album (a word to interview subjects: if the journalist does not volunteer his opinion of your latest masterpiece, don’t ask; he’s probably just trying to be polite) and he was evidently somewhat offended by my candid response. “I say bollocks to all that,” he snapped. “You must think we’re fucking stupid!”

  Things went from bad to worse. After ten minutes of increasingly heated debate he snarled, “I suppose you think you could do better!”

  You don’t need a degree in behavioral psychology to anticipate my answer. I stood up in the bar to deliver an a cappella rendition of one of my songs, drawing amused applause from some of the boozy regulars.

  “Well, it was in time and in tune and that’s the best that can be said about it,” sulked Fry.

  If I were him, I would have punched me.

  But I was convinced we could do better than ABC, who to my mind were condescending in their self-consciously ironic appropriation of pop. We had learned from our previous stints in the studio, however, that we needed a producer at the helm with the technical expertise to realize our grandiose but somewhat vague ambitions. Trevor Horn’s services were somewhat beyond our meager budget but we were introduced to Peter Eades, who had recently opened Ireland’s first 24-track mobile studio and was touting for business.

  We liked Peter immediately. He was a naturally effervescent musical enthusiast, who had honed his multi-instrumental skills on the show-band circuit with a band called the Memories, playing note-perfect cover versions of other people’s songs. He told us about the time he had seen Queen perform live. “They walked off stage halfway through ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and left a reel-to-reel tape recorder playing all the harmonies,” he said. “I nearly choked! The Memories had been doing the whole feckin’ arrangement. Do you know how long it took to get that right? And here’s the feckin’ originals and they can’t even play their own song!” But what really tipped it was when Peter showed us a pair of wire-rimmed National Health spectacles he had stolen from John Lennon’s effigy in Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum when he was fifteen. “Sometimes I put ’em on when I’m recording harmonies,” he said. “Sure, none of us is ever going to improve on the Beatles—but there’s no harm in trying!”

  Peter parked his huge mobile recording truck outside the front of our house. Inside was a desk that looked to us like something you would use to control a space mission, but for once we were confident that the man in charge actually knew how to send us into orbit. Lines were run into the basement room we used for rehearsals. As a rhythm section we drafted in Jack Dublin and Paul Byrne, easily the most gifted musicians in Howth. We played Peter our Dollar and Michael Jackson records and he showed us how to achieve our impossible musical dreams. He re-structured and rearranged our songs. He identified and underscored the hook-lines. He added walls of harmonies to our simple two parts. He expanded melodies with fabulously inventive counterpoints. He made me record and rerecord my vocals, tackling the songs line by line until they were perfect. I could hardly believe the sound of my voice as it came sailing out of the huge speakers: it had tone and timbre and character and emotion. This was the voice I had been hearing in my head all those years! I knew it was in there somewhere!

  Watching Peter work, I learned more about music than I did in all my years as a fan and critic. I learned how to make it. And I also learned to show some much-overdue respect to the craft of the professional musician. I was dismissive of the show-bands. They were throwbacks to another era, human jukeboxes touring the country playing anodyne cover versions in matching suits, their Mafia-like managers operating a monopoly on Ireland’s best venues. Show-bands were seen by us as the enemy, first to be hated and then (as groups like the Boomtown Rats and U2 finally started to break this vicelike grip on Irish musical culture) to be pitied. All of which may have been true. Show-bands certainly were responsible for the stagnant state of the prepunk Irish music scene. But Peter was a product of the show-band world and he was the most accomplished musician I had ever met.

  “I’ve got to make a living,” Peter said to me one night, over a pint in the Abbey Tavern (recording always had to stop in time for last orders). “My first priority has to be to my home and my wife and my kids. But at least I’ve been making my living from music. I’m not on the dole. I’m not a civil servant. I’m a musician and I’m playing for my bread and butter. There are people sneering at that and they’re living in a run-down flat in Berkley Street, eating a tin of baked beans for their main course. But they’ll tell you they believe in their songs! Imagine me arriving home to my wife and her asking, ‘How did the gig go?’ and me saying, ‘Ah, it was brutal, the audience split, we didn’t get paid…But we did a hundred percent of our own material!’ ”

  Peter made a curious revelation that evening: he was related to Larry Mullen. “I see Larry at family gatherings, you know, and I wish him well. I don’t know how he feels about it, but I think we’re both doing the same thing, we’re both doing what we love. It’s just a matter of scale.”

  Peter spent a week producing two songs for us, even though we had enough funds to pay him for only two days. At the end we had a tape comprising “The Kiss,” a frantic, jumpy, dance track, and “Amnesia,” a moodily atmospheric, sonically epic ballad about the loss of innocence. Both had been live favorites for Yeah! Yeah! but were utterly transformed by Peter’s input, resulting in what was probably the most polished, big-production, contemporary-sounding pop to have been produced in Ireland at that point in time.

  The Gravediggers and Deaf Actor had also recently split up in the face of music industry disinterest. We talked to Jack and Paul about forming a new group but t
hey opted instead to join forces with Ivan O’Shea, who was assembling a band that would combine folk and rock instrumentation in a contemporary setting. He called it In Tua Nua. I went down to the cliff-side cottage they used as a rehearsal room to check out the competition. Paul had spotted a young girl with an ethereal, crystal, tremulously soft voice singing at his sister’s wedding and persuaded her to try out for the band. She seemed impossibly shy, singing with eyes closed and retreating into a corner between songs, but I had to admit she was something special. Her name was Sinead O’Connor. As for the rest of them, they were having problems getting the uillean pipes to tune with the keyboards. I thought that if Jack and Paul wanted to take a chance with this unholy cacophony then that was their problem. They were clearly never going to get anywhere.

  I went to see Bono. I ran into him less and less these days as U2’s touring and recording became all-consuming. And he was a married man now. Bono and Ali had tied the knot at the end of the previous year. But the truth is that I felt our paths had drifted apart since the evening at Edge’s house. The whole Shalom scene was too weird for me. I could hardly even be bothered arguing about it anymore. Their tenets of belief were so utterly out of line with my own perception of reality they might as well have existed in an alternative dimension, where the rules of logic and science did not apply. For his part, I could hardly blame Bono if he had concluded that I was a godless pagan whose soul was unredeemable.