Killing Bono

by Neil McCormick

It took me a moment to adjust to the notion that my school-friends had moved into this realm of iconography, where complete strangers might display their pictures as if they were part of the family. The whole experience was strangely off-putting. Every time I glanced up from the perfect form of the naked beauty writhing beneath me, I would catch sight of Bono looking down at us. Was that a faint hint of disapproval in his eyes? Did he know that I was only with this girl because she was a model and I could brag about it later?

  “Do you mind if we turn the lights off?” I asked. My breathless little beauty seemed surprised by my bashfulness but nonetheless complied. Even in the dark, though, I could feel Bono’s reproving gaze burning into my back.

  U2 were out there now, dwelling in that hyperreality whose inhabitants have an existence quite separate to their real lives. They were off touring the world, waving white flags on stages erected from one corner of the earth to the other, but they were simultaneously here in this girl’s bedroom and scaling scaffolding on Top of the Pops and singing their songs on a million hi-fis. War had done that. It was the album in which Bono had begun to fulfill all his latent promise, stamping his passionate personality on music that was rougher, funkier, grittier and more vibrantly contemporary. It was as if the Edge had stepped back, stripping down his wall of sound to allow his songwriting partner some sonic space. Bono’s voice was filling out and the words were pouring forth. For the first time in his career as a lyricist, Bono risked being called verbose as he gave us his thoughts on love in a time of danger and spiritual survival in an era when the forces of chaos and disorder seemed to rule the world.

  I listened to War with admiration, not envy. I was honestly amazed that they were progressing in such creative leaps and bounds, producing songs of the transcendent quality of “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” “You don’t write songs,” I had once admonished Bono. “You make these fantastic records but if you took away all the layers of sound what’s underneath? There’s nothing you could just sing in the shower.”

  “I don’t have a shower,” he jokingly replied. “I have a bath. Maybe that’s the problem!”

  Now U2 had somehow reached the sacred ground of the singles hit parade with “Two Hearts Beat as One” and “New Year’s Day.” We had some catching up to do. But Ossie and Dave were still whispering their million-dollar supplications in my ear. Be patient. It would only be a matter of time.

  Hanging out with this model crowd, we were dining in places where we could barely afford a starter and being led into VIP rooms in exclusive nightclubs where you could take out a mortgage on a cocktail. Funds were running dangerously low. At the end of a night partying, when everyone was air-kissing their goodbyes and jumping into taxis, Ivan and I would hang back, making sure we were the last to leave, then we would walk back to Belsize Park from central London, traipsing miles under the lamplights, cutting across Regent’s Park, all the while talking about songs and albums and hatching fanciful plans for what we were going to do in the future. The very near future. When we got the deal. Everything would be all right if we could just hang on a little bit longer.

  Meanwhile, we were advised to sign on the dole. I was incredulous that I could come over from Ireland and receive money in England for not working but I was assured that this was the case. So I duly went along to an unpleasant building down the back streets of Camden, reeking of despair and hopelessness, and cheerfully filled in the requisite forms. I was summoned into a tiny, airless office, where a rather severe woman read my paperwork and, without once looking up to see who she was addressing, asked me what steps I was taking to find gainful employment.

  “I’m sorting out a record deal,” I told her.

  She sighed loudly and finally raised her eyes to meet mine. “You can’t depend on that,” she said. “We need to see evidence that you are actively seeking work.”

  I patiently explained that I really didn’t need a job as a major record contract would be in my hands any day now.

  “You don’t know how many times I have heard that,” she said, with a disturbing mix of pity and condescension.

  “Yeah, well, maybe,” I said. “But I’m different.”

  Her long-suffering look suggested she may have heard that line before, too.

  At last we were summoned to meet one of the movers and shakers apparently so enamored of our talent. Lucien Grainge ran a publishing company and was considered a real up-and-comer in the music business. Ossie and Dave were certainly most impressed with him. After all the buildup, Ivan and I were a bit nonplussed to find Lucien occupying a cramped and not particularly well-maintained suite of offices up a narrow staircase off Oxford Street. He was a small, stocky man whose chubby features were mostly hidden behind an enormous pair of bright-red, plastic-framed spectacles. He had the habit of interrupting our conversations to apparently take calls from major rock stars. “David…David,” he’d say, “love the new tracks,” then he’d cover the mouthpiece and whisper to us, conspiratorially, “Bowie.” Then the line from his secretary would buzz again. “Gotta take this call,” he’d say. “Mick, Mick…”

  But Lucien had ideas about how to progress. He thought we needed more recordings, to keep bombarding the record companies while they were hot. “Ossie tells me you’ve got songs coming out of your ears, so let’s get ’em down.” He had a producer he thought we should work with, a fellow called Phil Thornalley. “Very contemporary sound,” said Lucien. “He’d be perfect for you. Might be a bit hard to get, could be expensive, but I think we could work something out.”

  Ivan and I were nervous about working with someone we did not know, scared our lack of studio nous might be exposed. “What’s wrong with the production on our demos?” we asked.

  “Nothing wrong with them at all,” said Lucien. “But who is this guy, Peter Eades? No one’s ever heard of him.”

  “They’ve heard of him in Ireland,” said Ivan. “He’s a bit of a genius, actually. Everybody wants to work with him.”

  “I hear he’s talking to U2,” I improvised. “They’re thinking of a bit of a change in direction for the next album.”

  “Really?” said Lucien. “And you can get this guy?”

  “We’ve got a relationship,” said Ivan.

  So we persuaded Lucien to fund a trip to Ireland to record with Peter again. We knew we had to pull out all the stops. We recorded “Say the Word” as a banner-waving epic, replete with layers of harmonies. And we recorded a dreamy new ballad, “Sleepwalking,” with an epic production built around a sparse, decaying drumbeat. The lyric was an attempt to evoke the sense of dislocation I felt in London.

  The spirit of electricity

  Flickers like a torch through the bones of my hand

  Dreams are making a mess of me

  They say I’m looking like a ghost, but they don’t understand

  I’m the haunted not the haunting

  I need to get some peace,

  I’m walking in my sleep…

  I surprised myself by hitting a sweet falsetto at the song’s dramatic peak. My singing was dramatically improving under Peter’s tutelage. The recording was gorgeous. The best thing we had ever done.

  While in Ireland, we also had a session with a fashion photographer, complete with hair and makeup (we had learned something hanging around with models after all). My glasses had been replaced by contact lenses and with that change came a growing sense of confidence in my physical appearance. I was losing some of that skinny, boyish gawkiness that I felt might have impeded my attractiveness to the opposite sex. My face was decently proportioned, my teeth nice and even and, once in a while, one of the models I was chasing about would even describe me as handsome. That was praise indeed, given that physical appearance was about the only thing to which they gave any serious thought.

  Ivan had longish hair and I kept mine short but otherwise we tended to coordinate our appearance. Our image at the time might best be described as colorful. For the photo shoot, we wore luridly bright-orange and red shirts, ma
tching green army fatigue waistcoats and oily blue Levi 501 jeans. Who could resist us?

  Well, Lucien for one, apparently. We returned to London in high spirits but our meeting did not go well. Lucien glanced over our photo sets and declared, in his Jack-the-laddy fashion: “I thought you guys were meant to be pretty. You look like a couple of rent boys from the sticks.”

  “Look who’s talking,” sneered Ivan. “Do you wear those specs just to distract people from your ugly mug?”

  Lucien recoiled as if wounded. “What’s wrong with my glasses?” he asked, all bonhomie suddenly absent.

  “Maybe you need a new prescription,” I said, joining in the abuse. “Could be you’re too shortsighted to see how ridiculous you actually look.”

  Ivan and I thought our cheeky irreverence was part of our appeal but I don’t suppose many others felt the same. Lucien made us an offer nonetheless. He said he could set up a singles deal with a major label. “We want to make albums,” I pointed out.

  “Look, boys, what can I tell you?” he said. I got the impression he was enjoying our disappointment. “You’re a pop act. It’s a very expensive market to operate in. And it’s all about hits. You’ve got good songs, you’d have a shot. We’d have to do something about the way you look, obviously. We want you to make the little girls scream but not ’cause they’re having nightmares.”

  We told him to stuff it. And not in so many words. It went against everything Ossie and Dave had been advising. It did not escape my attention that our offers seemed to be getting worse rather than improving, but I wasn’t impressed with Lucien Grainge. I thought he was full of shit. He evidently thought the same about us and sent us on our way, telling us we were too big for our cowboy boots.

  These days, Lucien is one of the major players in the British music business (just as Ossie and Dave predicted), chairman and chief executive of Universal Music UK.

  This episode, remarkably, did nothing to dent our confidence. Ossie and Dave informed us they were having talks with London Records and CBS and proposed that the time had come to sign a management contract. A thick document duly arrived through the post. Being unable to afford the services of a lawyer, I sat down and read it all very carefully, working my way slowly through huge tracts of almost impenetrable legalese. The word gross (which kept recurring) is a fair description of what I found in there.

  Essentially the contract stipulated that we delegate all decisive power to them (they apparently preferred sole discretion to mutual agreement) while they charged us for all expenses incurred (including their own fees for accountancy and legal services) on top of which they would take their substantial management commission from the gross receipts of all our earnings from the entertainment industry (and a few subsidiary industries besides, including the literary industry). Since many activities in the music business (notably touring) are often conducted at a loss, it would mean that our managers would profit from things that actually cost us money. Indeed, there would be very little incentive to maximize profit as opposed to simply maximizing turnover. But what really struck me, reading the contract, was that there was no sense that we were in this together. Ossie and Dave had been so friendly and supportive, I really thought they believed in us and wanted to be a part of what we were trying to achieve. I thought our interests and their interests were the same. But the true nature of our relationship was spelled out in this document, if you only took the trouble to read between the lines of legal jargon. They saw us as a source of revenue. Nothing more, nothing less. I felt crushingly betrayed but at the same time I knew it was ridiculous to be upset. I experienced another little life shock as I mentally readjusted to encompass this new information, seeing myself as a naïve wannabe who had sailed gaily into the clutches of professional hustlers.

  I confronted Ossie at our next meeting. He just laughed. “Lads, lads,” he said, waving his arms dismissively. “These are starting points, a basis for negotiations.”

  “The thing is, Ossie,” I said, sadly, “if you’d just given us a fair contract we’d have signed it right away.”

  “Look,” he said, “we’ll draw up another contract. We’ll address your concerns. Don’t take it so seriously. It’s a game, boys!”

  Ossie cheerfully buoyed our spirits and sent us back out convinced that record companies would soon be battering down our door, begging us to sign with them. He was good at that, a real cheerleader. But something had changed in our relationship. It was not just the trust I had placed in him that had been damaged; it was an entire framework of trust that had been shaken—that somewhat childish, possibly very middle-class faith in the benign motives of the adult world. I certainly resolved to keep a closer eye on Ossie. It may have been a game to him, but this was my life.

  It was not like people weren’t telling me. I guess I just hadn’t been listening. Forced by growing financial desperation to contemplate gainful employment, I occasionally wrote an article for Hot Press (with the stipulation that, for a change, they actually pay me for my services). I was dispatched to interview Paul Weller, ex-leader of the Jam, who had recently formed the Style Council, attempting to shed his “angry young man” image by remodeling himself as the frothy Cappuccino Kid. Weller had been a real idol to me and proved to be impressively down-to-earth. When the interview was officially over, we wandered out to an Italian café in Hanover Square and indulged his new European aspirations by sitting in the cold at a pavement table, beneath dreary London skies, drinking cappuccinos. He listened sympathetically while I told him of the problems I was having. “The whole music business is shit, it’s run on a dirty basis,” he said. “But what business fuckin’ ain’t? Can you name a noble business? There must be a few, I suppose, but I don’t think there’s very fuckin’ many. You always got to bear in mind that the record business works this way: if you’re successful you can do what you want. If you’re not…”

  He let that thought drift. That was the unthinkable.

  In March 1984, Ossie and David came up with a new angle. They told us that Rod Stewart’s former manager was interested in taking us on. Billy Gaff was the owner of Riva records and currently manager of John Cougar Mellencamp, who had been the biggest-selling white act in America during the previous year (topping even Bruce Springsteen, to whom he was often unfavorably compared). Ossie set up a meeting and told us to be on our best behavior.

  We met this rock ’n’ roll kingpin in a house in Knights-bridge that looked like it shared an interior designer with Buckingham Palace. The reception room was bigger than our entire flat. Gaff was a portly, balding, extremely well-spoken Englishman with very camp mannerisms. Spread out on a vast mahogany table he had our photographs, images of us boisterously clambering all over one another. He picked up a shot of me kissing Ivan on the cheek. “I like this,” he said. “Very striking. Very seductive. Maybe you should tell me how you two got together?”

  “Uhm, we’ve been together since childhood,” I said, uncertainly.

  “Really?” said Billy. “How interesting!”

  “Well, we are brothers,” I pointed out.

  Billy seemed oddly put out by this information. But he sat with us for half an hour, telling us of all the songs he had picked for bands that had reached number one in America. “I’ve got ears,” he kept saying. “Very important in this business.”

  He did indeed have ears, sticking out either side of his head. But then so did Ivan and I. What was he getting at? Finally he spelled it out: he had a song he was looking for the right act to record.

  “You want us to do a cover version?” I gulped.

  It was a guaranteed megahit, according to Billy. A surefire American number one.

  “But we’re songwriters!” I spluttered.

  “Oh, really?” he said. I began to get the impression he hadn’t actually paid much attention to our demos. But at least he liked our publicity shots.

  “Look,” he said, “you can record what you want once you’ve had a hit. It’s getting that hit that’s all-imp
ortant. And I can pick hits. I’ve got ears. Have you got an American number one up your sleeve? Because if you have, I haven’t heard it.”

  A second meeting was scheduled for the following week, when he would play us the song he wanted us to record. Meanwhile, we were to get together with Billy’s producer, Jon Astley.

  We went away in a quandary. The idea of launching ourselves with a cover version was the absolute antithesis of everything we believed in. On the other hand, if we made this compromise now, everything we ever wanted would be within our grasp. Everything except artistic credibility. And musical satisfaction. And self-respect.

  “Look, if he wants an American hit, we’ll write him one,” I said to Ivan.

  For the next few days we were ensconced in the flat, putting our hearts and souls into creating the ultimate pop thriller. Wasn’t this what Lennon and McCartney had done, after all, writing “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” to conquer the U.S. market? We studied the American top ten, which was full of punchy, ultra-rhythmic, pop rock and dance songs like “Jump” by Van Halen, “Thriller” by Michael Jackson and “Automatic” by the Pointer Sisters. We decided we needed something with a melodramatic edge, a driving beat and a big chorus. We came up with an out-and-out rocker, “Love Is Stranger Than Fiction,” and a strange, rhythmically jagged track called “Faithless,” a song naked in its expression of desire and ambition, on which I shamelessly pleaded “All I want is my share / All I want is all.”

  Jon Astley turned out to be a tall, fresh-faced, amiable fellow, who had cut his studio teeth assisting the Who’s legendary producer Glyn Johns. He was making a step up from engineering to production, so this Billy Gaff project was as important to him as it was to us. We played our new songs on the acoustic guitar and he was delighted. “They’re superb,” he declared. “We could do fantastic things with them.”

  “What about this song Billy wants us to record?” I asked. “Is it really good?”

  “I haven’t heard it,” Jon admitted. “He’s been keeping it under wraps.”