Killing Bono

by Neil McCormick

  I picked up the phone. Waves crashed against the side of my skull. I held on to the door jamb as I croaked my hello.

  “Neil,” said a familiar Scottish voice. “Bill Drummond here. I just had to call and say last night was out of this world.”

  “Wow, thanks, Bill,” I replied.

  “I don’t know who else you’re talking to,” said Bill, “but I want to sign you.”

  Fifteen

  U2 played Milton Keynes Bowl on June 22, 1985. It was their biggest U.K. gig to date, a huge open-air event for 50,000. Ivan, Vlad, Joan and I traveled up by train to the concert, buzzing with anticipation. Hell, we were just buzzing in general. We were floating about in a bubble of happiness, heads spinning from a whirlwind week in which the Good Fairy of Fame & Fortune had waved her magic wand over our heads.

  I spoke to Bono on the phone shortly after Bill gave me the good news. “What do we do now?” I wanted to know. Because our every effort had been focused on getting this far and no further. I well remembered our conversation on the 31 bus when Bono warned me that the work starts after you land the deal. “You cannot possibly understand how frustrating the last few years have been,” I told him. “It’s like we’ve been denied access. We’ve just been hammering on locked doors. Sometimes they open, just a crack, and we start to go through and bang! They slam shut in our faces. And suddenly the door is wide open and I’m standing here thinking, ‘What am I supposed to do now?’ ”

  “Get yourself a solicitor,” said Bono. Such practical advice. I was glad I knew a rock star who had been through all of this before. Unfortunately the first name Bono suggested was David Landsman.

  “I don’t think he’s talking to us,” I said.

  Bono came up with an alternative, a solicitor named Nicholas Pedgriffe, who had apparently negotiated their deal with David Landsman.

  “You’ve got lawyers negotiating deals with other lawyers?” I said.

  “That’s rock ’n’ roll,” said Bono.

  Bill Drummond and Max Hole, head of A&R at WEA, took Ivan and me to lunch in a chichi Chinese restaurant in London’s West End. “I could get used to this,” I declared, tucking into a strange twist of something unidentifiable with a bit of something else I didn’t recognize elegantly arranged along the side of the plate.

  “Whatever it is,” added Ivan.

  Oh, we were on good form. Bill and Max were effusive in their praise of Shook Up! They got it. They knew exactly where we were coming from. Nothing needed to be explained.

  “We see you as a big pop band with crossover appeal,” said Bill. “You’ve got the whole deal. You’re young enough for a teenybop audience, you’ve got the showmanship to build a live following and enough substance in the songwriting to attract older listeners.”

  “Wow,” said Ivan. “We sound great.”

  “It’s a very unusual balance of elements,” said Max. “We think you have the potential to be as popular as Duran Duran or—dare I say it?—the Police.”

  “Yes, dare to say it,” I thought, smiling contentedly as I watched something that looked like a scale model of a volcano arrive for my main course. Was I supposed to climb it or eat it?

  “I think you could be one of the biggest groups on the planet,” said Bill.

  It was as if he could read my mind! Bill explained that we would be signing directly to WEA (not his label, Korova). We were a mainstream act and would require a lot of investment. The deal on offer was not the kind of megabucks arrangement Ossie had been gunning for (indeed, I have a sneaking suspicion that he had turned down more on our behalf in the past), but a £30,000 advance was not to be sniffed at—especially with a record company who were so enthusiastic about our potential. We met with Bono’s solicitor the next day to look over the draft contract. A few of the clauses would have to be negotiated but, since this was our only offer and we were eager to sign, he suggested we act with all haste and we agreed.

  Oh, happy days. Bill arranged for us to go into a studio to demo tracks he had identified as possible singles. Oddly enough, they included “Some Kind of Loving” and “Sleepwalking,” songs Yeah! Yeah! had been touting around to no avail, but we opted to keep quiet about that. The musicians were fantastic and we knew exactly what we wanted, laying down fresh arrangements with a funky, punchy edge. We were on a high. Bill came to see us in the studio and nodded enthusiastically to the playback of “Sleepwalking.” “That could be your first number one, right there,” he said. We liked the sound of that. The first of many!

  At Milton Keynes it rained all day but nothing was going to dampen our spirits. We wandered around the huge backstage encampment, greeting familiar faces from the U2 camp. Frank Kearns was there and Ivan and I wrapped our former bandmate in a bear hug. His new group, Cactus World News, had just finished recording an EP for Mother Records, with Bono producing. We were delighted to hear his news and he was delighted to hear ours. We were one big bundle of mutual delight. We stood in the drizzle at the side of the stage, with plastic bags fashioned into makeshift hats, and watched our old heroes, the Ramones, support our old schoolfriends. “It’s a great day to be here at Woodstock,” said Joey, one foot in a puddle of rain and a sly grin on his face. Count it, Dee Dee: “Wan-tu-tree-faw!”

  The sunshine punks from Rockaway Beach cut through the miserable weather, Joey singing like a newspaper vendor, making aural shorthand of all his hook-lines (“Blitzkrieg Bop” became “Bliree Bip”) and tossing in “Yeah! Yeah! Oh yeah!” whenever he forgot the lyrics (which was often). After their set we took shelter in a hospitality marquee and in wandered Joey himself, a spidery, string-bean geek, moving with the stilted grace of a puppet. Frank looked like he was going to pass out. “It’s…It’s…It’s him!” he gulped.

  “Let’s go and say hello,” I suggested.

  “We can’t do that,” said Frank.

  “Of course we can,” I insisted.

  “What would we say?” asked Frank.

  “We can say whatever we want, Frank. We’re all recording artists now! Let’s go and tell him about our record deals.”

  So we did. And Joey was gracious, bending toward us and chuckling as we told him how we started out by learning his songs. “Well, you just remember that when you get to number one,” said Joey. “We might be looking for some support dates.”

  “Oh no,” said Frank, aghast at this sacrilege. “But maybe we could support you one day.”

  Joey laughed. “Maybe!”

  Could life get any better than this? Bono came in and slapped me on the back, but he was uncharacteristically anxious and untalkative. “If the sun doesn’t shine for us today, I’ll be really disappointed,” he admitted.

  “Who needs the sun?” I said.

  “What are you so happy about?” said the Edge, who had joined our merry little corner.

  “Life,” I said. Life was great. It was beyond great. Life was fanfuckingtabulous. And here was our solicitor, Nicholas. “Hey, Nicholas,” I said. “Come and join us! How are the negotiations going?”

  Nicholas looked at me like a rabbit caught in the headlights. “Haven’t you heard?” he said, nervously.

  “Heard what?” I said.

  “Has nobody from WEA spoken to you?”

  Was that the earth moving under my feet? “Spoken to me about what?” I demanded.

  “Well, it shouldn’t be down to me to tell you,” said Nicholas, unhappily.

  “Tell me what?” I demanded.

  “They withdrew their offer. The deal’s off.”

  I stared at him, empty, unable to even react, thoughts draining like blood from my head.

  “I’m sorry to be the one to break the news, guys,” said Nicholas.

  People were patting me on the shoulders. I could hear murmurs of sympathy but I couldn’t really distinguish what anyone was saying. I felt stoned, in the literal sense. I was numb and utterly bewildered.

  The dream had lasted a week.

  I went out front during the U2 show. I wanted to get
away from my sympathetic friends, my solicitous girlfriend and my equally bewildered brother. I wanted to get drenched by the rain and covered in mud. Out there among the paying customers it looked like a lost scene from Apocalypse Now: 50,000 bedraggled refugees from real life, caked with dirt, standing hopefully on a hillside, waiting to be transported to another realm. The rain stopped but everything had turned to mud. People were sliding down the hill, caked in brown sludge.

  And I lost myself in the music and the beer, the swimming lights, couples swaying under umbrellas, people dancing in the mire, brown and soaking and grinning despite it all and punching the air and raising our voices to the heavens, “How long to sing this song?” all together, an immense crowd, singing as one while Bono swayed and Larry beat a lonely drum, “How long to sing this song? How long? How long? How long? How long?”

  How fucking long?

  I had a big choking feeling inside, moved once again by the sheer, elemental power of music that seemed to ripple right through me, to speak for me, to know my very being.

  There were fireworks at the close, deafening and dazzling.

  “We thought we’d play one gig and we played a different gig altogether,” said Bono after the show, as drenched in sweat as I had been by the rain. “But there’s nothing wrong with that, nothing at all!” He was smiling happily. Words of congratulation were flying around. Champagne was being popped. I wanted to rip the fucking marquee down. I wanted to kick over the caravans. I wanted to light a bonfire under the stage and burn a living sacrifice to whatever dark gods had control of my fate. But my problems were not U2’s problems, I knew that. So I just drank the champagne and kept myself to myself.

  Joan got food poisoning and was throwing up all the way home.

  A meeting was convened with Bill, to discuss what had gone wrong. “It has to be off the record,” he said, “but I think you boys are due an explanation.” In the quiet of his lair, he launched into a detailed description of office politics and internecine warfare within WEA. What it boiled down to was that Rob Dickens, head of WEA U.K., had returned from a conference with his international superiors in the U.S., where he had been reprimanded for the performance of the UKdivision. He was accused of spending too much money, not selling enough records and, in particular, failing to break certain major signings (notably Simply Red, whose highly commercial white soul was falling on deaf ears). Dickens had come back in a foul mood and promptly stomped on our deal.

  “Didn’t he like the new demos?” I said. “Because we’ve got other demos.”

  “He hasn’t listened to the demos,” said Bill, embarrassedly. “He looked at your photo, though. He said the singer’s hair was too short.”

  “I can grow my hair!” I wailed.

  “It’s not about your hair,” said Bill. “Look, no one here doubts that Shook Up! could be really huge, but you’re a pop band and pop bands require the biggest investment. Duran Duran are probably the most popular group in the world right now but they could just as easily have been dropped after two singles if they hadn’t had a hit. And making a single a hit is an expensive business. You don’t just need the right song, you need the right producer, the right marketing. Videos. Image. It’s an enormous outlay and if it goes wrong the company has lost a fortune. Whereas if we sign a rock band that’s played the circuit, built up its own audience and got good reviews, they don’t cost as much to market and they are guaranteed to sell a steady amount of records. Or at least that’s the theory. And those are the kind of bands we’ll be signing in the immediate future.”

  Bill let this sink in. “It really has got nothing to do with you or your talent,” he assured us.

  Was that supposed to make us feel better?

  It was beginning to seem as if it never had anything to do with us or our talent. It was as if we were caught in the middle of some complex game and nobody was telling us the rules. What we needed was the same thing every unsigned band needs: a good manager. But where do you find one? It’s a catch-22 situation: managers with a track record get their pick of all the acts who already have deals. Otherwise, you take your chances on an unknown who probably has no more idea of the rules than you do but, if you’re very lucky, at least has some idea of what kind of game you’re playing.

  Bill left the business side of music not long after and became a recording artist in his own right. He wrote a book entitled The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way), then demonstrated the efficacy of his theories by scoring a number-one hit with the Timelords’ “Doctorin’ the Tardis.” In 1987, he formed KLF, the revolutionary sound guerillas who became a chart-topping, multimillion-selling success before publicly disbanding with a violently antagonistic performance before a stunned music business audience at the 1992 Brit Awards ceremony. Afterward, they left a freshly slaughtered sheep at the entrance to the postawards party, with a tag reading “I died for ewe. Bon appetit.”

  I run into Bill occasionally, when he emerges from a quiet life of semiretirement with his young family to promote his all too rare and rather brilliant books (I recommend his collection of essays, 45, to anyone who cares about music and art). “I don’t think anybody wins in rock and roll,” he told me once, when I asked about his disenchantment with the music business. “I think on the whole most people come through it damaged. Most people get to their forties and either they haven’t had success and they’re full of ‘if onlys’ and ‘I-was-as-good-as,” or they had success when they were young and they don’t know why it went away or how to get it back. And the ones who are still successful, it doesn’t matter how many records they sell, you look at them and think: ‘Oh, dear me, doesn’t he realize he’s making a complete prat of himself?’ ”

  It’s all to easy to see what category of forty-something rocker Bill would put me into.

  So there we were, bereft, abandoned, well and truly fucked. And then an extraordinary thing happened. The new issue of Record Mirror hit the stands. It was the poor relation of the music weeklies (NME, Sounds and Melody Maker) and had recently become a glossy A4 mag to try to survive. But, while the bigger papers had ignored our show, Record Mirror attended and were clearly impressed with what they saw. They featured a huge photo on page two of the next issue, over a declamatory piece heralding us as the future of pop:

  You’ve had the Kemp brothers, the Jacksons, even the Osmonds. Now meet the McCormick brothers—the latest in a long line of musical siblings. Neil and Ivan McCormick form the nucleus of Shook Up!—a new band from Dublin, ready, willing and able to thrill you with their sharp pop sounds. With Neil on vocals and Ivan on guitar, they have now been joined by regular bass, drums and keyboards to produce a tight, dance-orientated rock sound that bursts with NRG…Mega success approacheth. Definitely NOT to be missed.

  Record companies started to call us. All the A&R men who had failed to turn up to our showcase wanted to know where they could see us play. And who were we talking to? Word of the WEA debacle was getting around, which was a bit of a double-edged sword. Other companies were interested to find out what got WEA worked up but were also seeking out the flaws that had made them dump us so quickly. But at least A&R departments were talking to us now. Of course, “talking” in A&R terms is a euphemism for extended bouts of procrastination. When a record company wants you, they act. When they’re not sure if they want you but they’re afraid somebody else might, they talk.

  We had to get another gig together. The problem being that we were broke. Shattered. Beyond penniless. In debt. Heading for bankruptcy. Living off our girlfriends and far too embarrassed to ask our dad to bail us out again. We explained this situation (well, perhaps not in detail) to an A&R man at London Records who was especially eager to see us perform.

  “They don’t hand out grants for showcases at the Unemployment Office,” I pointed out.

  “I thought you worked as chefs,” said the A&R man.

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “Well, what’s with the outfits, then?” he asked.<
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  It dawned on me that he was referring to a pair of matching, white, side-button shirts that Ivan and I had blown our dole money on. “This is high fashion, I’ll have you know!” I protested.

  “I didn’t mean any offense,” he apologized. “Some chefs look very cool.”

  Anyway, he agreed to contribute £100 and we managed to scrape together enough money to put on a gig in an out-of-the-way pub venue, the Half Moon in Putney. This time the music business came out to see us, a row of watchful men conspicuously lining up along the bar at the back of the room. The place was rammed, with most of the audience returning from our first show. The atmosphere was charged with excitement. I went to the toilet before we were due on stage and an extremely pretty girl followed me in. “I want to suck your cock,” she announced.

  This is not the kind of thing that usually happened to me. My would-be groupie’s timing was terrible, however. “I’ve got to get on stage,” I apologized.

  “After the show,” she said, invitingly.

  I could tell you we were great that night. But I don’t want to keep blowing my own trumpet so maybe I should let someone else blow it for me (and I’m not referring to my new female admirer, who, as far as I know, wound up blowing our drummer’s trumpet, having succumbed during the show to his peculiar pheromonal charm). Damien Corless from Hot Press was in London on an interview assignment and came along to review the gig. Damien was part of a new generation at Hot Press, a writer I did not know and who owed me neither friendship nor favor, but he subsequently became a big champion of the band.

  Shook Up! have catchy tunes to offer—and a great deal more. Principally there’s frontman Neil McCormick, whose wit keeps the party bubbling from first to last. Brother Ivan plays a mean guitar without ever descending into axehero cliché while bassist Vlad completes the front row admirably. The threesome’s carefully choreographed and highly eccentric stage antics proved a real crowd pleaser…Shook Up! are fun, they’re Irish and they’re going to be big.