Killing Bono

by Neil McCormick

  So these were the people Ivan and I found ourselves hanging out with at the tail end of the eighties, as we contemplated what path we were going to take. You know how in American action movies people are always saying things like “Failure is not an option”? Well, failure was definitely an option. It might not have been the particular option we would have chosen for ourselves but we had, by now, come to the belated realization that such matters were not entirely in our hands.

  We were approached by a young Irishman called Paddy Prendergast, who ran an independent record-manufacturing business. Paddy had been an admirer of both Yeah! Yeah! and Shook Up! and was sufficiently enamored of the quality of “Invisible Girl” to offer to manufacture the single on credit. I designed a sleeve, using a strange photo in which our faces blurred into the background. Vlad came back and did a radical dance remix for the 12-inch. “Stop the World” would be the B-side. It was fanciful to imagine that we could achieve chart success without a major record-company machine behind us but, as the single came together, everyone became convinced it would be just the thing to finally win us that elusive deal we had been chasing for so long. Even Barry rejoined the struggle, promising to make it all up to us by paying for a plugger and a press agent. A small distribution company, PRT, became involved, saying they thought it could be an independent hit but that sleeves would have to be reprinted with a bar code and they would need twice as many copies as we had intended to press.

  Everyone was getting a bit carried away. Expenses were mounting. But finally, in February 1988, ten years after we first formed a band, Ivan and I released our debut single, “Invisible Girl” by Shook Up! on our own Planet Pop label. We went down to Brown’s nightclub the day it was released. It was a starry hangout, frequented by such pop glitterati as George Michael and Elton John, but we were usually able to blag our way in. We handed a copy of the 12-inch to the DJ, who slipped it into his set, then we sat and watched with big smiles on our faces as London’s hippest clubbers grooved around the dance floor to our music. Maybe everything was going to be OK.

  NME slated the single. “These two sullen pouting young men who bang the drum machine for female victims of incest have honourable intentions, but who benefits? There’s a fine line between citing a tragedy and trivializing it. Shook Up! have crossed it.” Sounds gave it an ambivalent nod. Record Mirror and Hot Press were kinder, as might have been expected from magazines that had supported us all along. Music Week, however, was a revelation. The industry magazine recommended it to retailers, describing it as a “dynamic piece of epic dance-orientated pop that is the debut release for the McCormick brothers, helped out by bassist Vlad Naslas of Jack’n’Chill and Brother Beyond’s drummer Steve Alexander. A band to watch.” But best of all, Simon Mayo, one of the country’s most popular DJs, started playing the record on his top-rated Radio One show. We were being listened to by millions. Our friends were calling up in excitement and saying, “I heard you on the radio.”

  It was up to the general public now. But I thought I’d give it a kick start, so I went into Virgin in Oxford Street, the biggest record shop in London, and flicked through the racks, looking for my own face. I was nowhere to be found. So I went to the counter and asked for a copy of “Invisible Girl” by Shook Up! “We haven’t got it, mate,” said the clerk. I asked him to order a copy for me. He disappeared for a moment, to check the store computer.

  “How are you spelling that?” he said.

  I wrote it out for him. He disappeared again.

  “There’s no such record,” he said, when he returned.

  “I can assure you there is,” I insisted.

  “Listen, mate,” he said, “if it’s not in the computer then it hasn’t been released—all right?”

  “It’s on the radio,” I said.

  “Maybe it’ll be out in a few weeks,” he said, “but it’s not on the schedule.”

  I walked out of the shop in a daze. What the fuck was going on? I went into another record store. Same story. And another. Same story. No such record. Never heard of it. Doesn’t exist. Are you sure you’ve got the spelling right? “Invisible Girl” was an invisible single.

  I called Barry and he gave me the bad news. There had been some kind of cock-up at PRT. I don’t remember what the specific problem was now but the distribution company was in trouble and went out of business later that year. Our singles never made it out of the warehouse. Except in Germany, apparently, where I believe we sold sixty-four copies.

  Eighteen

  So we gave up, right? That’s what you’re thinking. The penny must have dropped by now. Surely, we had finally woken up to the realization that we just weren’t wanted? It was time to accept defeat. Lie down. Roll over. And get a proper job, a suggestion that most working adults we knew were increasingly prone to make.

  But we had just sold sixty-four records in Germany! So, ha! There was firm evidence that somebody loved us. And what about Simon Mayo? One of Britain’s best-loved DJs had played our song—proof, if ever it was needed, of our commercial potential. And besides, we had a couple of thousand copies of the single, retrieved from PRT, which we needed to flog in order to pay our debts.

  It was too late to stop now.

  So we began to put another band together, with the justification that anyone who took an interest in our single should be able to see us perform. But it was all being done in a rather halfhearted fashion. It was as if we were afraid to go back into the record companies, afraid to make another push for attention lest they turn around and say, “Oh no, not the McCormick brothers again.” Since we found ourselves unable to even contemplate going through the rigors of auditioning another 150 drummers and other assorted musicians, we conceived a plan with our keyboard player, Richard, to play to programmed synths, sequencers and backing tapes, which was all the rage in the wake of the Pet Shop Boys and other electro pop stars. Essentially we only needed the three of us on stage but we would spice things up with a band of babes, recruiting a sax player called Chrissie Quayle and a coterie of female backing singers, Margo Buchanan, Julie Harrington and Rebecca De Ruvo.

  The girls were enlisted by word of mouth through fellow musicians. They were an absurdly talented bunch who between them had worked with Tina Turner, Level 42, Billy Idol, Eurythmics, Paul Young and Stock, Aitken and Waterman. They agreed to lend their talents to our cause because they were all convinced, as so many had been before, that record companies would not be able to ignore us. The fools!

  I was feeling a bit marginalized by the new musical setup. Essentially all the work was done by Ivan and Richard. I just had to slot my vocals into spaces left by their preprogrammed arrangements. And Ivan and I weren’t getting along very well. I detected a kind of exasperation in his attitude toward me. He described me as a prima donna and accused me of being too precious about my art. Ivan always had a swagger of confident physicality about him and favored the instinctive over the intellectual. Maybe this was partly a path he had chosen to define and separate himself from me. Our songwriting partnership had to strike a balance between my desire to craft lyrics of substance and his taste for feisty dance music but, as we moved into this more techno-orientated area, he became increasingly insistent that I write to his specifications.

  “You tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you!” I snapped, exhausted by one too many screaming arguments. “How many choruses? How many verses?”

  “I want the chorus to be longer than the verse,” he said.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Start with the chorus,” he said.

  “Whatever you want,” I said.

  “Make it a double chorus,” he said. “Chorus, verse, chorus, verse. If you have to have a middle eight, keep it short. In fact, make it a middle two! Or forget about it altogether. And then lots of choruses.”

  “No problem,” I said.

  “Short lines,” he said.

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “And no rape, no vomit, no child abuse, no wor
ds you need to look up in the dictionary.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  I wrote a lyric in thirty minutes. It was called “Comme Ci—Comme Ça.” The chorus went like this:

  It comes and it goes

  You got to learn to live with it

  It comes and it goes

  You got to learn to live without it

  Comme Ci, Comme Ça

  Like This, Like That

  [repeat twice]

  OK, so it had a bit of French in it, but Ivan loved it, and there was peace in the household for a while.

  Songs are like a diary to me. I can tell what I was going through when I wrote any given song even if I wasn’t aware of it at the time. I think that song was about me and my brother. It was about everything we had been through and the inevitable separation to come. As Ivan had demanded, it wasn’t exactly subtle.

  We had to move out of the flat. The landlord wanted to sell the building. It felt like the end of an era, the curtain falling on five years of partying. We had one last blowout which resulted in our long-suffering neighbors finally calling the police. It may have been the fireworks display we staged in the bedroom that upset them. Ivan and I wound up in a two-bed flat in West Hampstead, which, despite its name, bears no relation to the up-market Hampstead. It’s more like East Kilburn. Or, as we used to call it, Wild West Hampstead.

  There was an aspect of my brother’s behavior which was really starting to bother me. He was conducting simultaneous relationships with two girls, his long-standing girlfriend Cassandra and the ringleader of our Oriental fans, Ina Hyatt. I was in no position to lecture him about his attitude toward the opposite sex but I disliked being caught up in his deceit and having to lie on his behalf to both his girlfriends. I wrote a song which I thought might get this message across, entitled (without delicacy) “Somebody’s Gonna Get Hurt.”

  “Is that song about me?” asked Ivan, when he read the lyrics.

  “Yeah,” I admitted.

  “I love it,” he said. “I wanna sing this one!” Which wasn’t quite the reaction I had hoped for.

  We debuted the new-look Shook Up! at a sold-out gig at the Rock Garden in March 1988. It was a storming success. The sound was sleek and modern. The girls were fresh and feisty and sang like the pros they were, wrapping my vocals in blocks of warm harmonies. Ivan and I had a new look: long hair (I hadn’t been to the barber since Rob Dickens declined to sign us on account of my haircut), cut-off jackets and jeans with belts made out of motorcycle chains. The buckle of mine said “Shook.” The buckle of Ivan’s said “Up.” So as long as he stood to my left nobody would think we were called Up Shook.

  The sheer thrill of being back on stage, under the lights, in front of a noisy audience got my enthusiasm up for a while. But the limitations of the synth lineup began to present themselves when Barry got us a college gig in front of a less sympathetic crowd. We were tied to the programs. With a live band you could move things around, speed up, slow down, jam songs together, improvise. You had room to maneuver. In front of a late-night, drunken, student audience, I could feel them slipping away and there was nothing I could do about it. My between-songs patter just grew steadily more desperate. We did not get called back for an encore, which was a first for a Shook Up! concert. I threw a tantrum in the dressing room, fueled by the generous allocation of alcohol Barry had negotiated for us in our contract rider. “Maybe you should just sample the fucking vocals as well as everything else and I could stay at home,” I snapped at Ivan.

  “Well, at least that way you might stay in tune,” Ivan whipped back.

  “Girls! Girls! Break it up,” intervened one of our backing singers. “It wasn’t that bad. They’re students. They’re drunk. What d’you expect?”

  Ah, but that was the problem in a nutshell. By now we expected to be playing to people who actually wanted to hear us. We had worked so hard for so long it was mortifying to find ourselves right back where we started.

  We decided to go for one final push. We recorded a new demo, featuring “Comme Ci—Comme Ça,” “Somebody’s Gonna Get Hurt” and a song called “Back in the Machine” that gave a few clues to how we were feeling:

  There’s a sound machinery makes as it’s grinding to a halt

  The death rattle of pumps and chains as the arteries clog

  And that’s the only sound I heard for an eternity

  Nothing seemed to work anymore, and that included me…

  And that was only the spoken intro.

  We needed a review to set things in motion but we were old news by now and it was difficult to get music papers interested. But there was an obvious solution to that little problem. After all, I had been accused in the past of making up my own reviews. So…

  I had a friend called Gloria.

  Or, as Van Morrison might have put it: her name was G! L! O! R! I-aye-aye-aye-aye-aye-aye…Or, as U2 would have sung it: Gloria in te domine. Gloria Exulte!

  It was Gloria Else, actually.

  “You know you’ve got the same name as a U2 song,” I said to her once.

  “You who?” she said. Gloria was not particularly interested in pop music. As a recent divorcée with two very young boys to bring up, she generally had more pressing matters to engage her attention. But I was interested in Gloria. In fact, she was the first woman who had stirred my genuine interest since Joan’s departure. Gloria was (it was widely agreed among our friends) something special. She was gorgeous and vivacious, with a lively spirit and infectious laughter. And she had the most beautiful blue eyes. And lips like cushions. You could have made a sofa out of her lips. I wanted to settle down on that sofa, make myself really comfortable. Oh, I had it bad for Gloria. I was always volunteering to help her out, with babysitting and other duties. I was a regular one-man single mother’s support unit.

  But Gloria had other ideas. She was a former neighbor from Belsize Crescent and had seen a few things. To Gloria, I was a long-haired, feckless, unemployed musician who slept all day, partied all night and, as she once pointed out, seemed to have a different woman with him every time he walked out his door.

  “That’s only ’cause you won’t go out with me,” I countered.

  “I don’t mind going out with you, Neil,” she said. “I’m just not staying in with you.”

  I’ll tell you another thing I liked about Gloria. She was serene. She seemed to be enshrouded by a bubble of calm. My life was a swirl of chaos and emotional turmoil. Her flat became a refuge, a port in my personal storm.

  Anyway, as you may have already noticed, I am nothing if not persistent. I was prepared to play a long game with Gloria. Right now, I saw her great charm as an asset to be exploited in the cause of getting Shook Up! a review. I asked Gloria to call Melody Maker, claim to be a student and ask how she could break into music journalism. I knew that music papers were desperate to recruit female journalists and I knew exactly what they would tell her: go to a gig and send in a review. I counted on her telephone manner to make sure they would be paying attention when the review arrived.

  Shook Up! had a gig lined up supporting Auto Da Fe, a veteran Irish Goth band, in the Mean Fiddler. After the show I wrote a review. I was nice enough about Auto Da Fe. But I was really nice about the support band. I maintained an edge of sarcasm, however, so that Melody Maker did not smell a rat.

  Shook Up! promised to lead us into a wonderland of temptation: safe sex, guilt-free sin and love’s sweet salvation, launching into “Faithless,” a solid pop groove that could be covered by Kylie Minogue in leathers and fishnet stockings. Three girls and three boys coming together in close harmony, Shook Up! never let up for an instant, ripping through six would-be hits as if warming up for a Top of the Pops chart countdown.

  Melodic, dance-worthy, gorgeously coutured, there had to be something wrong and it reared its head halfway through when the handsome, flaxen-locked lead vocalist stopped grinning for a moment and said, sincerely: “This is a song about something that goes on all around us, though we
never see it, it’s a song about child abuse.” Suddenly, you realize that at the heart of this pop dream machine lie more angst-ridden singer-songwriters, yet the resultant “Invisible Girl” is funky enough to keep feet on the dancefloor and sad enough not to offend. After the show, band members mingled with the audience selling copies of the single version of the track. Anyone that desperate for success deserves a shot (and, in a perfect world, to be shot as soon as their 15 minutes is up).

  OK, maybe I was laying it on a bit thick. But it did the trick. Gloria’s review was printed in the next issue and all the record companies sat up and took notice. Meanwhile, Gloria was fending off excited calls from Melody Maker, who wanted to commission her to do a feature and wondered if she could pop into the office to say hello to the editor and maybe she would like to have lunch? The next time they rang, I told them Gloria had been summoned back to South Africa to attend her grandmother’s funeral. She was never heard of by the rock press again.