So here we are. In August 2001, at the end of the Elevation Tour, Bono lost his father. Months later, he agreed to start working on these interviews. While we were talking, I often felt that Bono and I resembled two elderly people in a convalescent home, with all the time in the world. Well, that’s not really true, because Bono would usually break it off with his usual phrase “I’m gonna have to run”—which he duly did. When it stopped, I always felt I was waking up from a dream, but those were deep dreams, and urgent ones. In the words Bono used to sum up my approach, “I went straight for the jugular.” I gave each conversation everything I had. I kept thinking: this might be the last one, maybe I won’t get to talk to him anymore . . . But at the same time, Bono’s words seemed to spring from a very serene and deep part of himself. He spoke with a compelling quietness and uncanny focus. The conversations were marked by an odd combination of urgency and serenity. It’s not so much a paradox as a state akin to being suspended in the eye of the hurricane. I guess some of the greatest music comes from that place. I’d love to believe that a book could come from there too.
MICHKA ASSAYAS, NOVEMBER 2004
1. STORIES TO TELL THAT ARE NOT SONGS
This first conversation (presented here in four installments, i.e. chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4) took place in late 2002 in Bono’s house by the sea in Killiney, near Dublin.
On a gloomy November day, Bono picked me up at the Clarence Hotel (that he co-owns with Edge) in his Mercedes. I noticed that he’d apparently given up ignoring red lights and driving the wrong way down one-way streets. He owns a dentist’s car, and drives it like a dentist.
We drove alongside a gray sea through heavy rain. Bono talked about his new role as an ambassador for DATA (Debt, AIDS, and Trade for Africa). He also mentioned that he had written a play in just one week for an American director. When we pulled up to his house, the electricity was down because of the heavy rain, and the security gate had collapsed. Bono helped the caretaker shove it open. During a quick lunch, we chatted with his wife, Ali, who was busy organizing a fashion show to benefit the families of victims of the Chernobyl catastrophe. Bono showed me around the house and took me to the pavilion where Mr. and Mrs. Hewson (Bono and Ali) put up distinguished visitors: the walls were covered with letters from Bill Clinton, Salman Rushdie, Quincy Jones, and others. Though I looked far, I could see nothing from the Pope. We came back to the main house. I followed Bono to a small room that faced the sea, as an extension of his study. He took off his shoes and tucked himself up on the couch. We would be visited at regular intervals by his elder daughter, Jordan, and his two little boys, Elijah and John. Sometimes, Bono would halt the conversation to make a phone call. I remember he’d been expecting one from Prince, but got one from Bruce Springsteen instead. He was trying to organize the writing of a song to be performed during halftime at the Super Bowl, so that Americans would consider it a “patriotic act” to help Africans ill with AIDS get the drugs they need. Unfortunately, I don’t think it went anywhere. We finished the day watching the MTV awards and eating pizza: U2 did not win any of the awards they’d been nominated for. Each time, though, Bono guessed who the winner would be, while Jordan and her younger sister Eve, who had arrived in the meantime, lay on the couch and sent text messages. Elijah was fascinated by Christina Aguilera’s performance. A few weeks before, enthralled by Kylie Minogue, he had suggested to his father that he invite her for dinner one of these days.
You have given plenty of interviews. Why is it that you want to reveal yourself in a book now? After all, you’ve had plenty of opportunities . . .
Well, I’m a person that actually doesn’t like to look back in my work, in my day, or in general. But maybe this is the moment. There are stories to tell that are not songs.
There is one important thing you just said off the record, before we got started, about your father, whom you lost recently. You mentioned his sharp wit and sarcasm. I was wondering: how come it never came out in your songs?
Yeah, it’s interesting. My father acted kind of jaded . . . nonplussed. It was an act, but the world just couldn’t impress him. So as a kid I wanted to be the opposite. Especially as a teenager when for periods it felt like my father had become my enemy. It happens . . . And so you reject the enemy’s weapons of choice, which was his wit, his sarcasm.
That’s a pretty tough portrait . . . What was your father really like?
As I say, a very charming, very amusing, very likable man, but he was deeply cynical about the world and the characters in it: affection for the few, a sort of scant praise on even them. As I was saying, I got to make peace with him, but never really to become his friend. My brother did, which is great. Nothing extraordinary here, just Irish macho male stuff. We never really could talk. Even in his last days, when I used to come and visit him in the hospital, all he could do was whisper. He had Parkinson’s. I would lie beside him at night on a roll-up bed. Being sick, he didn’t have to converse. I could tell you he was happy about that. In the day I sometimes would sit there and just draw him. I did a whole series of drawings of his hospital room, all the wires and tubes. Occasionally I would read to him . . . [pause] Shakespeare. He loved Shakespeare. If I read the Bible, he would just scowl. [laughs] It was like: “Fuck off!” In fact, the last thing he said was “Fuck off.” I was lying beside him in the middle of the night and I heard a shout. And of course it would have been days of whispers. So I called the nurse. The nurse came in. He was back to whispers, and we both put our ears to his mouth. “What are you saying? Are you OK? Do you need anything? Do you need any help?” And the nurse was saying: “Bob, are you OK? So what are you saying?” “What’s that? What d’you need?” “Fuck off!” He said: “Would you ever fuck off and get me out of here? I wanna go home. This place is a prison cell.” And they were his last words. Not romantic, but revealing. I really had a sense that he wanted out of not just the room, but out of his body and his skeleton. That’s classic him. He would always pour salt—and vinegar—onto the wound. He could meet the most beautiful girl in the world. In fact, Julia Roberts . . . I remember introducing her in a club, and he goes: “Pretty woman? My arse.” [laughs]
You know what it reminds me of? Brian Wilson’s father . . . Have you read about it?
A little bit, yeah.
Brian Wilson’s father dreamed of making it in the music business, like your father who fancied being an opera singer. He was a very severe presence when the Beach Boys rehearsed. Brian Wilson kept on coming up with those amazing songs, and his father would go: “This won’t be a hit. Get some proper work done.” He was abusive, both verbally and physically. So there is an interesting thread there: maybe the harsher your father is on you, the more creative you can become, sometimes.
Yeah. If you meet up with two of my best friends, Gavin and Guggi,* sometime, you’ll find that their two fathers gave them a lot more abuse than mine. The three of us grew up on Cedarwood Road: Guggi’s now a painter, Gavin’s a great performer, writing songs for a kind of “nouveau cabaret” and score for movies. But what separated them, I guess, is that they ran from the scold of their respective fathers to the bosom of their mothers. And I probably would have too, but she wasn’t around. So that created its own heat, and looking back on it now, some rage.
Rage at what?
Emptiness . . . an empty house . . . aloneness . . . realizing I needed people.
You mean you wanted friends to fill in for your mother, and that made you much angrier.
I think so. And I think something else as well. If you wake up in the morning with a melody in your head, as I do, it’s all about how much you compromise that melody to take it out of your head and put it into music. I’m a lousy guitar player and an even lousier piano player. Had I not got Edge close by who was an extraordinarily gifted complex musician, I would be hopeless. Had I not got Larry and Adam, these melodies would not be grounded. But it’s still very difficult for me to have to rely. Your weakness, the blessing of your weakness is it forces you into fr
iendships. The things that you lack, you look for in others, but there’re times when you just become angry when you think: if only I could get to this place . . . These melodies I hear in my head, they’re just so much more interesting than the one that I’m able to play. Rage, there’s a rage in me that I have to rely on others, actually, even though I’m very good at relying on others. And we are, I should say, in our group, the best example I know of how to rely on others.
What’s so special about that?
It’s the thing Brian Eno always speaks about. He says: “They should study that in the Smithsonian, how the four of you get on, how the politics of it work, the accommodation of each other by each other, it’s quite something.” But at the same time, it’s uncomfortable sometimes. Think about that. Isn’t that a frightening thing? You rely on your lover, you rely on your friends, and finally you have to rely on God if you want to become whole. But we don’t like it. We do resent our lovers, especially the idea of relying on your friends to be whole. That means that on your own, you’re . . . [pause] that old Zen fucking idea. You’re the one hand clapping. [laughs]
This need to be carried by a group . . . did you become aware of it after you lost your mother as a young teenager? Or is it something you had in mind before?
As a kid I was actually not that interested in other kids.
I’m feeling there’s a contradiction there. I have to rely on my own experience in order to understand yours. Like you, I had an elder brother with whom I felt very close. I could rely on him, which gave me the freedom to be a solitary child and feel protected at the same time. Whereas, from what you’re telling me, for you it was a matter of survival to rely on your friends.
Not early on, you’re quite right. Early on, I had supreme confidence in myself, and I was probably arrogant with it. I was very able intellectually in a lot of ways. I was popular. As a child, I played chess; I was pretty good at it. I played an international competition when I was twelve. What a pain in the arse!
Did you win?
No, but I did OK. And people made a fuss over me being a kid playing against adults. But the fact that my father taught me the game meant I had to learn to beat him as soon as I could. Maybe he let me win. But it felt great, and I’ve been playing chess ever since with declining results. But . . . confidence? Yes, plenty of it. And then it cracked. Every teenager goes through an awkward phase, and that was just exacerbated, I suppose, by there not being anyone in the house. The death of my mother really affected my confidence. I would go back to my house after school, but it wasn’t a home. She was gone. Our mother was gone, the beautiful Iris . . . I felt abandoned, afraid. I guess fear converts to anger pretty quickly. It’s still with me.
What else does it convert to?
I like to be around people.
Where?
One of the things that I love to do is to go to lunch. And I like to drink. I eat well.
Yes, I’ve noticed that. And actually wondered about it.
I’ll gravitate towards the best restaurant in the city. It’s not very rock ’n’ roll! I think I go because, when I was a kid, food had no love at all in it. I really resented it. I couldn’t taste it because she . . . my mother wasn’t there.
You mean you had to cook for yourself at a very early age.
I even went as far as robbing groceries from the shops, and giving the money I was given by my father for groceries to my friends. I hated mealtimes. Remember this thing called “Smash”? It was an awful idea. You would pour boiling water into these astronaut-type tablets and they would turn into potatoes, then put them in the same pot as baked beans or something, then eat out of the pot, not even on a plate, in front of the TV.
You are describing a French chef’s idea of hell, there.
It was comic tragedy. My brother, who used to work in the computer division of the national airline, discovered that he could buy airline food at a cheap rate. So he used to bring these packaged meals home, and our fridge was full of it. So I used to come on home from school and I would eat the airline food. Then an amazing thing happened. Our high school was near the airport. They didn’t do lunches then, but they decided they were gonna do school lunches. So they bought them at the airport. So, I used to eat airline food at lunch. I would go home, eat the same fucking airline food for dinner. What happens then? You join a rock ’n’ roll band and spend the rest of your life eating airline food. [laughs] It’s enough to drive a fellow to a posh restaurant and might explain my expanding waistline. By the way, I’m not ready for my fat Elvis period yet. Stick around for the opera . . . Oh, that’s why you’re here . . . OK, back to the couch.
Time for a hamburger, here, maybe.
Seriously, I think my whole creative life goes back to when my world collapsed, age fourteen. I don’t wanna oversell this, a lot of people had much bigger hills to climb. Wasn’t it the Dalai Lama who said: “If you want to meditate on life, start with death”? Not girls, not cars, not sex and drugs . . . The first thing I started writing about was death. What a bummer this boy is! Actually, Boy, our first album, is remarkably uplifting, considering the subject matter.
And what was that?
Oddly enough, it’s similar to our new album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. It’s something to do with the end of innocence. But in our first album, it was being savored, not remembered. In that period, everyone was knowing. We were celebrating our lack of knowledge of the world. I thought, No one’s written that story. No one would be raw enough. Rock ’n’ roll is rarely raw in an emotional sense. It can be sexual. It can be violent and full of bile. Demons can appear to be exorcised, but they’re not really, they’re usually being exercised. The tenderness, the spirituality, the real questions that are on real people’s minds are rarely covered. There was a lot of posturing and posing. With that first record, I thought I would just let myself be that child, write about innocence as it’s about to spoil. Rock ’n’ roll had never taken on the subject of innocence and loss of innocence before, outside of romance, that is.
What I’m interested in is how you had the idea to face this very subject you just talked about. It is interesting to go back to this part of your life, where you had only dreams, and you had no clue about how you were going to fulfill them. Specifically, I want to know if your relationship with your brother, who is seven years older than you, helped you gain confidence.
It did and it didn’t. I mean, he taught me to play the guitar. I learned to play on his guitar the songs that he had learned. As an example, he had the Beatles’ Songbook, the one with the psychedelic illustrations. That book blew my mind. In fact, that book still blows my mind.
What was the first Beatles song that you learned?
“Dear Prudence.” All the things you could do with the C chord. Neil Diamond . . . that’s another songbook he had. I loved the “Diamond.” A song called “Play Me.” [sings it] Genius . . .
So back to your brother. Did you get on with him?
Yes, but we used to fight—physically fight.
Most children fight. What was so special about this?
Because you would have this sixteen-year-old little Antichrist who resents the house that he’s living in. As I say, I’m sure I was a pain in the arse to be around. My brother would come home from work, I’d be sitting there with my mates and be watching TV. I wouldn’t have done the washing up or something I said I would do. He would say something or he’d slam the door; we’d end up in a row. [laughs] There was literally blood on our kitchen walls, years later. I mean, we could really go at it.
But when your mother died, I’m sure he supported you. He had turned twenty by then.
He’s a great man. My brother couldn’t tell a lie. Back then he was trying his best. I remember once we had a big fight, and I threw a knife at him. [laughs] I didn’t throw it to kill him; I just threw it to scare him. And it stuck into the door: boing . . . And he looked down at it, and I looked at it. And I realized: I didn’t mean to, but I could have killed him. And I think b
oth of us wept, and both of us admitted that we were just angry at each other because we didn’t know how to grieve, you see . . . Because my mother was never mentioned.
How do you mean: never?
After she died, my father didn’t talk about her. So it never came up. So that’s why I don’t have any memories of my mother, which is strange.
It is strange, because you were fourteen. I read that she died after she came back from her own father’s funeral. Is that so?
She collapsed at the funeral of her own father, picked up and carried away by mine. She never regained consciousness. Well, actually, we don’t know if she did or she didn’t. My father, at his most fetal, when he was losing it or we’d been having a big row, would say: “I promised your mother on her deathbed that . . .” Then, he never finished the sentence. These and other things, I would have liked him to have coughed up at the end.
Do you feel there are questions you wanted to ask your father that remain unanswered?
Yes.
But why didn’t you ask them?
I tried to. He didn’t want to answer them.
Like what?
I wanted to get into the conversation where I could actually ask him why he was the way he was. I have discovered some interesting family history since, which is extraordinary. It’s not something I want to talk about now. But no, he would disappear into silence and wit.
What is it exactly that you wished you knew about his way?
So closed, I suppose . . . And so disinterested, in a certain sense. As I say, my father’s advice to me, without ever speaking it, was: “Don’t dream! To dream is to be disappointed,” which would be a pity, wouldn’t it, never to dream . . . And, of course, this is where megalomania must have begun. To never have a big idea was his thing. That’s all I’m interested in.
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