Killing Bono (15 page)

In the photo studio (actually just a white-painted spare room) I produced, from a plastic bag, the tools I had brought along to create the desired effect: a wire coat hanger, a box of paraffin-soaked firelighters and some matches. “Very hi-tech,” joked Bono. “I can see we're working with professionals here.”

While Bono stood holding the
Hot Press
open in front of him, his mouth open and eyes popping in an expression of mock alarm, I lurked out of camera shot with a lit firelighter stuck on the end of the bent-out coat hanger, so the flames appeared to be shooting from the pages. It took a while to achieve the required result, with a moment of panic when my only copy of
Hot Press
caught ablaze. “Don't set fire to his hair!” screeched Ali, as I endeavored to rescue the precious issue.

There was much laughter after that, with Bono reminding us, in a thick Dublin accent, to “Moind the hair, roight? Can't be a rock star wid no hair!”

Afterward, at Bono's behest, he posed for some photos with his girlfriend, Bono with his white shirt buttoned up to the neck, Ali in a flowery print dress. You don't see them often photographed together and perhaps these rare pictures illustrate why. Bono is at ease with the camera, alternately playing to it and ignoring it completely, while Ali, as beautiful as she is, looks distinctly uncomfortable, either watching the camera with wary distrust or watching Bono perform with an air of suspicious curiosity. Ali was never a seeker of the limelight. She loved Bono (of that there could be no doubt). Everybody loved Bono. He was such a charismatic force and he always seemed to have so much love to give, enveloping everyone in the room around him, whether it was a small photo studio or a huge rock venue. But Ali loved something different about him than the rest of us did, something vulnerable and unshowy, lurking deep within the extrovert exterior.

The three of us went out to dinner in a Dublin restaurant. And there the conversation turned once more to God, with Bono earnestly trying to explain the roots of faith.

“You have to trust your instincts,” he said. “You're a writer, Neil. It's like working on a hunch, using your imagination to try and see the real story underneath the surface. D'you know the story of Elijah going up to a cave where he has been told he will hear the voice of God? It's in the Bible. Elijah gets to the cave and goes in but there's nothing there, so he waits and eventually he hears a roll of thunder. He thinks, ‘Ah, yes, the voice of God!' and goes to the entrance of the cave…But the thunder rolls again and he doesn't hear God. So he goes back in the cave and waits. Then he sees a bolt of lightning flash across the sky and he thinks, ‘Ah, of course, the voice of God.' Goes back to the entrance of the cave and waits…But God says nothing. And he starts to think maybe he's been misled—maybe there is no God; whatever is going through his mind. Then a small puff of wind blows into the cave and he hears it, like a whisper, the voice of God…”

Bono paused for dramatic effect. “I always liked the idea that God is in the small things. And when it gets too noisy and fucking crazy, and I'm running around like a madman, I have to quiet myself down to get in touch with God.”

I kept running into Bono around this time, in the audience at gigs, at various openings and parties and once in a while just aimlessly wandering the city streets. Every time our conversation would revolve around the same subject, rambling debates about the spirit that always ended with his “God bless.” I suspect he thought there was purpose in the coincidence of our encounters and that I was ripe for conversion. And, in truth, he had succeeded in plunging me back into spiritual confusion. I found myself reexamining every aspect of the faith I had rejected, turning it all over in my mind during long, sleepless nights. I kept finding the same logical flaws that had first persuaded me of the fallacy of religious belief but now I had a new problem, caused in large part by my huge respect for Bono: did I really think I was smarter than every believer, every mystic, every guru and every religious philosopher in history? It probably won't surprise you to learn that “yes” was my answer to that particular question. But what if I was wrong? Was I really prepared to take the chance of damning my soul to Hell? Besides, God was an appealing concept, representing the promise of immortality—a condition of considerable attraction to me.

Bono invited me to a meeting of the Shalom Bible Group at Edge's parents' house in Malahide. He told me I'd get a chance to answer a lot of my questions. I took Ivan along for protection, relying on my brother's studied spirit of irreverence to keep the forces of the spirit world at bay.

Shalom were Charismatic Christians, evangelical and fundamentalist, committed to the surrender of the ego before the healing grace and fiery breath of the Holy Ghost. It was strange to find members of U2, who struck me as easy-going and liberal in their application of belief, keeping this kind of company but stranger still to learn that it was the provocative Virgin Prunes who had first been attracted to the Bible group; into the fold they'd brought Bono, who introduced the always inquisitive Edge, with Larry finding comfort there too following the death of his mother in a tragic road accident in 1978.

We gathered in the Evanses' front room, where a sixteen-millimeter projector had been set up and a white screen erected. There were familiar faces, including members of Lypton Village and ex-pupils from Mount Temple, cups of tea and biscuits and everybody was being very nice and solicitous, as committed Christians almost invariably are, but it was hard to escape the feeling that this was some kind of recruitment drive and that they were more interested in my soul than in me. Someone got up and gave a talk, telling us about some films we were going to see, which had been sent by an associated Christian group in America. Allegedly these films graphically demonstrated scientific proof of biblical miracles and the power of the Holy Spirit. The lights were turned off. The screen flickered into life.

What followed was absolutely gobsmacking. Men in white laboratory coats chatted about the power of faith, while volunteers were subjected to powerful electrical currents, apparently relying on prayer to keep them healthy as lightning bolts passed through their bodies. There were a series of experiments which appeared to defy the laws of physics. Experts in the fields of geology, paleontology and archaeology were trooped on to refute evidence of human evolution and to challenge conventional wisdom regarding the age of the earth, their own experiments conclusively demonstrating that the world was only a few thousand years old (correlating with figures laid out in the Bible) and had, in fact, been made in just seven days, complete with built-in fossilization.

The film flickered to a close. There was much excited chatter. Ivan and I stared at each other, wide-eyed and speechless.

“What d'you think, then, Neil?” one of the group leaders asked me. I could feel Bono's watchful eyes on me.

“I'm absolutely amazed,” I said, truthfully.

“God is amazing,” replied the evangelist, sincerely.

Ivan and I made our excuses and headed for the exit, thanking Edge for his hospitality. We were almost home free when Bono caught me by the front door. “What did you really think?” he said.

“Oh, come on, man!” I sighed. “That was the biggest load of shit I've ever seen. Blind, stupid, illogical hocus fuckin' pocus!”

He smiled ruefully and shook his head. I even heard him say “God bless” as we headed off down the driveway. Always the “God bless”! Could nothing shake his conviction? At least the Shalom meeting had the effect of ending my crisis of faith. This lot, I was convinced, were several beads short of the full rosary.

With the (dis)honorable exception of Adam, U2's deep faith kept them from indulging in the traditional excesses of rock 'n' roll, something which I think gave them extra reserves of strength to take on the world and helped them to avoid many of the obvious pitfalls that regularly derail the careers of young musicians. As Edge once said to me: “It's such a sort of prostitute business that you would find it immensely difficult on your own steam to carry through a principle, single-mindedly.” Bill Graham, who knew the band as well as anyone and understood them better than most, speculated that, for Bono in particular, Christianity acted as a kind of shield. “As the focus of the audience's apathy or acclaim, frontmen always have the most vulnerable and volatile egos,” Bill once wrote. “But imbued with a missionary sense—however unfocused—and believing his gift came from above, Bono may have been protected from those identity and ego problems that can upset those singers who find their fame has neither savor nor reason.” As far as I was concerned, if Bono, Edge and Larry wanted to surrender their egos to the mysteries of the Holy Spirit that was their own affair. I had another path to walk.

I was ready to embrace the hedonism promised by rock 'n' roll. Hell, I was eager to be corrupted. The problem was, I was actually a rather sensible, clean-living fellow. I didn't drink, for one thing. Growing up in Ireland, where drinking is the national pastime, I had been put off the whole business by the regular carnage I witnessed around pubs at closing time, with grown men pissing on walls and spewing up in gutters and generally lurching about with all the gainliness and physical coordination of a herd of rhinos in zero gravity. My position on alcohol was considered quite controversial among my contemporaries, who were, for the most part, enthusiastic in their endeavors to prove themselves the equal of their pint-swilling forebears. Neither did I smoke, having witnessed my own parents' heroic efforts to forsake this particular vice, so my few attempts to share a spliff usually ended up with me coughing my guts up and then complaining it had had no effect whatsoever.

“You've got to inhale!” my friends would admonish me.

“My lungs won't let me!” I would protest.

As for the other much-noted rock 'n' roll vice, Yeah! Yeah! were not exactly proving a magnet for the kind of pneumatic groupies I entertained in my rich fantasy life. We did have a small group of female fans who had begun to follow us around, and to whom Leo unkindly referred as the Alsatians. This was a reference to their attractiveness rather than qualities of dogged loyalty.

But while I did not drink or smoke and rarely got laid, I could secretly pride myself in having gone straight for the class-A narcotics in the form of Colombian marching powder (as it was known around the offices of
Hot Press
). We worked hard putting that magazine together. Indeed, such was the intensity of the work and the length of the hours, we used to mock bands who had the temerity to complain of the hardships of life on the road—a weekend spent with us would show them what it really took to keep Ireland safe for rock 'n' roll. Operating on a fortnightly schedule, effectively there would be one week in which little was accomplished on the production side as we waited for the writers to produce their copy. Then it would be all hands on deck for the second week, with mounting pressure resulting in increasingly long nights, culminating in final production weekends that occasionally ran to forty hours or more of continual toil. Absolute deadlines were set by the schedule of the van departing from the depot of the
Irish Independent
newspaper, with whom we had an arrangement to deliver our pages to our printer in Kerry. We were supposed to rendezvous by one a.m. at the latest, but many was the time when I would still be frantically applying the final touches to the layout while the clock ticked and Liam or Mairin waited tensely beside me, snatching the page as soon as I was done and haring down the stairs to where Niall was already waiting, revving the engine of his beat-up mustard-yellow Austin Maxi. Then they would race through the streets in pursuit of the already departed van. One time they got all the way to Urlingford, Kilkenny, some seventy miles from Dublin, before they caught it.

However, it did not escape my attention that, on the longest nights, various exhausted members of staff would discreetly disappear into the editor's office, only to emerge minutes later with a spring in their step and a glint in their eye, merrily chattering away. One day I burst in and found them all poised around a table on which sat a small, square mirror with several fine lines of white powder arranged upon it.

“I knew it!” I declared, although in truth I only had the vaguest idea what was going on. I was an avid reader of Hunter S. Thompson but he was stronger on amusing euphemisms for illicit substances than on the techniques employed in their consumption. I insisted that I be included in this particular ritual and refused to be dissuaded by several parties apparently concerned with my youth and naïveté. So I was handed a rolled-up £5 note and instructed that the correct procedure was to put one end of it to my nostril and the other on the mirror, then inhale deeply. I followed my instructions to the letter, resulting in gasps of either horror or admiration from my fellow members of staff.

“He's had the bloody lot!” shrieked one malcontent.

“You're only supposed to snort one line,” someone explained, a little too late.

“Bloody hell, Neil. We'll have to call you Hoover Factory!” said another (a reference to an obscure Elvis Costello B-side).

But hey, I wasn't complaining. I bounced out of the office with the spring of a kangaroo spoiling for a fight and threw myself into the creation of pages (not just pages! Works of art!) with renewed zest.

Actually, I am not sure how productive this period of cocaine consumption was. Certainly it would lift spirits but usually this would result in Liam and myself standing around blathering, making hats out of record sleeves, Frisbeeing unwanted vinyl out the window, firing off jokes and pursuing surreal lines of thought that would have the office in stitches. Then Niall would inevitably emerge from his office to suggest that perhaps it might be in our best interests to get some work done, at which point the mood of euphoria would collapse and we would all sink back to our desks to contemplate the gruesome immensity of the task still at hand.