Killing Bono (26 page)

I spoke to one of our regular contacts in A&R (or “Uhm & Ahh” as we had started to refer to it). “The quotes are a bit over-the-top,” he said. “I suppose you made them up yourself?”

What was the fucking use?

There were so many great gigs, such fantastic reactions, so much confidence—we were convinced record companies could not see this and walk away from it. But they did. Again and again. I visited Ross Fitzsimons in MCA, where Lucien Grainge was no longer employed. I was playing Ross our “Stop the World” demo when the door of his office flew open and in stormed Gordon Charlton, the new head of A&R.

“What are you listening to?” he demanded to know. “It's bloody fantastic!” He wanted to know where he could hear more and I told him we would be appearing that very night at the Rock Garden. “I'll be there!” he said. And he was true to his word. I saw him walk in halfway through the set, stand at the back and watch two numbers before walking out again, which (as you can imagine) was extremely disconcerting. The next day I rang for his reaction. “It's too commercial for my taste,” he said.

“Too commercial?” I spluttered. “How can something be too commercial? You mean it might be too popular? We might sell too many records?”

“It was all a bit well played,” he said. How did this man get his job?

“Maybe we should fucking rehearse a bit less,” I muttered.

He told me he liked things rougher around the edges. He signed Cactus World News.

I was beginning to faintly comprehend that the very area we had chosen to operate in was working against us. We were upbeat, danceable, unashamedly commercial but we had songs about rape, greed, fear, religion, love, pain and the whole damn thing. We were a square peg and no matter what angle the music business looked at us from (and, to be fair, they did keep coming back and taking another look), nobody could figure out how to fit us into the around hole labeled “pop.”

And then the inevitable happened. At the end of the summer of 1986, after a year of gigging, Vlad announced he was leaving.

“I thought you believed in fate,” I said.

“I do,” said Vlad.

“Well, didn't your girlfriend tell you we were going to be the biggest band in the world?” I pleaded.

“She spoke to her father about that last night,” said Vlad. As we knew, his girlfriend's father was dead but made occasional appearances to bring her up to date with developments in the spirit world. His verdict was that “Destiny is not set in stone—there are different paths we can all choose,” Vlad reported. Apparently we had taken a wrong turning at a spiritual T-junction. “Cosmically speaking, you're fucked,” said Vlad. I hoped he was joking. You could never really tell.

Vlad hung up his bass and decided to concentrate on production. He signed a record deal with 10 (a subsidiary of Virgin) and, in January 1988, reached number six with “The Jack That House Built” by Jack'n'Chill (he was Jack), Britain's first home-grown house record.

Damien was the next to depart, going back to music college, disillusioned with the music business. We did not hear from him for years but, in the late nineties, started seeing his credit appear on major records. He cowrote material on Madonna's
Music
album and produced an album for K. D. Lang. Ivan ran into him at a London club. Damien was reportedly very happy, living in L.A., his skills much sought after by A-list stars. Our former pale Oriental sex symbol was, according to Ivan, looking very tanned indeed.

Steve was getting session work for busty female pop stars such as Taylor Dane, Tiffany and Samantha Fox (must have been those pheromones). Brother Beyond, a quartet of handsome lads signed to Parlophone, started to employ him and I went to see them play a showcase. I wondered what the difference was between them and us. They had two talented songwriters, Eg White and Carl Fysh, and a handsome lead vocalist, Nathan Moore, and crafted funky, modern, dance pop. It was all very smooth, lacking Shook Up!'s live extravagance and spiky edges. But the crucial difference emerged when their recording career began with material written for them by top Europop producers Stock, Aitken and Waterman. Eg quit the band in disgust. Steve, meanwhile, proved so popular with their fans (those pheromones again) that they asked him to become a full-time member. We were close friends and Steve was reluctant to leave us in the lurch but he was being presented with pop stardom on a plate. In any event, Brother Beyond enjoyed short-lived careers as pin-ups (they reached number two in 1988 but lost their grip on the top ten a year later and were bankrupt by 1991) before Steve returned to session work, playing with everyone from Duran Duran to Jeff Beck. He remains one of the leading session drummers in the recording industry.

As for Ivan and I, well, we briefly contemplated tracing our steps back down the cosmic highway to try to work out where we had gone wrong. But fuck it. We didn't believe in that shit anyway. We'd just have to press on and hope we were still traveling in roughly the right direction.

I
was summoned to interview-room number 4 in the Department of Health and Social Security. Mysteriously, the door had “No. 58” stuck on it and was consequently quite hard to find, resulting in my arriving some five minutes after my name had crackled over the tannoy.

It was my third visit to the DHSS offices in as many weeks. Each time, I had made the journey to Euston, waited around for hours, only to be informed that (because of backlogs of work or other such excuses) my appointment would have to be postponed. I had a feeling they were testing me.

“So, we meet at last!” I joked to the somber, matronly, fifty-ish woman sitting at the other side of a thick file, presumably mine. She did not respond, other than to pointedly look at her watch. I wasn't sure what was in store. I had always been confident that if I kept my wits about me I could spin this whole dole racket out indefinitely. My previous interviewer was a skinny, nervous pushover who seemed to expect to get pushed. But I had the distinct feeling my new case officer was a step up and a stage heavier.

“Do you know you have signed on late every fortnight for the last three years?” my interrogator commented, perusing my notes.

“Really?” I said. “You know, it's not easy getting to the dole office at that time of the morning when you've got no money for transport.” I had mentally debated what attitude to adopt (indignant? Stupid? Penitent?) and decided the safest best was to smile and be as pleasant as possible while I worked out what she was after. She launched into a stern lecture about my responsibilities to the state. “You haven't held a job since you left college five years ago,” she noted.

“Is it that long?” I asked, innocently. Well, what was I supposed to say? “I'm sorry, officer, I'll give up all my foolish ambitions and take the first paid work that comes my way”? This occasional hour of boredom was the price I paid to follow my rock 'n' roll dream. But then she made a tactical mistake.

“You've got to play by the rules of the game,” she said. I couldn't believe my ears. Her and Ossie and the music business and all these fucking games! I considered boldly declaring “This is no game, this is my life!” but decided it would be too corny. So I let her ramble on until she bullishly announced: “These are the rules of the game…”

That was quite enough. “This is no game,” I declared passionately. “This is my life!” She actually bought it. She became flustered and apologized for her comments while I pressed home my advantage with a sincere, slightly desperate: “Do you know what it's like to live on twenty-four pounds a week?”

No, of course she didn't. But then neither did I.

I was still doing bits and pieces for
Hot Press
. I drew a regular cartoon strip, the subject matter of which is rather revealing. It was called “Situations Vacant,” and it featured a couple of unemployed scoundrels sitting at a bar discussing matters of the world. For example:

“Did you hear Mad Mick got done for joyriding?” says one scoundrel.

“No, what happened?” says the other.

“He went to a nightclub, got really drunk and couldn't get a taxi, so he stole a BMW and crashed into a police car on the way home!” reports the scoundrel.

“That's becoming a serious problem in the city today!” says his gloomy friend.

“Yeah,” agrees the scoundrel, “you can never find a taxi when you need one.”

Boom! Boom!

The interview ended with another stay of execution. In order to satisfy my unemployment officer, however, I needed evidence that I was actively seeking work. So I sat down to apply for several creative jobs gleaned from the Media section of the
Guardian
newspaper. The problem was I wanted replies but I didn't want interviews, which would be too time-consuming by far and might result in my accidentally finding myself employed.

I initially found it quite upsetting applying for jobs for which I was eminently qualified while deliberately selling myself short. My ego had taken quite a battering of late, and the idea that someone might take me for an idiot (despite the fact that I would, hopefully, never meet them) made me squirm. But, resigning myself to the task, I started to draw perverse pleasure from the subtle constructions of my letters, handwriting them on paper that was far too thin, folding them too many times and, to top it off, liberally spraying them with a pungent, butch deodorant. I could only hope they would not be kept on file and pulled out to embarrass me after I became famous.

You see, I was still convinced that I would make it. It was just taking a bit longer than planned, that's all.

I had a chilling moment while sitting with Yeah! Yeah!'s old drummer, Leo Regan, in a pub in Kilburn (an area of London known by locals as the twenty-eighth county of Ireland). Leo still walked with a limp from our accident, a physical disability that (following a stint playing stand-up drums with a hugely popular rockabilly trio named Those Handsome Devils) had eventually curtailed his musical career. Leo received a substantial insurance payout and had done some traveling around the world, during which he developed an interest in photography. He surfaced in England to do a course at the London College of Printing, and became the latest emigrant to move into our flat.

Anyway, Leo had come up with the idea of doing a photo feature for
Hot Press
on London's Irish community, which was a good excuse to trawl around drinking pints of Guinness in every watering hole in Kilburn. I was interviewing a publican, when our attention was drawn to a wrinkled old fat man sitting at the bar, chuckling away to himself.

“Are you Irish, yourself?” asked Leo.

“Oh, I am, yes, indeed,” chuckled the old fella in a thick Galway accent.

“When did you leave Ireland?” asked Leo.

“I came over to London in 1952 for a game of soccer and I never went back,” said the old man. He began to tell us how he played for the Galway Rovers and emigrated on the promise of a professional football career that never materialized. He was twenty-six then. He was sixty-three now. And he had never returned home. But he was adamant that he would be going back someday. “I never signed anything!” he insisted.

“What do you mean, you never signed anything?” I asked.

“Oh, I signed the dole, all right, but I never pledged allegiance to the Queen!” declared the old man. He supped from his pint of bitter. The Guinness was too expensive for him these days. “I'll go back someday, I will,” he said. “Oh yeah, I'll go back.”

“That's you in another forty years,” said Leo as we left the pub. I didn't laugh. The thought had already occurred to me. I was in danger of turning into the character from the beautiful old Irish ballad “The Mountains of Mourne”:

Joan left, traveling to Australia. I had driven her away and I was sick with myself. Joan was beautiful and she was funny and she loved me totally, unreservedly, hopelessly. And I…didn't know what I wanted. Just something else, something different. I worried that I would never feel anything more than I felt for her but I was afraid of going through life without finding out for sure. Our relationship was all push and pull but those last few months together had been weirdly harmonious. Once Joan posed a solution to my commitment dilemma by telling me she was leaving, all problems between us evaporated. We spent the summer of 1986 like a young couple tenderly in love. Then, one day in October, I accompanied her to Heathrow Airport. Joan was in tears. We kissed good-bye at the departure gate. Then she turned. And she was gone. Out of my life. And it was as if a huge wave of nausea came rolling down the airport concourse and blasted through my body. I found myself staggering from the shockwave of emotion, dazed and bewildered, a cold sweat prickling my skin. I lurched into the public toilets and just made it to a sink to throw my guts up. A toilet attendant stared at me with reproach as I wiped the vomit from my lips.

“I'm sorry,” I said. And I
was
sorry. Truly, truly sorry. But not for him.

That night I wrote a song, which was the way I always dealt with my emotions. It was called “Fool for Pain.”

Can there be any greater art form than the song for exorcising a feeling? It's poetry with melody to fill in all those spaces that words can't touch. But surely songs need to be released into the world to work their magic? Mine were becoming congested inside the studio of my own mind, turning cancerous.

Bono phoned one day to tell me he had just written a song. He was full of the excitement of the creation, bubbling over with the need to share. “You know how you are always saying U2 don't write real songs? Well, I think we've cracked it,” he said. “I think we've written a real, classic song.”

“What's it called?” I asked.

“ ‘I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For,' ” said Bono.

“Great title,” I admitted.

He proceeded to sing to me down the phone line. “I have climbed highest mountains / I have run through the fields / Only to be with you…/ I have run, I have crawled, I have scaled these city walls / These city walls / Only to be with you…/ But I still haven't found what I'm looking for.”

It gave me a chill. How could Bono know what was going on in my head? After all, he was the man with everything. Fame, riches, love, faith, creative fulfillment. But as for me, I was still searching.

You might have thought that Ivan and I would have given up by now. Surely any sane person would know that it was over? We had shot our bolt. We had exhausted all avenues of inquiry. But we had each other to sustain our mutual madness, talking up the notion that what did not kill us could only make us stronger and that talent would win out in the end. We even took rejection as a kind of perverse encouragement, rationalizing that we had learned a great deal along the way, improving as musicians and growing as people. And we were still young and free and without responsibilities. The future was ours. And the prize would be all the sweeter when it came.

We had other encouragement, too, to keep us hanging on. We were told that Clive Davis, the legendary head of Arista in the U.S., had taken an interest in our demos. The problem he identified was the lack of that all-important first single, the unstoppable hit that seemed to us to be the Holy Grail of an A&R community too timid and unimaginative to trust the artists themselves. Have you ever wondered why so many manufactured bands are launched with cover versions? Because the songs have already been hits. They are tried and tested. Even George Martin wanted the Beatles to record a cover version as their second single, before John and Paul, stung at the implicit criticism of their songwriting, delivered “Please Please Me” and unleashed Beatle-mania.

Ivan and I decided to do something we should have done years before: record and release our own single. We had been too precious about our songs. Because we aspired to state-of-the-art pop, which is an expensive business, we had spurned the idea of releasing anything that was less than perfect. Now we wanted something that at least acknowledged our existence, some kind of testament to years spent making music. We wanted something we could actually hold in our hands and play on our record decks. As usual, there was one overriding problem. We had no money.

Our agent, Barry Campbell, stepped in. Barry was basically a small-time, hardworking hustler, who cheerfully admitted to being no more knowledgeable about the machinations of the big-time music business than we were. But, in exchange for a management contract, he was prepared to put his money where our mouths were and frankly we had no one else to turn to. He would pay for the recording and arrange its release on an independent label he was in the process of setting up. We shook hands on a budget figure of £4,000 and while contracts were drawn up we booked three days at Terminal studios in Elephant and Castle.