Killing Bono (28 page)

“That tape you gave me,” he said. “It's extraordinary. The song ‘Fool for Pain,' it's so raw it's painful to listen to. You're standing naked in that song, with your trousers down and your willy hangin' out for everyone to see. I was almost embarrassed to listen to it. That's the stuff you should be doing. Forget the pop music. You and Ivan are two of the best songwriters ever to come out of Ireland and nobody knows. Why? Because you're not letting anybody hear what you can really do.”

“We've played Wembley,” I said, defensively. Bono looked at me skeptically. “Wembley Coach & Horses,” I added.

Bono laughed.

“I don't know what you think's so funny,” I said. “It was a really good gig.”

The gap between us now was so large you could lose yourself in it. What were the chances of this happening? It wasn't enough that I had gone to school with some guys who became rock stars. No. They had to go and become the biggest-selling and most acclaimed rock stars of their generation in the whole wide world. All I wanted when I was a kid was to be famous. Now, even if I was to somehow miraculously achieve my dream, it would be dwarfed into insignificance by the sheer scale of the achievements of some kids who used to sit next to me in class. It was a twist of fate worthy of the vindictive God of Bono's Old Testament.

My life was taking some dark and twisted turns. Steve and I were picking up girls. He too had recently come out of a long-term relationship and we spent a lot of time together, hanging out in wine bars, talking about life and trying to get laid (not necessarily in that order of priority), preferably for one night only, no strings attached. Of course, the problem with trying to pick up women in the company of the Walking Pheromone was that he always got the best-looking ones, including a
Playboy
model whom he later claimed to have carefully inspected for signs of staples in her stomach. The thing is, neither of us seemed to be enjoying the whole experience very much. We were just doing it because it's what we had signed up for. The rock 'n' roll had proven to be a bit of a disappointment. Steve wasn't into drugs and, frankly, I couldn't afford the drugs I wanted. So all that was left was the sex.

I was not a happy bunny. I fulfilled most of my sexual fantasies, checking them off a mental list in my head, and, let me tell you, compared to intimate sex with someone you care about, these assignations proved a sad disappointment. I even had a three-way tryst with two gorgeous bisexual girls, who were into each other, while snorting cocaine and drinking champagne, which is probably right up at the top of most men's fantasy list. And you know what? After I had ejaculated a couple of times, I lost interest. The pair of them went at it all night. I got up and went into the other room and watched TV.

And I really don't want to think about the woman who introduced her dog into the proceedings.

You know the problem with a godless universe? You're on your own. Responsible for no one but yourself. And every time you contemplate the future, you are forced to conclude that your ultimate fate is simply to cease to be. It makes it hard to care about things, even yourself. The distractions of vice are all too easy to surrender to. You tend to think, “I know I shouldn't be doing this but…fuck it!”

You could say I was experiencing an existential wobble.

Then Steve went and got famous with his boy band and I lost my partner in misdemeanor. That was a rather bruising lesson about the nature of fame. It wasn't that Steve turned into some kind of egotistic monster; it was more like he got distracted for a minute in the sudden burst of flashlights…But it was long enough for him to lose sight of some of his closest friends.

I must have been a bit of a pain in the arse to be around anyway. I found it hard to be overlooked by the excited fans who would come bustling up to Steve in the street and then give me their cameras and ask me to take a picture of them with their idol. I probably made a few too many caustic jokes about Steve's pin-up status. But we went from talking every day and hanging out several times a week—two young men with an incredibly similar outlook, sharing our experience of the world—to talking only when I could get him on the phone and meeting when he could squeeze me into his schedule. And then I thought,” I'm not going to call him until he calls me.” And I never heard from him again.

I did run into him at a party a few years later. To his credit, he was sheepish and apologetic. By then he had come out of the other side of celebritydom and had genuine insight into how it had affected him. We exchanged numbers but we never used them. The damage done to our friendship was beyond repair.

In some strange phenomenon of social connectivity, as the chosen few moved into the stratosphere, gathering together in a galaxy of celebrity, with hangers-on and other satellites orbiting endlessly around, the wannabes and might-have-beens and other assorted show business rejects began to congregate in the dark space at the edge of this constellation of stars, telling funny stories about failure to make themselves feel better and bitching behind the backs of their more famous friends. I have to say, my fellow nonachievers were good company. A more extraordinary, talented and delightfully eccentric bunch of people you could not invent. Maybe failure is more character-building than success.

There was Gerry Moore, of course, who had gone back to Ireland, where he made a living as a voice-over artist in radio ads, frequently impersonating singers who could not have held a candle to his own vocal talent. And there was Reid Savage, an erudite raconteur who was also one of the most exciting guitarists I had ever heard. Reid signed to MCA when Ossie was telling us not to and got dropped after one album. I always thought he could have been a great, inventive guitar hero like the Edge but Reid was working his personal magic on the pub circuit, not in stadiums. He was married to Louise Goffin, the only child of classic songwriters Gerry Goffin and Carol King, who had to deal with a very different kind of rejection than the rest of us. Louise put out a lyrically complex, melodically demanding album,
This Is the Place
, in 1987, but every review and interview focused on the family connection and most found her wanting. “What's good enough for other people,” she sadly noted, “isn't good enough for me.” And then there was Frank McGee, a frighteningly fucked-up ball of hyperintensity who had an ugly sex appeal uniquely his own, the charisma of a Hollywood movie star and a wild, poetic streak that should have made him a rock legend, but somehow his band, Jo Jo Namoza, always managed to scare off the A&R community. To be fair, Frank was a scary guy. He once told me that his ideal date was to go back to a woman's home, fuck her up the ass, steal her money and shit in her handbag. But Jo Jo were a strange, taut, funky and utterly unique band and it is the world's loss that they eventually broke up in the face of timidity from the music business, robbing posterity of the chance to enjoy such classics as “Yes, I Am a Fishhead.” I see Frank pop up on my TV screen every now and then, usually as a policeman or criminal in some low-rent soap opera. He should have been a star. But that's the epitaph of so much talent. Should have been. Could have been. Might have been. If only.

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.

S
o 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 words 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:

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:

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.

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.

We had often been told it was a mistake to manage ourselves—if only from the point of view that, to the unimaginative at least (a category which definitely included A&R departments), artists should never appear to be interested in (or even capable of understanding) the brutal, cutthroat world of business. Managers made plans. Artists had visions. And besides, I knew I had upset a few too many people with my outspokenness. So, in the absence of the real thing, we decided to invent pseudo-management. Ivan's friend trainee Doctor Martin and my friend Gloria (who had rather enjoyed the whole
Melody Maker
subterfuge) agreed to pose as a vibrant new management team and do the rounds of the record companies. I would brief Martin and Gloria on who they were about to see and what tack they should take, then sit at the back during the meeting and look as baffled by all this high-powered business talk as any self-respecting artist should be.