Killing Bono (30 page)

Adam was in ebullient form, grinning widely as he approached to ask if I still possessed that first bass guitar we had both owned.

“I'm sure it's around somewhere,” I said.

“I'd like to buy it back off you,” he said.

“It'll cost you a bit more than sixty quid,” I said. “You really ripped me off when you sold me that plank.”

“Name your price,” he said. “I've come into a bit of money since then.”

At some point in the evening, I sat down with Bono.

“That song!” he said, rather pointedly.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“You've got the sickness,” he said. “Your songs make Leonard Cohen sound cheerful.”

“I've been feeling a bit jealous,” I admitted. “You know, I can't believe in anything. I just can't. But I look around at where people are in their lives and I find that the people who have a strong belief system seem to do better than those of us who have nothing but confusion.”

“You're suggesting that belief and confusion are mutually exclusive,” countered Bono. “I don't think so. I think belief gives you a direction in the confusion. So what's really bothering you?”

“I can't believe you wrote a song with Bob Dylan,” I said, barely able to disguise my envy.

“How jammy is that?” laughed Bono. “You know the strange thing: I was staying in L.A., right, and I had a dream one night about Bob Dylan, and I woke up and just started writing that song. And it's about a man who people keep turning to as a savior but whose own life is getting messed up and he could use a bit of salvation himself. I wrote a couple of verses and I didn't really know what to do with it, but I thought, ‘I'm a rock star, right? And I've actually got Bob Dylan's number…somewhere! So why don't I give him a call.' So I go over to his house and I told him I've got this song, it's not finished, and he says, ‘Play it to me,' and he just started making up lyrics on the spot. It was incredible, whole verses just came pouring out. And so I actually got to finish the song with the man in my dream!”

“I hate to admit this,” I said, “but I've been dreaming about you.”

“I'm not sure if I want to know about that,” said Bono.

“I'm not sure if I want to tell you!” I said. “I don't want you in my dreams! They're private!”

“I'll try to remember that next time I'm wandering about at night looking for somebody's head to get into,” laughed Bono.

“I'd appreciate it,” I said, but I couldn't bring myself to take this matter any further, to tell him how I was really feeling. “So what was Dylan like to work with?” I asked instead, bringing the conversation back to safe ground.

“You know, he recorded a lead vocal on that song but then he wouldn't let us use it,” said Bono. “It's incredible. People still say he can't sing but I learned more about phrasing and delivery just listening to him sing that song than I think I've learned in ten years on stage. Every line he sings, it's like the truth, he's got absolute conviction. I wish he'd let us put it on the album but he had some excuse about not wanting to conflict with the Traveling Wilburys' record. I don't know if that was true or if the song was just a little close to the bone. There's a lot of despair and regret in there. I think maybe he got cold feet about portraying himself in that way. I'll tell you a funny thing, though. We're in the studio, right, laying down the vocal, and he says, ‘Uh, can't use that verse.' I'm like, ‘What's the problem, it's a fantastic verse.' It was one of his verses, which he'd just sung off the top of his head. And he says, ‘Uh-uh, can't use it.' And I said, ‘Why not?' He said, ‘I've used it before!' And he had!”

I was laughing at Bono's impersonation of Dylan's weirdly undulating voice, shaking my head with incredulity at the whole situation. Bono seemed equally amused, reveling in the absurdity of his farcical encounter with this legendary hero. And for a moment we seemed united, just like when we were schoolboys, looking at this fantastical world of rock dreams from the outside, noses pressed to the glass. I had a nice time with Bono at the
Rattle and Hum
party. It was like old times. We chatted all night, while people buzzed about trying to catch his attention. We revisited all our usual topics, flogging the same hobby horses just to see if there was any life left in them. Then it was time to go.

“God bless,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Same to you.”

It would be a long time before I saw him again.

D
reams don't die easily. They limp toward the horizon, staggering from their wounds, muttering to themselves, trying to convince anyone who will listen that it's the cavalry coming over the horizon, not just a cloud of dust.

Well, that's how it was for Ivan and me, anyway. There was no dignity to be found in the death of ambition. Not even relief that it was all over, bar the postmortem. We just dragged that carcass as far as we could, then sank to our knees, exhausted, still baffled about how it could have come to this sorry pass, silently wondering if this could really be the end. The slow and bitter end.

Which went something like this.

Shook Up!'s negotiations with Chrysalis Publishing became bogged down in detail. Chrysalis were definitely interested but there was something else going on in the background, another agenda that was hard to get a handle on. They offered to let us record some new demos at their in-house studio. One of the songs they wanted us to record was “Sleepwalking.” We didn't tell them we had already recorded it twice. What the hell. Maybe it would be third time lucky.

While we were in the studio, the engineer got called out to an unusual assembly of Chrysalis staff. He returned a bit shaken and told us they had been addressed by the MD. The company was being taken over by EMI. There would be major changes ahead.

Ivan and I went upstairs to see the publisher we had been negotiating with. In a somber mood, he admitted he wasn't in a position to sign anything. Maybe next year. If he managed to retain his job.

It was the same old story. Ivan and I had heard it so many times now it was difficult to even get worked up by each new cruel twist in the tale. It was almost as if we expected it. We were despondent but refused to admit defeat. In public, anyway. Or even to each other. But in the dead of night, well, that was different. There was one thought tossing around my head, one question that only I could answer. “Is it over?”

Arista, too, were going through a complete overhaul and put us on the long finger. That was a position we were used to occupying by now. Paul Tipping was an experienced manager who had taken up the running after the showcase, helping us negotiate the Chrysalis contract that never was. He felt we would get a deal with Arista or one of the other companies that had expressed an interest if we could push it through before they broke up for Christmas. But it was already November and the clock was ticking. Paul told us frankly that we needed to have a contract signed, sealed and delivered by December or when the record companies we were dealing with came back after their holidays they would have forgotten all about us. But what more could we do to press our case? What could we give them that they hadn't already heard? Nothing. The pot was empty. Hit us and we rattled.

Paul's prediction turned out to be right on the money. But it wasn't only the record companies that forgot about us. So did Paul.

And still we didn't sit down and say, “That's it.” Wave the white flag. Surrender. We didn't look each other in the eye, shake hands and say: “We gave it our best shot. It was not to be.” Rather, we skulked around, avoiding each other, seeking refuge in the arms of women.

I was in love. For the first time, I felt I could actually say that without fear, without equivocation or concern about commitment. And it may be that failure released me from the prison of ego and ambition, so that I no longer contemplated the future with the greedy eyes of a child in a candy store. Or it may be that love was a safe haven for my wounded ego, because love makes everybody special. Everyone can be a star in the constellation d'amour. Our loved ones loved our songs. They'd ask us to play for them, even when no one else wanted to listen anymore. Maybe I could not believe, like John Lennon and countless other dreamers, that love would save me. But at least love would lick my wounds.

The object of my ardor was Gloria. And when she finally reciprocated, after a long siege on the stronghold of her heart (itself a damaged but well-fortified citadel that had survived a drawn-out war of attrition with her ex-husband), I was temporarily elevated to seventh heaven, king of all I surveyed. In the warmth of her embrace, I could overlook my failures. I could even give thanks for the crooked path my life had taken, telling myself that it had led to this wonderful woman. The fact that she was a single mother with two young children did not daunt me. Her little boys became my new playmates. In retrospect, of course, I can see that motherhood may have been part of her appeal, as I sought refuge from my broken dreams in the bosom of a ready-made family. But Gloria was no pushover. For the first time in a decade, I had a girlfriend capable of resisting my charms and standing up to my wiles. When we were together our love was sweet and crazy, in the first bloom of emotion, but she had other priorities. She did not want her kids to know we were dating, which made me feel as if I was on permanent probation, sneaking out of the house at three in the morning so that I would not be there when they got up for breakfast.

Ivan's own romantic life was even more of a mess. In my song, I had predicted that somebody was gonna get hurt. As it turned out, everybody got hurt. When Cassandra discovered that Ivan had been two-timing her she was understandably devastated. But Ina's triumph at becoming the only woman in Ivan's life was short-lived. She became upset by my brother's game-playing and returned to her family in Indonesia. Ivan adopted the pose of wounded lover, although it was clearly he who had done the wounding. When the latest deal fell through and he had no one to turn to to make him feel better, he decided to head out East to find Ina and tell her he loved her.

You might be wondering how he could afford to do this, since we were both supposed to be on the dole. Well, we had been caught up in a back-to-work initiative, one of a multitude of schemes specifically designed to get work-shy skivers like us off the unemployment register. This particular scheme was called Enterprise Allowance. We actually got slightly more money (the increase was incremental but when you were as poor as we were every little bit counted) and we did not have to sign on anymore (a big plus for such a pair of lazy good-for-nothings). The downside was that it lasted only a year, after which we were on our own. We had to do a couple of day-long courses, which were supposed to tell us all we needed to know about the enterprise culture, and then we were supposed to start our own business. It was entirely ridiculous, of course, but it effectively got people off the dole and made it incredibly hard to get back on, so you were more or less forced to get up off your arse and find a job. The days of free money were coming to an end. Anyway, Ivan buggered off to Indonesia on the pretext that he was importing fancy Oriental chess sets.

I told my Enterprise case worker that I was going to set up as a freelance journalist. Even though I could not admit to myself that the group was finished, I had been carefully considering my employment options for a while. I put in a couple of days on a building site, coming home physically shattered and completely caked in dust and dirt, all for £25 cash-in-hand, which was enough to convince me that I was not cut out for manual labor. I thought about graphics and design work but, while I had been an art director at nineteen, my dexterity with a scalpel and cow gum was somewhat behind the times. Computers had become the principal design tool. Scanning the employment ads, I realized I was no longer qualified. A decade out of work will do that for you. I could probably have found work as a cartoonist but coming up with one joke a fortnight for the strip I was doing for
Hot Press
already felt like hard graft. A gag a day would be worse than working nine to five. So it would have to be journalism.

I loved writing. And I had written some good features over the years, when something had particularly perked my interest or I had just been desperate for money. But I did not want to be a professional journalist. And in particular I did not want to be a rock critic. I had heard so many musicians complain that rock critics were just frustrated rock stars, to fulfill that cliché would have been the ultimate admission of defeat. But I wrote off a few halfhearted letters to magazines, enough to keep my case worker off my back.

Had I actually gone to a job interview, the only people who might conceivably have employed me were some dirty bikers magazines. Or maybe a gazette for the great unwashed. I had always been vain. Mirrors were my friend, a cheap substitute for the TV screens I wanted to see my face in. So I suppose it is rather telling that I had grown a scruffy great beard which covered half my face. What with the long, unkempt hair and the scuffed leather jacket, I was starting to attract nervous glances from strangers. Not that I could blame them. I looked like the kind of person I would cross the road to avoid.

Then disaster struck. Or potential disaster, at least. Ivan and I were summoned to interviews with our Enterprise case worker, to see how our business plans were progressing. The problem being that neither of our plans were progressing at all, besides which, Ivan wasn't even in the country, his lengthy absence being somewhat against the rules of the scheme. But fuck 'em all. The unemployment bureaucracy held no fear for me. The interviews were scheduled a day apart and I decided I would attend as both McCormick brothers. Ivan's came first. I showed up with my hair wild and my beard bushy, wearing loud clothing and behaving like a complete moron. I got some weird satisfaction from the case worker's withering appraisal of Ivan's business scheme.

“You say you are planning to import exotic Indonesian chess sets?”

“That's the idea,” I said.

“So on your business card—if you can call this square of cheap cardboard a business card—why have you stuck a picture of a plain, ordinary, common-or-garden pawn, and not one of your exotic chess pieces?”

“Good point,” I said. “Why didn't I think of that?” The real answer, of course, was that I had made the card myself and I didn't have any pictures of exotic Indonesian chess pieces in my possession. Indeed, I had no idea what such a thing would look like.

The next day, I returned to the office as myself. The case worker liked me much better than my brother. I shaved off my beard (to Gloria's great relief). My hair was tied up in a ponytail. I was wearing glasses. I had on a tatty suit. I played Ivan as a loudmouth but presented myself as quiet and withdrawn.

“I have been writing to magazines with ideas,” I said, showing the case worker my rejection letters. “It's a very competitive business but I think I am making some headway.”

“What makes you think that?” asked the case worker.

“Well, the rejection letters are getting more polite,” I pointed out.

My case worker was very helpful, giving me some useful tips on how to proceed. “You're living with your brother,” he noted as the interview drew to a close.

“Yes,” I said, nervously. Where was this going?

“I met him yesterday,” he said.

“Uh, yes, I know,” I admitted.

“Your presentation is much better than his,” said the case worker. “Maybe you could give him a bit of help.”

“Oh, he never listens to anything I say,” I said. “He likes nothing better than the sound of his own voice.”

“I rather got that impression myself,” laughed the case worker, sympathetically.

“I hope he wasn't too obnoxious,” I said.

“You're the one who's got to live with him,” pointed out my case worker.

The whole episode put a bit of a spring back in my step. I even thought I really
could
do a bit of journalism. Where was the harm? At least it would keep my case worker happy.

I spoke to a contact at the
Sunday Times Magazine
, sending in some of my
Hot Press
clippings instead of one of my deliberately hopeless letters. They were apparently impressed, commissioning me to interview Sinead O'Connor. They may have been swayed by my ever-so-slightly exaggerated claim to have known Sinead since she was a little girl (well, I had met the young chanteuse once while she was rehearsing with In Tua Nua).

It was a prestigious assignment. The beautiful, shaven-headed, ethereal-voiced Irish singer was already infamous for her outspoken and combative views but I felt sure that, with our shared background, we would get along just fine. My interview technique had improved somewhat since that first, painful encounter with Fay Fife and the Revillos, but I did not want to leave anything to chance so I prepared an extensive list of questions. Sinead, however, did not seem to take it quite so seriously. For one thing, she was distinctly unimpressed by my assertion that we had met before, muttering dismissively, “Don't remember.” She sat in the offices at Chrysalis, eating a curry, communicating between mouthfuls in sentences of one word. Or less. We got through my questions in ten minutes flat—without producing anything resembling a printable quote.

Floundering for a topic with which to engage her, I decided to broach her exotic spiritual beliefs. Drawing on something she once said about how we choose our own parents before we are born, I asked her why, since she was always complaining about her mum, she didn't choose a better one. She became incensed and announced that our meeting was over. I suggested leaving her to finish her curry in peace and then perhaps starting the interview over. In a remark that contained cutting echoes of Fay Fife's degrading appraisal of my skills, she snapped, “That wasn't an interview. That was more like a conversation on a bus!”