Killing Bono (36 page)

“Maybe there aren't,” I replied. “This is where you find yourself at this place in time. I used to think, ‘How are they going to solve the Northern Ireland problem?' They needed an individual to rise above the mire. They needed a Nelson Mandela. And they got…”

“John Hume,” said Bono.

“So the debt idea came into focus and they needed a figurehead. You put a politician up there and nobody is going to pay any attention. You put a concerned movie star like Richard Gere up there and it falls apart. He can't carry the world with him. People would be suspicious. They'd mock him. But you're one of the most famous people on the planet and look at what got you to where you are. You've got the passion, the intelligence, the faith, the conviction and twenty years of history that says this guy really believes in what he does. You are the right man, in the right place, at the right time.”

Bono laughed. “You could talk a blind man into crossing a motorway.”

“And never forget you've got God on your side,” I said.

“You mean the lifelong argument I have with my maker?” he smiled, ruminatively. “I'm not sure if we're on speaking terms at the moment.”

“Welcome to the club,” I said.

“The belief that there is love and logic at the heart of the universe is a big subject. If there is no God, it's serious. If there is a God, it's even more serious!” He laughed. “Sometimes I think it takes a lot more courage not to believe. I don't know what gets you through the night.”

“I haven't quite given up on finding God,” I said. “I'm keeping my options open for a deathbed conversion.”

“You have always been such a crank!” laughed Bono. “Even in school. What I always kind of looked up to in you was that you were just a nagging question! Just rooting and scratching for whys and wheres and whos and hows. You were more curious than I was, back then. I think maybe I've caught up with you.”

It took me a while to digest this. “You looked up to me?” I finally blurted out. The possibility had never occurred to me that I might ever have been, in some small way, my hero's hero.

“Have I ever told you, if I hadn't become a rock star I always thought I'd like to be a journalist?” said Bono.

“Any time you feel like giving it a shot,” I said, “we can swap places.”

T
here may yet be a twist in this tale. Whether it is just another twist of the knife buried between my shoulder blades remains to be seen.

I never stopped writing songs. Never stopped playing my guitar and singing. I just stopped trying to foist my efforts on the rest of the world. I stopped looking so far outside myself for validation. My songs were my poetic diary, an emotional record of my life with Gloria, our ups and downs, my struggles with stepfatherhood, my state of perpetual existential crisis in my ongoing search for meaning and purpose. They were probably the best songs I had ever written but they were only ever played to myself, my family and my closest friends. To my own surprise, I found that was audience enough. Just about.

And maybe that was further evidence that I never really had that God-shaped hole Bono talked about, that dark engine of stardom, that motherless black hole of naked desire sucking in all the attention it can get. “If you were of sound mind you wouldn't need seventy thousand people a night telling you they loved you to feel normal,” he admitted to me once, before adding, reflectively, “It's sad, really.”

But still I had the music. It may even be true to say that music meant more to me than ever. Because once you have dived into the stream of music that flows like a torrent through the history of mankind, once you have truly surrendered to its power, immersing yourself in its nurturing force, only a fool would crawl to the bank and shake himself dry. Playing a musical instrument is not just a conduit to the latent joy within you, it is a vehicle of release from all the constricted emotions and petty frustrations and little disappointments of everyday life. Music is a channel to the spirit. It is a gateway to yourself. I don't know how I would get by without my guitar.

And then, for my fortieth birthday, Gloria bought me an electric Custom Telecaster and amplifier. Big mistake.

To celebrate the occasion, I assembled a motley crew of musical contemporaries to perform in a local pub under the name Groovy Dad (because we are dads, and we are groovy). One of my fellow rock rejects, Reid Savage, now a graphic designer, was lead guitarist and musical director. We had a set-builder on drums. An astrophysicist on bass. Ivan came along and joined in on backing vocals. We opened a short but lively set with a version of Led Zeppelin's “Rock and Roll.” Which seemed appropriate. It really had been a long time since I rock-and-rolled.

Too long. I may have given up on dreams of rock stardom (or, fairer to say, they had given up on me) but our nostalgic excursion pungently reminded me of the pleasures of performing music for its own sake. Our little band was made up of regular civilians, none of whose job description included the word “musician,” but they were all talented players who had once been in bands and never lost the love of their chosen instrument.

“You know what?” I said to Bono, when he rang to wish me a happy birthday. “Music is for life, not just for Christmas!”

Bono laughed. But he pronounced himself much enamored of this concept, pointing out that the very notion of making a living out of music is a relatively recent phenomenon. As young men growing up in Ireland, we could witness astonishingly resonant folk sessions in pubs where the players were local fishermen or farmers. “There's a strange idea that music is a way to get rich quick,” said Bono. “But it never even used to be a paying job. It was a part of the community, something people did on the side.”

And it became something I did on the side. I started an occasional, informal gathering of musical friends under the name Songwriters Anonymous. I billed it as a “twelve-step program for singers and songwriters who cannot resist the urge to perform.” Except that I could only come up with six steps:

1. Turn up
   
2. Tune up
   
3. Sing up
   
4. Hit the bar
   
5. …er…
   
6. That's it
   

I was a bit concerned about the
Daily Telegraph
's pop critic straying from the realm of gamekeeper into the terrain of the poacher, so, to preserve my anonymity, I performed as The Ghost Who Walks, a name from an old comic book. It seemed appropriate. Because, as far as music was concerned, I felt like a ghost slowly coming back to life.

Those evenings were a lot of fun. The quality of the music played was fantastic. Old bandmates like my brother and Margo Buchanan turned up and did their bit; new friends came along too, successful working musicians such as Robyn Hitchcock, Steve Balsamo and Jamie Catto; but the real revelation was how many civilians who had never pursued a musical career got up to perform songs they had written themselves, wonderful songs full of heart, soul, wit, insight and passion. It occurred to me that whatever problems the music business has in developing new stars, it is not for want of talent.

A friend had started a small label, Map Music, and frequently prevailed upon me for advice and guidance. In return, I got the use of his cramped but well-equipped studio. I started to record some of my songs, drafting in Reid as coproducer. Our philosophy was simple. Get the best musicians we could find and let them do their stuff. Bang it down fast. Worry about it later. The idea was to have some fun. We weren't concerned with what anyone else might make of it because it wasn't for anybody else. For the first time in my life, I was making music solely to satisfy myself. And the result (to no one's surprise more than my own) was the richest, most fully realized music I had ever made. Other musicians would come in and rave about what we were doing. “You could get a deal with this,” my friends kept telling me. But I wasn't sure about that at all. I had been bitten too many times by the music business. I thought we could stick it out quietly and anonymously on Map as a no-budget, Internet-only release, so that it would exist, at least. Maybe I could have a bit of fun with The Ghost Who Walks in my column. Get my fellow rock critics to review it without actually telling them who it was.

One morning, I woke up from a vivid musical dream. All night in my sleep I had been singing a song. I was singing to God, even though I did not believe He could hear me. I was singing about the idea of God in all its heavenly glory and earthly cruelty, addressing a living universe with the questions that had tormented me all my life. And as I sang my song to God, the music I could hear in my sleepy head was suitably divine (there is no music like the music of your dreams), a huge gospel choir of voices, raised in praise and torment. And then, the strangest thing happened. God sang back to me. The really peculiar thing is He sounded quite like Bono.

I pulled myself awake, jumped out of bed and started scribbling down everything I could remember. It just came pouring out, in short, sharp couplets with an A-A, B-B rhyming scheme. It took me about fifteen minutes to write it all down. And there it was. Complete on the page, like a gift from Heaven or my subconscious: my whole lifelong struggle with divinity captured in a song. I picked up my guitar and started strumming. And the first chords I played fitted perfectly. It was the fastest song I had ever written. And maybe the best.

And another strange thing happened. A weird moment of synchronicity. Bono phoned. It was not like he called every day. We seemed to be speaking more often than ever before but still, months could pass between calls. But there he was, on the end of the line while I was still bursting with enthusiasm and excitement for my new creation.

“I've written a song,” I told him. “It's called ‘I Found God.' ”

“That'll be the day,” he laughed.

“Well, at least I'm still looking,” I said. “Do you want to hear it?”

“Do I have a choice?” he joked.

I had him on the speakerphone. So I picked up my guitar, and sang him my new song.

At the end of my impromptu performance there was a moment of silence. And then Bono declared, “I wrote that song!”

“You wish!” I said.

“I have been trying to write that song my whole life,” he said.

I played “I Found God” at the next gathering of Songwriters Anonymous. And all these great singers in the room started joining in with the coda, until I could hear the gospel choir of my dreams. And afterward people kept coming up to talk to me about the lyrics. Everybody seemed to hear different things in it, finding a reflection of their own beliefs. Some heard a religious devotional. Some heard a philosophical discourse. Some heard an atheist anthem. That song had a power all of its own.

I recorded it at Map studio, with eight of the best singers I knew backing me. The album (because I now realized that that's what it was) was coming together and I started seriously wondering what I was going to do with it. Still, I was busy writing my column. I could record only when the studio was free and I wasn't too busy and I had a bit of money to spare to pay for musicians and engineers, so the whole process was dragging on, which suited me fine. It meant I could delay deciding where this was all going.

One day, I was working in my office when my phone rang. My caller had a bold opening gambit. “I believe you have described me as the biggest asshole you've ever met!” boomed a patrician voice.

“Who is this?” I inquired cautiously.

“Nick Stewart,” my caller replied.

I had to think for a minute, but finally the penny dropped. It was the Island A&R man who had signed U2 but rejected Shook Up! “Mr. Stewart,” I said. “I did not call you the biggest arsehole I ever met. I called you
one
of the biggest arseholes I've ever met! There were plenty of other A&R men in my black book.”

Laughter rolled down the telephone line. It turned out that Nick was a big fan of my newspaper column. He was head of international A&R at BMG now, where he also ran his own label, Gravity. Nick invited me to dinner. We got along famously, the disappointments of the past long forgotten. At the end of the evening I gave him a four-track CD of The Ghost Who Walks without telling him what it was. I just asked him to give it a listen and let me know what he thought.

Now Nick also had a late-night weekend show on Virgin radio, for which he was known as Captain America, in which he would play a mix of alternative country, Americana and classic singer-songwriters. And, unbeknownst to me, on his next show he played one of my tracks.