Rock and Hard Places (51 page)

I’d been in Sarajevo a month previously, doing a story for
The Sunday Times
about the rebirth of the city’s tourist industry. Just about everything that wasn’t moving was upholstered with U2 posters. The concert was all anyone was talking about. Even the staff of Sarajevo’s newly reopened tourist office, whose average age was around seventy, said they were going. The excitement was about more than a big rock group coming to town: Sarajevo was going to be on CNN because something good was happening in it.

“Well,” shrugs Bono, “I don’t, as a general rule, suffer from any Catholic guilt, even though I’m half Catholic, but I think for any person who finds success, the instinctive reaction is to try and level the pitch a bit, with your friends, and your family, and I guess in the wider world, which is when you become a real pain in the hole. Or I guess the other extreme is to just put it all up your nose, and I thought I had a great nose, so I wasn’t interested in that.”

U2 had played a smart game: tickets were sold in Croatia, Slovenia and Yugoslavia, but there was no concert scheduled in Zagreb, Llubljana or Belgrade. Anyone between Austria and Greece who wanted to see U2 was going to have to come to Sarajevo, and they did, in their thousands. On the day of the show, trains had run into Sarajevo for the first time in four years. The city’s roads were full of cars bearing Croatian and Yugoslav license plates. The bars were crowded with people with subtly different accents. There was no trouble—although, earlier this morning, I did see a local market trader knock on the window of a Belgrade-registered car, say something to the clearly affronted driver and walk off looking terribly pleased with himself; a friend translated the pedestrian’s remarks as, “I’ve just fucked your Hungarian mother with her dead horse’s dick.”

“So no, it wasn’t really what I’d planned,” continues Bono, in what sounds a painful rasp. “I’d planned to be in fine voice. I have been in fine voice, of late, and I’d probably have been a terrible pain in the arse if I had pulled that off. It was very humbling, actually. But maybe that allowed room for Sarajevo to kind of take the gig away from us, which is what they did. They could see that things could go very horribly wrong, but they’d come here, and they’d gone to a lot of trouble, and they were going to make it happen. And they did, and they just kind of carried me along. And the band also played with some real spunk, I thought. When I lost it on ‘Pride,’ and Edge started singing it, I thought, fucking hell, now see what it feels like, you bastard, but he did it, you know, he got us there.”

The first act on last night had been a local choir. They were followed by Protest, one of the better acts to have emerged from Sarajevo’s wartime rock scene. Sikter followed them, starting their set by tearing up the Bosnian national anthem in the style of Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner,” and playing a blinder after that. When U2 made their entrance, and the
PopMart
stage lit up on cue, the roars had been as much of relief as excitement. In a city which has come to view delivery on promises as very much the exception to the rule, there had been a general view that something would go wrong at the last minute.

In the event, the only thing that went wrong was Bono’s voice. On any other night, this might have been catastrophic, but as Bono says, last night it really didn’t matter. By the time the giant disco lemon rolled out for the encores, it felt less like another stadium concert, and more like a very, very large party with a band playing in one corner of it. Standing in the middle of it on the mixing desk was an overwhelming experience, if one leavened with a guilt at the privilege of being there without having suffered the same suspension of everyday life that everyone else was celebrating the end of. “Concerts are one of those things that happen in normal cities,” Sikter’s drummer Faris had said backstage before the show, twitching with nerves. “Tonight is one of the most important things that’s ever happened here—way bigger than the Olympics.” Faris is not, in my experience, prone to overstatement. “My father made me some new shoes especially,” he laughed.

Two parts of
PopMart
had been tailored to the location. The karaoke singalong was replaced by Edge delivering a lovely, mournful solo reading of “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” and the encores included the first-ever live performance of “Miss Sarajevo”—the gorgeous song inspired by Bill Carter’s film about a wartime beauty pageant, and recorded by U2, Brian Eno and Luciano Pavarotti under the name Passengers. Last night, Eno joined U2 onstage in person, Pavarotti on tape. It had been a tentative performance. “Well, we wrote that song for you,” Bono said, as it stumbled to a close, “and we can’t fucking play it.”

When the lights came up at the end of the show, and the crowd started filing out, something strange and wonderful happened. The stand along the left of the stadium, which was filled with ranks of uniformed soldiers serving with the multinational NATO-led Stabilisation Force (SFOR) stood, as one, and applauded the crowd, the people of Sarajevo. The punters leaving the ground stopped, turned around, and clapped back. A self-conscious, embarrassed silence followed, eventually broken by the Spanish SFOR contingent, many wearing their national flag as bandannas, leading an impromptu massed military choir in “Y Viva España” and, then, an altogether surreal line dance to “The Macarena.”

With me on the mixing desk was the only other British journalist who’d flown out for the show, Mat Smith of the
NME
.

“It’s amazing,” he said. “Every time some idiot musician starts with that hippy-dippy music-bringing-people-together-as-one stuff, we just laugh at them. But look at this . . . they’ve actually done it. What the hell are we going to write?”

At the Holiday Inn the next morning, Bono tries to give me a hand with that one.

“In the mid-80s,” he says, “we were involved in America, and the concept of the two Americas, and that brought us on the one hand to Central America, Nicaragua and ‘Bullet The Blue Sky’ and on the other hand to Sun Studios. But it was all part of the same . . . it’s sometimes helpful to make a parallel between bands and filmmakers. You go for whatever you’re doing and just focus on it. And that’s one of the reasons our records have real . . . they’re caught in their time. When people look at the 80s, they will pick out one of our records, and they’ll say that if you want to know what was going on in music,
and you want to know what was going on . . . you know, America was what was going on, and this was a response to it.
Achtung Baby
and
Zooropa
, again, that paints a picture of what was going on. I guess we should start just writing tunes, and just shut the fuck up, but if you’re curious, and that’s certainly my strongest suit, the tunes get set into a context of some kind . . . and here we are.”

Someone comes to tell Bono to get a move on, as U2’s plane has to leave.

“I’ve had, I guess, a few holidays in hell, but I hate that—and you should be careful with that yourself—but the way it works with me, the way it works with the group, is whatever you’re doing, you look under every stone of it. So Zoo TV brought us into that world of television, news, cartoons, Dada, and you end up following that through, and if you do that you end up in Sarajevo one minute and hanging out with some of the most beautiful women in the world the next, and you just get fully into it.”

 

TWO MONTHS LATER, by the pool in the exquisite garden behind the impeccably renovated and uproariously expensive Delano Hotel in Miami’s South Beach, we are hanging out with some of the most beautiful women in the world, getting fully into it. Photographer Rankin introduces me to Helena Christensen, and one of my chats with Bono is interrupted when he is distracted by Veronica Webb wandering over to say hello. I am inclined to forgive Bono for this, as Veronica Webb wandering over to say hello would be enough to distract a man performing an emergency tracheotomy on his brother.

U2 have pitched camp in the Delano for a couple of weeks while
PopMart
tours the south of the United States. The band’s families are here as well—there are seven U2 children—and U2 are flying back to Miami every night on the lemon-spangled 727 after shows in other nearby cities. Various friends have flown in for the Miami show, Elvis Costello among them. George Clooney is also staying here (“Hey,” says Bono, as we leave the hotel to find a bar showing the Ireland vs Belgium World Cup playoff, “there’s Batman playing basketball. Cool.”) and though he hasn’t come as a friend of the band, he seems to leave as one.

Rock tours are not usually such relaxed things to visit, especially not after they’ve been six months on the road. Most seethe with
tensions and paranoias comparable with the last weeks of the Nixon administration, and most regard an itinerant journalist as little more than a handy outlet for those pressures. U2’s organisation has the feel of a large and almost suspiciously happy family. It may help that many of their closest staff have associations with the band going back most of the twenty-odd years of U2’s existence. It may also help that many of those closest staff, whether by accident or design, are women.

The four members of U2 are themselves unfailingly courteous and pleasant, certainly more so than men regularly credited with a combined wealth of £300 million really have to be.

Edge, the permanently behatted guitarist, first sees me at some distance past my best when, not long off the flight from London, I descend on his table on the Delano’s back porch, jetlagged and margarita-sodden, and interrupt someone else’s praise of The Spice Girls with a lengthy rant outlining their defects. Edge cheerfully puts up a case for the defence while I mutter things like “cynical,” “vapid,” “worse than the plague” and “the Nolan Sisters,” and drink someone else’s drink, becoming dimly aware that I am talking no sense at all, know nobody here and that everyone has gone very quiet. A hope of salvation arrives in the shape of Elvis Costello; while I don’t expect him to remember the nervous nineteen-year-old who interviewed him in Sydney nine years ago, I do expect that the curmudgeonly elder rock’n’roll statesman will take my side. “I’m in the Spice movie,” he grins. “I play a barman.” I decide that discretion is the better part of valour, and go up to bed, my attempt at a dignified exit hampered by the way the garden furniture keeps jumping in front of me.

Larry Mullen Jr., the strangely ageless drummer whose high-school noticeboard advertisement bought U2 together, introduces himself after a few days and apologises for not wanting to speak on the record on the grounds that “I only feel comfortable sitting at my kit hitting stuff,” and besides which, his young son, Elvis, has pulled a table over on himself and hurt his foot. Adam Clayton, the bass player who comes nearer than any of them to mustering the traditional hauteur of the rock’n’roll aristocrat, seems generally thoughtful and oddly shy.

Bono flits between tables in the Delano’s garden, dressed all in black with silver sunglasses and the leopard-print loafers Gucci made him to go with the interior of his Mercedes, chatting to those he knows,
signing things for those he doesn’t. He’s a prolific and entertaining talker—I can imagine he gave the Blarney Stone the one kiss it still talks about. Unusually, for someone as famous as he is, little of what he says is about himself—he talks seven beats to the bar about things he’s read, people he’s met, places he’s been. In two espressos flat, he can do Picasso, the Reverend Cecil Williams’ Glide church in San Francisco, Daniel Ortega and liberation theology and whether or not Ireland really stand much of a chance against the Belgians. Even more unusually, for someone as famous as he is, he’s also a generous and genuinely inquisitive listener.

“I like that generosity in Americans,” he says, later. “We haven’t the cultural baggage that other bands in the UK would have, because we’re Irish. We don’t see America as the devil like the English do, so we came here early on and we spent a lot of time here. Being on the road feels like an American idea—you grow up on Kerouac, and the poetry of the place names, and what it was like being nineteen or twenty and looking out the window of a tour bus and thinking it was more like the movies, not less.”

U2’s love affair with America has been one of two boundlessly ambitious entities falling hopelessly for the endless possibilities of each other. Of the seventy-seven million albums U2 have sold, thirty million have been bought in America.

 

IN MIAMI, U2 are playing at the ProPlayer Stadium, home of the Florida Marlins baseball team.
PopMart
has come a long way, in every respect, since its inauspicious beginnings in Las Vegas. A workable tension has been located between the gleeful satire of consumer culture that flickers on the giant screen, and the songs from
Pop
which are, beneath the beats and effects, some of the most intimate and troubled U2 have recorded. During the Miami show, just before U2 play “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” Bono makes a short speech thanking the crowd for their patience with his band’s unpredictability. “If we keep it interesting for us,” he says, “hopefully it won’t be bullshit for you.”

After a triumphant show, in a suite somewhere in the warren of dressing rooms inside ProPlayer Stadium, Edge can just about laugh at the memory of Las Vegas; the encore, when he was forced to his knees
to fossick hopelessly for his dropped plectrum in the dry ice while the other three started “Discotheque” without him and his signature riff, was, he says now, “about as
Tap
as it’s ever got.” Edge is genial and amusing company, and only makes about a dozen slighting references to my inebriated performance at the Delano the previous evening, which is sweet of him.

U2 have kept Edge’s solo “Sunday Bloody Sunday” in the set since Sarajevo. He’s kind enough to let it go when I explain that I’d never liked the song much in its original, martial-drumming, foot-stomping, flag-waving incarnation, that it had seemed to sum up everything that I used to think U2 were: pompous, earnest and a whole bunch of no fun at all. Stripped down and delivered in a bare whisper, it had worked in Sarajevo, and even removed from that emotive context, it had worked in Miami.