For the day that is in it, I think it would be great to honour the greatest musician to ever come from this small island. Bono. The name says it all. What a man. What he has done for music, and for society as a whole hasnt been matched by anyone. Some legend.
This is an interview from 2005 in Rolling Stone magazine.
First off: Where do you get those sunglasses?
Bulgari. A lot of people think that, when they see a “B” on the side, that it’s just my own megalomania. Only half the time it is. I’m the Imelda Marcos of sunglasses.
Why do you wear them all the time?
Very sensitive eyes to light. If somebody takes my photograph, I will see the flash for the rest of the day. My right eye swells up. I’ve a blockage there, so that my eyes go red a lot. So it’s part vanity, it’s part privacy and part sensitivity.
I. GROWING UP
What was your childhood in Dublin like?
I grew up in what you would call a lower-middle-class neighborhood. You don’t have the equivalent in America. Upper working class? But a nice street and good people. And, yet, if I’m honest, a sense that violence was around the corner.
Home was a pretty regular three-bedroom house. The third bedroom, about the size of a cupboard, they called the “box room” – which was my room. Mother departed the household early: died at the graveside of her own father. So I lost my grandfather and my mother in a few days, and then it became a house of men. And three, it turns out, quite macho men – and all that goes with that. The aggression thing is something I’m still working at. That level of aggression, both outside and inside, is not normal or appropriate.
You’re this bright, struggling teenager, and you’re in this place that looks like it has very few possibilities for you. The general attitude toward you from your father – and just the Irish attitude – was “Who the fuck do you think you are? Get real.” Is that correct?
Bob Hewson – my father – comes from the inner city of Dublin. A real Dublin man but loves the opera. Must be a little grandiose himself, OK? He is an autodidact, conversant in Shakespeare. His passion is music – he’s a great tenor. The great sadness of his life was that he didn’t learn the piano. Oddly enough, kids not really encouraged to have big ideas, musically or otherwise. To dream was to be disappointed. Which, of course, explains my megalomania.
I was a bright kid, all right, early on. Then, in my teenage years, I went through a sort of awkward phase of thinking I was stupid. My schoolwork goes to shit; I can’t concentrate. I started to believe the world outside. Music was my revenge on that.
I got the sense that it was kind of a dead-end situation.
Its blandness – its very grayness – is the thing you have to overcome. We had a street gang that was very vivid – very surreal. We were fans of Monty Python. We’d put on performances in the city center of Dublin. I’d get on the bus with a stepladder and an electric drill. Mad shit. Humor became our weapon. Just stand there, quiet – with the drill in my hand. Stupid teenage shit.
Just to provoke people? Performance art?
Performance art. We invented this world, which we called Lipton Village. We were teenagers when we came up with this, a way of fighting back against the prevailing bootboy mentality.
Were there a lot of fights?
Oh, yeah. The order of the day was often being beaten to within an inch of your life by roaming gangs from one of the other neighborhoods. When they asked where you were from, you had to guess right – or suffer. The harder they hit us, the more strange and surreal the response.
You were like the freaky kids?
Yeah. Gavin Friday – who’s doing the music for the 50 Cent movie now – was the most surreal-looking. He had an Eraserhead haircut; he wore dresses and bovver boots. I mean, myself and my other friend Guggi – we’re still very close friends – were handy enough. We could defend ourselves. But even though some of us became pretty good at violence ourselves, others didn’t. They got the shit kicked out of 'em. I thought that was kind of normal. I can remember incredible street battles. I remember one madser with an iron bar, just trying to bring it down on my skull as hard as he possibly could, and holding up a dustbin lid, which saved my life. Teenage kids have no sense of mortality – yours or theirs.
So that was your teen rebellion?
I don’t know if that was rebellion. That was a defense mechanism. We used to laugh at people drinking. We didn’t drink. Because people who spilled out of the pubs on a Friday night and threw up on the laneway – we thought we were better than them.
You were the smart-kid clique?
We were a collection of outsiders. We weren’t all the clever clogs. If you had a good record collection, that helped. And if you didn’t play soccer. That was part of it. Now, when you look back, there’s an arrogance to it; it’s like you’re looking down, really . . .
At the jocks?
At the jocks, at the skinheads, at the bootboys. Maybe it’s the same arrogance my father had, who’s listening to opera and likes cricket. Because it separates him.
You wrote an extraordinary song about your father, “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own.” When I spoke to Edge this week, he said that you’re turning into your dad.
He was an amazing and very funny man. You had to be quick to live around him. But I don’t think I’m like him. I have a very different relationship with my kids than he had with me. He didn’t really have one with me. He generally thought that no one was as smart as him in the room. You know that Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue” where he gives the kid a girl’s name, and the kid is beaten up at every stage in his life by macho guys, but in the end he becomes the toughest man.
You’re the boy named Sue?
By not encouraging me to be a musician, even though that’s all he ever wanted to be, he’s made me one. By telling me never to have big dreams or else, that to dream is to be disappointed, he made me have big dreams. By telling me that the band would only last five minutes or ten minutes – we’re still here.
It seems there’s some power in this relationship that’s beyond the ordinary father-son story. You were probably one of the most difficult children to have around.
I must’ve been a bit difficult.
He was trying to raise two children without a mother. And here you are, unforgiving and unrelenting, showing up at all hours, in drag and with all kinds of weird people. I think it’s amazing he put up with you and he didn’t just throw you the fuck out. Do you ever feel guilty about how you treated him?
No, not until I fucking met you! He loved a row. Christmas Day at our house was just one long argument. We were shouting all the time – my brother, me and then my uncles and aunts. He had a sense of moral indignation, that attitude of “You don’t have to put up with this shit.” He was very wise politically. He was from the left, but you know, he praised the guy on the right.
The more you talk about it, the more it sounds like you’re describing yourself.
That is a very interesting way of looking at it, and I think there’ll be a lot of people who might agree with you. I loved my dad. But we were combatants. Right until the end. Actually, his last words were an expletive. I was sleeping on a little mattress right beside him in the hospital. I woke up, and he made this big sound, this kind of roar, it woke me up. The nurse comes in and says, “You OK, Bob?” He kind of looks at her and whispers, “Would you fuck off and get me out of here? This place is like a prison. I want to go home.” Last words: “Fuck off.”
II. A MUSICAL EDUCATION
What were the first rock & roll records that you heard?
Age four. The Beatles – “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” I guess that’s 1964. I remember watching the Beatles with my brother on St. Stephen’s Day, the day after Christmas. The sense of a gang that they had about them, from just what I’ve been saying, you can tell that connected, as well as the melodic power, the haircuts and the sexuality. Which I was just probably processing.
Then performers like Tom Jones. I’d see Tom Jones on Saturday night on a variety show – I must have been, like, eight years old – and he’s sweating, and he’s an animal, and he’s unrestrained. He’s singing with abandon. He has a big black voice, in a white guy. And then, of course, Elvis.
I’m thinking, what is this? Because this is changing the temperature of the room. And people stopped talking.
When did you run across Elvis?
I might have heard the songs, but it was the Comeback Special, when he was standing up – because he couldn’t sit down to play. The thing was: He’s not in control of this – this is in control of him. The abandon was really attractive.
Who else had a big impact on you, musically, when you were that age?
Before I got to the Who, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, and those kinds of things – I really remember John Lennon’s Imagine. I guess I’m twelve; that’s one of my first albums. That really set fire to me. It was like he was whispering in your ear – his ideas of what’s possible. Different ways of seeing the world. When I was fourteen and lost my mother, I went back to Plastic Ono Band.
Bob Dylan at the same time. Listened to his acoustic albums. Then starting to think about playing those acoustic songs. My brother had a Beatles songbook – so trying to teach myself guitar, and him sort of helping.
And that song – which is actually such a genius song, now that I think about it, you’re embarrassed the day after you learned it – “If I Had a Hammer.” That’s a tattoo, that song.
That was the first song you learned how to play?
“If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning/I’d hammer in the evening/All over this land/I’d hammer out justice/I’d hammer out freedom/Love between my brothers and my sisters/All over this land.” Fantastic. A manifesto, right there.
You’re still doing the same song.
[Laughs] Right.
And so all that stuff was going on in London in the Sixties: the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, the Kinks. What kind of influence was that on you?
The Who: About age fifteen, that starts really connecting. In amongst the din and the noise, the power chords and the rage, there’s another voice. “Nobody knows what it’s like behind blue eyes . . .” And the beginnings of what I would discover is one of the essential aspects for me – and why I’m drawn to a piece of music – which has something to do with the quest. The sense that there’s another world to be explored. I got that from Pete Townshend; I got that from Bob Dylan.
“Imagine” is the first really powerful thing to you?
Imagine and Bob Dylan. “Blowin’ in the Wind” – all that stuff – and the folksy thing. Which is, I suppose, what set me up for John Lennon.
Dylan set you up for John Lennon?
Because it’s folk. If you’re interested in folk, in words and whisperings, that quiet thing. I was in my room listening on headphones on a tape recorder. It’s very intimate. It’s like talking to somebody on the phone, like talking to John Lennon on the phone. I’m not exaggerating to say that. This music changed the shape of the room. It changed the shape of the world outside the room; the way you looked out the window and what you were looking at.
I remember John singing “Oh My Love.” It’s like a little hymn. It’s certainly a prayer of some kind – even if he was an atheist. “Oh, my love/For the first time in my life/My eyes can see/I see the wind/Oh, I see the trees/Everything is clear in our world.” For me it was like he was talking about the veil lifting off, the scales falling from the eyes. Seeing out the window with a new clarity that love brings you. I remember that feeling.
Yoko came up to me when I was in my twenties, and she put her hand on me and she said, “You are John’s son.” What an amazing compliment!
About the band, you said, “We come from punk.” What does that mean?
Now, it’s 1976. I was in school. It was the obnoxious-teenager phase. Schoolwork’s gone to shit, angry, living at home with two men. My friends are all gonna have big futures, 'cause they’re very clever. I’m probably not gonna be able to concentrate enough to be that clever.
I’ve always had these melodies in my head. In quiet times – at the local club, in a church hall – if I’m beside a piano, I put my finger on a key. I figured that if I press a pedal under that – boom – this note can fill the whole hall. Reverb, you know. It turns this church into a cathedral. I hear a rhyme for the note in my head – I really do. I can find another note that sounds good with it – but I’ve had no way to express it.
Then a note appears from this kid twenty-nine years ago last Saturday. Like really a kid – he’s fourteen, and I’m sixteen. He wants to start a band. He plays the drums. So my friend Reggie Manuel says, “You have to go.” He puts me on the back of his motorcycle, and he takes me out to this suburban house, where Larry Mullen lives. Larry is in this tiny kitchen, and he’s got his drum kit set up. And there’s a few other boys. There’s Dave Evans – a kinda brainy-looking kid – who’s fifteen. And his brother Dick – even brainier-looking – who’s built his own guitar. He’s a rocket scientist – a card-carrying genius.
Larry starts playing the kit – it’s an amazing sound, just hit the cymbal. Edge hit a guitar chord which I’d never heard on electric guitar. I mean, it is the open road. Kids started coming from all around the place – all girls. They know that Larry lives there. They’re already screaming; they’re already climbing up the door. He was completely used to this, we discover, and he’s taking the hose to them already. Literally, the garden hose. And so that starts. Within a month I start going out with Ali. I mean, I had met her before, but I ask her out.
That was a good month.
Yes, a very good month. What’s interesting is, in the months leading up to this, I was probably at the lowest ebb in my life. I was feeling just teenage angst. I didn’t know if I wanted to continue living – that kind of despair. I was praying to a God I didn’t know was listening.
Were you influenced by punk rock then?
No, this has nothing to do with punk. This is September of '76. Punk has just started in London that summer. Adam [Clayton] goes to London the next summer. London was burning. And he comes back with the Stranglers, the Jam, the Clash. Oddly enough, though, in our very first rehearsals, we were talking about what music we should play. Everyone got to make suggestions. I wanted to play the Rolling Stones, from the High Tide and Green Grass era, and the Beach Boys. I was getting tired of the hard-rock thing.
Hard-rock being . . .
Big hair and extended guitar solos. I was saying, “Let’s get back to this rock & roll thing.” Then people said, “Oh, have you heard the Clash?” And then seeing the Jam on Top of the Pops in '76, just going, “They’re our age! This is possible.” Then the Radiators From Space – our local punk band – had a song called . . . “Telecaster” or something: “Gonna push my Telecaster through the television screen/'Cause I don’t like what’s going down.” And it’s a twelve-bar thing – so you can play it.
How far into the band are you now?
It’s just occasional rehearsing. We’re playing the Eagles. We’re playing the Moody Blues. But it turns out we’re really crap at it. We actually aren’t able to play other people’s songs. The one Stones song we tried to play was “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” It was really bad. So we started writing our own – it was easier.
Were the Ramones the big punk influence on you? Or the Clash?
More Ramones than the Clash – though we saw the Clash first, in '77, in Dublin, and it was extraordinary. There was an air of violence, the sense that somebody could die. But their music didn’t connect with us the same way that the Ramones did.
What connected about the Ramones?
I didn’t have the gravel or the gravitas of Joe Strummer. Joey Ramone sang like Dusty Springfield . . . It was a melodic voice like mine.
Was David Bowie a big influence?
Gigantic, the English Elvis. Bowie was much more responsible for the aesthetic of punk rock than he’s been given credit for, like, in fact, most interesting things in the Seventies and Eighties. I put his pictures up in my bedroom. We played “Suffragette City” in that first wedding-band phase.
We started to listen to Patti Smith; Edge starts listening to Tom Verlaine. And, suddenly, those punk chords are just not the only alternative. Now we’ve got a different kinda language and we started finding different colors, other than the primary ones.
III. A SPIRITUAL LIFE
What role did religion play in your childhood?
I knew that we were different on our street because my mother was Protestant. And that she’d married a Catholic. At a time of strong sectarian feeling in the country, I knew that was special. We didn’t go to the neighborhood schools – we got on a bus. I picked up the courage they had to have had to follow through on their love.
Did you feel religious when you went to church?
Even then I prayed more outside of the church than inside. It gets back to the songs I was listening to; to me, they were prayers. “How many roads must a man walk down?” That wasn’t a rhetorical question to me. It was addressed to God. It’s a question I wanted to know the answer to, and I’m wondering, who do I ask that to? I’m not gonna ask a schoolteacher. When John Lennon sings, “Oh, my love/For the first time in my life/My eyes are wide open” – these songs have an intimacy for me that’s not just between people, I realize now, not just sexual intimacy. A spiritual intimacy.
Who is God to you at that point in your life?
I don’t know. I would rarely be asking these questions inside the church. I see lovely nice people hanging out in a church. Occasionally, when I’m singing a hymn like . . . oh, if I can think of a good one . . . oh, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” or “Be Thou My Vision,” something would stir inside of me. But, basically, religion left me cold.
Your early songs are about being confused, about trying to find spirituality at an age when most anybody else your age would be writing about girls and trouble.
Yeah. We sorta did it the other way around.
You skipped “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and you went right . . .
. . . Into the mystic. Van Morrison would be the inverse, in terms of the journey. It’s this turbulent period at fifteen, sixteen, and the electrical storms that come at that age.
There was also my friend Guggi. His parents were not just Protestant, they were some obscure cult of Protestant. In America, it would be Pentecostal. His father was like a creature from the Old Testament. He spoke constantly of the Scriptures and had the sense that the end was nigh – and to prepare for it.
You were living with his family?
Yes. I’d go to church with them too. Though myself and Guggi are laughing at the absurdity of some of this, the rhetoric is getting through to us. We don’t realize it, but we’re being immersed in the Holy Scriptures. That’s what we took away from this: this rich language, these ancient tracts of wisdom.
So is that why you were writing such serious songs when you’re nineteen?
Here’s the strange bit: Most of the people that you grew up with in black music had a similar baptism of the spirit, right? The difference is that most of these performers felt they could not express their sexuality before God. They had to turn away. So rock & roll became backsliders’ music. They were running away from God. But I never believed that. I never saw it as being a choice, an either/or thing.
You never saw rock & roll – the so-called devil’s music – as incompatible with religion?
Look at the people who have formed my imagination. Bob Dylan. Nineteen seventy-six – he’s going through similar stuff. You buy Patti Smith: Horses – “Jesus died for somebody’s sins/But not mine . . .” And she turns Van Morrison’s “Gloria” into liturgy. She’s wrestling with these demons – Catholicism in her case. Right the way through to Wave, where she’s talking to the pope.
The music that really turns me on is either running toward God or away from God. Both recognize the pivot, that God is at the center of the jaunt. So the blues, on one hand – running away; gospel, the Mighty Clouds of Joy – running towards. And later you came to analyze it and figure it out.
The blues are like the Psalms of David. Here was this character, living in a cave, whose outbursts were as much criticism as praise. There’s David singing, “Oh, God – where are you when I need you?/You call yourself God?” And you go, this is the blues.
Both deal with the relationship with God. That’s really it. I’ve since realized that anger with God is very valid. We wrote a song about that on the Pop album – people were confused by it – “Wake Up Dead Man”: “Jesus, help me/I’m alone in this world/And a fucked-up world it is, too/Tell me, tell me the story /The one about eternity/And the way it’s all gonna be/Wake up, dead man.”
Soon after starting the band you joined a Bible-study group – you and Larry and Edge – called the Shalom. What brought that on?
We were doing street theater in Dublin, and we met some people who were madder than us. They were a kind of inner-city group living life like it was the first century A.D.
They were expectant of signs and wonders; lived a kind of early-church religion. It was a commune. People who had cash shared it. They were passionate, and they were funny, and they seemed to have no material desires. Their teaching of the Scriptures reminded me of those people whom I’d heard as a youngster with Guggi. I realize now, looking back, that it was just insatiable intellectual curiosity.
But it got a little too intense, as it always does; it became a bit of a holy huddle. And these people – who are full of inspirational teaching and great ideas – they pretended that our dress, the way we looked, didn’t bother them. But very soon it appeared that was not the case. They started asking questions about the music we were listening to. Why are you wearing earrings? Why do you have a mohawk?
How did you end up leaving that?
I think we just went on tour.
And forgot to come back?
Well, we’d visit. If you were going to study the teaching, it demanded a rejection of the world. Even then we understood that you can’t escape the world, wherever you go. Least of all in very intense religious meetings – which can be more corrupt and more bent, in terms of the pressures they exert on people, than the outside forces.
What draws you so deeply to Martin Luther King?
So now – cut to 1980. Irish rock group, who’ve been through the fire of a certain kind of revival, a Christian-type revival, go to America. Turn on the TV the night you arrive, and there’s all these people talking from the Scriptures. But they’re quite obviously raving lunatics.
Suddenly you go, what’s this? And you change the channel. There’s another one. You change the channel, and there’s another secondhand-car salesman. You think, oh, my God. But their words sound so similar . . . to the words out of our mouths.
So what happens? You learn to shut up. You say, whoa, what’s this going on? You go oddly still and quiet. If you talk like this around here, people will think you’re one of those. And you realize that these are the traders – as in t-r-a-d-e-r-s – in the temple.
Until you get to the black church, and you see that they have similar ideas. But their religion seems to be involved in social justice; the fight for equality. And a Rolling Stone journalist, Jim Henke, who has believed in you more than anyone up to this point, hands you a book called Let the Trumpet Sound – which is the biography of Dr. King. And it just changes your life.
Even though I’m a believer, I still find it really hard to be around other believers: They make me nervous, they make me twitch. I sorta watch my back. Except when I’m with the black church. I feel relaxed, feel at home; my kids – I can take them there; there’s singing, there’s music.
What is your religious belief today? What is your concept of God?
If I could put it simply, I would say that I believe there’s a force of love and logic in the world, a force of love and logic behind the universe. And I believe in the poetic genius of a creator who would choose to express such unfathomable power as a child born in “straw poverty”; i.e., the story of Christ makes sense to me.
How does it make sense?
As an artist, I see the poetry of it. It’s so brilliant. That this scale of creation, and the unfathomable universe, should describe itself in such vulnerability, as a child. That is mind-blowing to me. I guess that would make me a Christian. Although I don’t use the label, because it is so very hard to live up to. I feel like I’m the worst example of it, so I just kinda keep my mouth shut.
Do you pray or have any religious practices?
I try to take time out of every day, in prayer and meditation. I feel as at home in a Catholic cathedral as in a revival tent. I also have enormous respect for my friends who are atheists, most of whom are, and the courage it takes not to believe.
How big an influence is the Bible on your songwriting? How much do you draw on its imagery, its ideas?
It sustains me.
As a belief, or as a literary thing?
As a belief. These are hard subjects to talk about because you can sound like such a dickhead. I’m the sort of character who’s got to have an anchor. I want to be around immovable objects. I want to build my house on a rock, because even if the waters are not high around the house, I’m going to bring back a storm. I have that in me. So it’s sort of underpinning for me.
I don’t read it as a historical book. I don’t read it as, “Well, that’s good advice.” I let it speak to me in other ways. They call it the rhema. It’s a hard word to translate from Greek, but it sort of means it changes in the moment you’re in. It seems to do that for me.
You’re saying it’s a living thing?
It’s a plumb line for me. In the Scriptures, it is self-described as a clear pool that you can see yourself in, to see where you’re at, if you’re still enough. I’m writing a poem at the moment called “The Pilgrim and His Lack of Progress.” I’m not sure I’m the best advertisement for this stuff.
What do you think of the evangelical movement that we see in the United States now?
I’m wary of faith outside of actions. I’m wary of religiosity that ignores the wider world. In 2001, only seven percent of evangelicals polled felt it incumbent upon themselves to respond to the AIDS emergency. This appalled me. I asked for meetings with as many church leaders as would have them with me. I used my background in the Scriptures to speak to them about the so-called leprosy of our age and how I felt Christ would respond to it. And they had better get to it quickly, or they would be very much on the other side of what God was doing in the world.
Amazingly, they did respond. I couldn’t believe it. It almost ruined it for me – 'cause I love giving out about the church and Christianity. But they actually came through: Jesse Helms, you know, publicly repents for the way he thinks about AIDS.
I’ve started to see this community as a real resource in America. I have described them as “narrow-minded idealists.” If you can widen the aperture of that idealism, these people want to change the world. They want their lives to have meaning. And it’s one of the things that the Democratic Party has missed out on. You know, so much of the moral high ground in the past was Democratic: FDR, RFK, Cesar Chavez. Now I suppose it’s Hillary’s passion for cheaper medical care. And Teddy Kennedy, of course.
[Excerpt From Issue 986 — November 3, 2005]
