With Bono’s voice in such disrepair, we’ve left the interview till the last possible moment. He’s still croaking the next morning but at least he has the knowledge that after three more dates, the band take their first break in three months when they fly to the Bahamas for a holiday.
I flash on the comparison between Irish showbands and the Midwest megabands. On a higher dimension, U2 are fighting a similar struggle. Detroit could be a larger Limerick. He doesn’t disagree with my theme, though he diplomatically refuses to upset the Limerick jury by accepting my comparison of cities. But he quickly moves to a more positive line.
“The audience are open in themselves but because of the conservatism of the media due to advertising — because the radio depends on this — it’s a lowest common denominator and they’re not giving songs a chance to mature.
“It’s a battle. The people who are in the streets need to hear it and the only way of being able to change that is by getting the radio programmers to change and the only way to get them to change is to get them to see us face to face. We’re over there knocking on doors hard and if you have to come back a second time, a third time, a fourth time, a fifth time, those radio stations will fall because when they come down and see a place like last night, a huge place basically sold out and there’s been no radio play, they start thinking — what is this?
“Also they still have the bad taste of punk rock in their mouth. And anything that has any resemblance frightens them because change frightens those people, and they’ve got this industry sewn up. So the idea is to sit on change.”
“But if they see all those people squashed up into this hall, giving, applauding, it starts to make them think — well, hold on, we’re being left behind.”
Just like Adam Clayton, Bono will argue that American music is about to improve. “I really think something is about to happen. The idea of an explosion in 1976 has been somewhat delayed. I think it’s happening now.” And in earlier chats, he speaks of bands in Washington D.C., Texas and a San Francisco band, Romeo Void, with whom they’ve been particularly taken. Perhaps such optimism isn’t induced by their own euphoria and I’ve just tripped through the glummest region of America. I sincerely hope so.
Bono accepts that they run a potentially disturbing gauntlet by playing to audiences older than themselves but again he refers back to early Irish experiences.
“It reminded me of the Baggot Inn last night. I mean, we were 18 years old and there were people outside who couldn’t get in because they were underage so there were fifty people turned away one night.
“We’re playing to audiences older than ourselves and it hasn’t changed, nothing’s changed. It’s like bees around honey, all those people — they see excitement, something moving. Personally, if I don’t feel ready for it, I opt out — just like last night in the dressing room.”
Wasn’t that a small example of how such pressurised American touring can weaken the will? Don’t you have to keep catching yourself?
“You caught me catching myself last night and that’s a process I know I go through and each member of the band goes through every week. We’ve been touring six months now with three weeks off. We chose to do that. We don’t have record companies telling us to do that. It’s the other way round and we have chosen to do that because U2 could be misinterpreted as a group and we feel the only way to lay a foundation for us to grow on, is to play to people face to face and let them make up their mind.
“That’s why we toured for three months in England. That’s why we started off in the pits in the Hope and Anchor and worked our way up to the Lyceum, that’s why we did it in Europe, in Germany playing beer kellers right up to cinemas and that’s exactly what, on a different level, we’re doing here except that we’re starting much higher — but we have to get higher because it’s a bigger country.
“I think in many ways the Americans are innocent and more honest than us. They’re very wide-eyed, it seems, but they make up their minds by instinct and I think that’s very healthy. The reason that music is stale over here is that they haven’t been given a chance to let their instinct go to work. But when it does, it sparks.”
Sure, but they can be misled into expecting juvenile hippies when so much Mid-American press is touting you as part of a psychedelic revival?
“I think people who are using that term are people who are inarticulate and who can’t explain what we’re doing. Anyone who comes from Dublin can cope with that because they know us and they know what we’ve been doing over the years. It’s just that in America they’re only meeting us this year, so they think maybe this band sat down and worked on a psychedelic revival.”
In this Holiday Inn restaurant, we’re about to sign off and stop the tape but the husky-voiced Bono is insistent on one last message.
“You must mention the family arrangement in the bus between Joe O’Herlihy, John Kennedy, Pod and Tim and the fact that there was somebody born during the tour. Joe O’Herlihy’s wife bore a daughter in Cork. I think that’s very important.
“And we apply that arrangement to everybody, management, record company, agency and gradually the whole unit is getting bigger and stronger. We’re standing on our own two feet and gradually getting more mature.
“Last night I could have turned to Ellen Darst and said ‘Ellen, I want those people out’ and she would have — and we’ve done it before, but we’re getting that power and that control.
“This unit is getting stronger and working and at the top of it are four people who may be 20 years old and there’s all those people, 30, 34, all their jobs depending on it, and that’s an interesting situation coming from 10 Cedarwood Road. And there’s literally millions of dollars at stake.
“And there’s all these people hustling around you and 1 can see how people are sucked in. It’s so easy because there becomes this complete wall around you, of people who think you’re great.
“There’s just one final thing I want to say: This touring. We’ve beaten it, it hasn’t beaten us. We’re not going out like a showband, playing tra-la-la every night.”
The bus is leaving for their next appointment in Columbus, Ohio. I shake hands all round, wave goodbye and muse in the Holiday Inn’s forecourt, all forebodings diminished and dismissed.
So far U2.
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