U2: Rockers Finally Speak Out About Their Rumored Faith

The members of the rock ‘n’ roll band U2 know they have many people confused. Two members of the band use strange stage names — Bono and the Edge. No one seems to know how old — or young — they really are. No one knows what to call U2’s music.

And now, a few members of the rock press have started to raise another question. As the band worked its way across America this spring during its third U.S. tour, a few people began to show signs of actually hearing what the band was saying on its second album, October. After listening to the lyrics of songs like “Gloria,” “With a Shout,” “Tomorrow,” and “Rejoice,” a few interviewers started hitting the members of the band with a loaded question: What are you, a bunch of Christians or something?

“It’s time to talk about it,” U2 guitarist the Edge said quietly after a recent concert on a campus in the Midwest. As it turns out, almost everything the Edge says is quiet. He does not act like a rock ‘n’ roll guitar star. “We realize the band…is at a crossing point. For a long time we haven’t talked with interviewers about the fact we’re Christians, because it’s so easy for people to misunderstand. It’s easy for people who are not Christians, especially writers who do not understand, to take what we say and misinterpret it.”

The four members of U2 will not speak for each other about religion and Christianity. Various members of the band are at different stages of individual journeys of faith. They are all scared of being stereotyped.

The Edge and [drummer Larry] Mullen, both 19, were reading the New Testament and downing glasses of orange juice in the dim auditorium dressing room. Bono, 20, and [bassist Adam] Clayton, 21, were upstairs talking with fans and would be down to join in the discussion later. The Edge said they try to make Bible study and prayer a regular part of their “winding down” process after shows.

The scene seemed strange. An hour before, these same young rockers were pounding out a torrid 90-minute set of hard rock songs off the band’s first album, Boy, and the more recent October, released last year. October is full of obvious songs about faith and the struggle to live a Christian life in 20th-century battle zones such as the band’s home — Dublin, Ireland. The Edge finally realized somebody was going to have to speak out.

“I really believe Christ is like a sword that divides the world,” he said, “and it’s time we get into line and let people know where we stand. You know, to much of the world, even the mention of the name of Jesus Christ is like someone scratching their nails across a chalkboard.”

The brash, upbeat sounds of Boy gave way to the more complex, darker feel of October. The critics loved the first album, but their link was divided on the latter. Most of the writers who did praise October didn’t mention the Christian content of the lyrics. Most writers either ignored the lyrics or attacked the style of the lyrics on the album.

Bono, who has read both the positive and negative reviews, finds it interesting few people have noticed what he is singing about. If critics want him to stop going after the big subject or the deep emotion, though, they can forget it. For that matter, Bono said, if another crowd of people wants him to only go after the “safe Christian subjects” and the “safe Christian crowd,” they can forget that, too.

What U2 is after, Bono has said repeatedly, is music that is “bigger” than conventional rock ‘n’ roll — music that is about more than sex, big cars and drugs. U2 has dodged modern rock labels like “punk,” “new wave,” and “neo-psychedelic.” To Bono, rock music is bigger than labels. Rock is a modern art form that can deal with the subjects that dominate real life: growing up (the subject of Boy), work, sweat, sin, doubt and faith. The song that ends October is a clue to the band’s goals, Bono said.

“The song is called ‘Is That All?’” he said, quoting several key lines from the song. “You know, ‘I can sing a song to make you happy,’ or ‘I can sing a song to make you dance,’ or even ‘I can sing a song to make you angry. But is that all?’ ”

The song “Gloria” is about the difficulty Bono has in talking about his Christian faith. It is a mixture of the two things with which he feels comfortable in life — his faith and aggressive rock ‘n’ roll. It is ironic, Bono said, that many people stop thinking the song is a love song when they notice the lyrics. “Of course, it is a love song. It’s a song about my love for God.”

Since Bono improvises many of U2’s lyrics while the band is recording, his struggle to communicate during the recording of “Gloria” had an interesting result. “I was so restrained in trying to express myself that I had to resort to another language, to a way somebody else had expressed it a long time ago in a Gregorian chant. Hence, the Latin. And that’s the way it ended up. It ended up in Latin because I couldn’t find the kind of English words to say what I needed to say. I still have trouble talking about it.”

U2 was formed while Bono, the Edge, et al were in their mid teens at Dublin’s Mount Temple School. When listing influences on the band’s sound, Bono names Talking Heads, Patti Smith and the now defunct Television. U2 has also been influenced by the Renaissance music the members studied in school.

“We are the original garage band,” Bono said, pronouncing the word garage so it almost rhymes with marriage. “We’re from garageland. We formed the band around the drums, in the sense that Larry was the only one who could play before we began…the Edge could play a few chords and so could I. Adam couldn’t play at all, although he told us he could. And we literally just stumbled our way, in the dark.”

The band was after a sound Bono describes with words like “atmosphere,” “bigger,” and “grand.” Instead of learning the classic rock ‘n’ roll cliches, the members of U2 taught themselves to play the music they really wanted to play. Their own. The Edge said he is just now getting around to listening to many of the classic rock guitarists because he has been too busy working on U2’s music.

The Edge is an “anti-guitar hero,” Bono said. The band’s music is built on the tension between the hard rock beat provided by Mullen and Clayton and the atmospheric sounds of the Edge’s work on guitar and piano. On stage and in the studio, the Edge avoids the “macho” postures of the guitar idol and spends his time building the sound of the band through feedback, overtones and clusters of notes hanging in echo while he plays short, crisp leads against the sound of his own guitar. The Edge often plays open strings like the “chanter” drone of a set of bagpipes while fretting other notes further up the guitar neck.

After a year or two of honing its basic sound on the Irish club scene, U2 recorded a three-song single, U2-3, in late 1979 that went to the top of the charts in Ireland. The band played in London for several months before signing with Island Records and releasing “11 O’Clock Tick Tock” as its first single in England. Boy, with Steve Lillywhite as producer, was released in October of 1980 and the band was on its way.

The success of Boy — including the hit song, “I Will Follow,” which also received considerable FM airplay in the States-allowed the band to have more freedom during the recording of October. Thus, more of the band’s feelings ended up on the album. Some people, including the band’s management, were shocked by the LP’s content.

“I think it is a side of ourselves we like to sweep under the carpet,” Bono said. “I don’t believe in preaching at people. You know, I always include myself in the ‘we’…’We’ have fallen. I include myself. ‘I Fall Down’ is a song about my own failures,” he said. “I’m not telling everybody I have the answers.” Bono and the other members of the band are writing material for the third album. Scheduled tours of Japan and Australia have been canceled because they feel they should be at home. Events in Ireland are never far from the band’s thoughts.

“I really don’t know how it’s going to turn out,” Bono said of the band’s future. “I know I may start being more specific in the lyrics…There are a lot of things that I have been writing in my little red book that I feel have got to come out.”

When the members of U2 describe their feelings about religion, Ireland is always hovering in the background. After growing up in a land torn by religion, Bono prefers to talk about Christianity instead of religion. The band is anxious not to be pigeon-holed as a “religious band.”

“I’ve spent most of my life avoiding labels. I don’t intend to adopt one now.” Bono is also convinced that there are more people in the audience who understand what he is singing about than many music critics think.

“I like to think people feel it. They just don’t want to allow themselves to feel it. I mean, everybody feels it. Everybody.

“I can’t accept a belief that I just came out of gas, you know? That we as a race just exploded into existence — I can’t believe that, and I don’t think others can, really. Maybe they can accept it on a sort of ‘thin’ level, but not really deep down. Deep down, everybody is aware.”

If critics say the band has floated off into a pretentious world dominated by a never-never-land of religion, Bono doesn’t care. In fact, it might be the non-believers who do not have their eyes open. “Things around can shock us into a realization of what is going down. When you look at the starvation, when you think that a third of the population of this earth is starving, and crying out in hunger, I don’t think you can sort of smile and say, ‘I know. Well, we’re the jolly human race. We’re all very nice, really.

“I mean, we’re not. People have got to see what is going on.”

A new single, released overseas but not yet in the States except as an import, is entitled “A Celebration.” By all indications, we’ve not seen the last of U2.

© CCM, 1982.