Two weeks ago, Dublin’s Evening Herald printed the complete lyrics of U2’s current hit single “The Fly.” Under the heading “Is It Fake Or Fabulous?” they asked various Irish celebrities for their views on Bono’s new composition. Eamon Dunphy, Ireland’s premier sports writer and U2 biographer, thought it was a “fake” whilst Brendan Kennelly, poet and Professor of Modern Literature at Dublin’s Trinity College, called it “a tremendous lyric because it refuses to be explicit and immediately accessible.”
The nature of the exercise, and the corresponding breadth of the response, says much about U2’s standing in their homeland where a serious journalist, quoted in Dunphy’s book, once described them without irony as “just about the most important and successful thing to come about in Ireland ever.” This kind of homegrown hyperbole is to be expected given that Ireland is still coming to terms with the notion that U2 are probably the biggest rock band in the world.
On November 18, they will release their new album, Achtung Baby, and hope to emulate the success of the seven mega-selling LPs that have preceded it. To date, their greatest achievement, both creatively and commercially, has been 1987’s album, The Joshua Tree (14 million copies sold). The accompanying world tour grossed enough to place them in the top five when the American money magazine, Forbes, published a survey of the entertainment industry’s biggest earners. The same year, they appeared on the cover of Time, rare for a rock group, but making it the biggest selling issue ever.
“We’re all about emotion, about blood, sweat and tears,” said lead singer Bono a few years ago. And Bono is the emotional epicentre of U2, one of those driven individuals who, to borrow a phrase from the Van Morrison, believes in the “healing power of rock and roll.”
Born plain Paul Hewson in Dublin on May 10, 1960, he was the second son of a Catholic father and Church Of Ireland Protestant mother. In his early teens, he attended Mount Temple, Dublin’s first non-denominational, co-educational comprehensive, a progressive place but one where, he later admitted, he existed in a twilight zone between Catholicism and Protestantism.
U2 began life as just another Dublin proto-punk band in 1978, four Mount Temple schoolboys inspired by the iconoclastic thrust of the Clash and the Sex Pistols. When their first album, Boy, appeared on Island Records in 1980, it was apparent that they were a reaction to the abiding negativity of punk. The two key signatures of U2 music were established from the off — Paul “Bono” Hewson’s passionate vocal delivery and Dave “The Edge” Evans’ chiming guitar style. On record, but more discernibly, on stage, they had a certain gaucheness, a naive sense of vision that was totally out of step with the times.
Sometimes, Bono would leap off the stage or cajole the more cynical members of the audience, anything to inspire a reaction. At one early Dublin show he attempted a rapport with two girls dancing half heartedly at the front only to be rebuffed with the immortal line: “Fuck off, dickhead and get on with the bleeding music. Who do you think you are anyway, David Bowie?” (In his U2 biography, Unforgettable Fire, Eamon Dunphy records that “Those around the stage smirked. Bono shrank back into the shadows, wounded.”)
Their early songs, too, were possessed of a palpable, if abstract, sense of faith as if Bono was trying to define himself spiritually, still trying to transcend the religious twilight zone of his Dublin upbringing. Song titles like “Gloria,” “I Will Follow” and “Rejoice” often sounded like rock hymns, their clarion calls riding on huge rolling guitar signatures. Then they released a concert video called Under A Blood Red Sky, filmed at an American outdoor show, and suddenly the image of Bono, carrying a white flag across the stage, became imprinted in some people’s minds with a particular style of eighties’ stadium rock. U2 had arrived in the big league.
After the completion of the year long trans-global Joshua Tree tour, they became the quintessential rock band of the Eighties. In Ireland, U2 were all but canonised, Saint Bono nestling in the collective conscious alongside Saint Bob Geldof. Unlike Geldof, U2 refused to move away from Ireland, settling in Dublin and spawning a rock infrastructure of studios, rehearsal rooms and mini business empires in the capital. “Most people at home regard us with an air of benign bemusement,” Bono once remarked, underscoring the sense of national pride that surrounds them: “If they think we’re getting too big for our boots, the attitude is “Bono needs a clip round the ear.” Recently, they have courted controversy by paying the fines imposed on Dublin stores who have been penalised for selling condoms. And, if the new album is anything to go by, there has been a profound sea change in the nature of their subject matter, the spirituality now tempered with a strong sense of sexual tension. “Someone like Van Morrison started off singing songs about girls and years later came up against the spiritual higher ground,” Bono told me a few years ago, “Me, I got it all back to front! I started with the spiritual stuff, now I’m learning to write about girls’.
Until now, U2’s music, although identifiably Irish in its rampant emotionalism, has always been suffused with a definably American spirit that arising from the bigness of their sound and the imagery of Bono’s songs. Achtung Baby, for the main part, dispenses with all that in favour of a more modernist Euro-sound which one suspects may not be readily absorbed by their huge middle-American core audience. It is a brave move.
Those close to Bono are probably relieved that the new album finally fractures the holier-than-thou public image that has dogged him since he waved that white flag. In the past, U2’s music has never captured the chameleon spirit of its lyricist and singer. Offstage, he remains an inspiring character, animated and amusing. U2’s manager, Paul McGuinness replied matter of factly when asked to describe the “real” Paul Hewson, “he’s also extraordinarily ambitious, constantly driving himself harder.”
“People underestimate their achievement,” argues McGuinness. “Today, rock music is considered a valid cultural form here mainly because U2 have been so successful whilst also insisting on the dignity of rock and roll. That takes a certain type of calibre, a belief that what you’re doing transcends trends.” Bono, of course, has never thought otherwise. In the age of the disposable pop icon, he remains convinced of the redeeming power of rock and roll. After all, it did save his soul.
© The Guardian, 1991.