The Elastic Bono Band (Part 1)

The three non-singing members of U2 have one priceless piece of advice for newcomers to their rarefied world: “Whatever you do, don’t get in a car with Bono.””Seriously,” insists Larry Mullen Jr. with policeman earnestness, “Bono’s not great at the old driving. It’s not a good look for him.”

As Paul “Bono” Hewson’s enormous, buffleather boat of a Mercedes weaves cavalierly through Dublin’s Friday evening traffic, we discover that this is no great exaggeration. Gesticulating wildly, performing terrifying impressions of Liam Gallagher, flagging down gobsmacked drivers midstream to demand directions, he is an erratic king of the road. As a Freeman of Dublin — an honour bestowed on all U2’s members in February this year — Bono can gaze sheep on St. Stephen’s Green (which he has) and park wherever he likes (which he does), immune from Dublin’s predominantly Norwegian wheel-clamping fraternity.

Bono’s car has radar, which beep-beep-beeps whenever the Bonomobile muzzles the fender of the car in front. Bono’s car radar beeps an awful lot. Q and Bono are on an impromptu mission. The St. Stephen’s Green Hotel is hosting a benefit to honour the birthday of Burmese/Myanmari dissident leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest since July 1989 and confined to the envious of Rangoon since her “release” in 1995. Present will be Dublin liberal arts mafiosi including Marianne Faithfull, mayor Mary Freehill (whose name Bono will forget), Chris De Burgh, U2/PJ Harvey manager Paul McGuinness and film-maker John Boorman. Bono looks like a rock star in the black, open-necked shirt, Chinese dragon sunglasses and jet-dyed, Zoo TV hair. Q looks like a pranny in a Beta Band T-shirt, while clutching Bono’s ghetto blaster — today dubbed the “Bailyman Briefcase” — which is cued up to play an unfinished mix of “Walk On,” the fourth track on what is to be U2’s 10th studio album. Bono figures “Walk One” could almost be about Aung San Suu Kyi, although if you were asked to guess, you’d probably say it’s about marriage. “Stay close to me,” he urges as the Merc nudges the kerb outside the hotel. Then Bono and boom box roadie sweep into the function room, a sea of oohing, aahing faces part instinctively and a microphone is proffered. The tape begins and Bono sings along into a hot barrage of flashbulbs. “Home…” yearns Bono in a gritty soul tenor, “I can’t say where it is but I know I’m going home/That’s where the hurt is…” The look on Chris De Burgh’s face is saying, “I’ll get me coat.”

Back at U2’s Dublin wharfside studio, Friday 22 June, there are seagulls and tension in the air. U2 have been recording their new album, again with Daniel Lanois, since the 1998 end of the PopMart tour and the rumours filtering back have suggested a succession of recording and confidence crises. Nine months in, they’re suspended sessions and resolved to begin all over again. In April 1999, Bono buttonholed Q at Dublin’s Clarence hotel (which U2 own) and proceeded to croon a number of recently written tunes. But even that was 14 months ago. “It was tough at times,” recalls Larry Mullen. “There were dark moments. We choose to record in Dublin so you have to go home, deal with that leak in your roof as well. Danny thought it was interfering with making the record.”

Late ’99 brought further complications, notably the birth of Elijah Bob Patricius Guggi Q Hewson in August and Levi Evans in October. An autumn deadline whistled by, but things were looking up, a situation threatened before Christmas by the theft of Bono’s lyric-hoarding laptop but ameliorated by its eventual return. “In the last six months things really improved,” says Mullen. “Everyone was in a better humour, we felt we were winning with the songs. Bono’s voice, which he was struggling to make work the way he wanted it to, started going right. It was almost like his voice broke. All these things…synergy.”

Buoyed by this creative sprint, U2 have given themselves till the end of August to finish the album and Q‘s visit coincides with what is hopefully the final stretch of mixing. Everyone agrees that this one will go to the wire. “What’s the latest we’ve ever changed something?” ponders badger-bearded the Edge. “Well, we’ve recorded backing vocals to “Playboy Mansion” in the mastering suite.”

In the living room itself, shades on, half-crouched, grasping a mic in his hairy right fist, Bono re-records a vocal to an Iggy-in-a-submarine, pumping rock/dance tune called “Elevation.” He aims his character’s sensual exhortations at a plastic figurine placed on the mixing desk. Arms aloft, painted helmet hair, it looks from a distance like Noel Gallagher. In fact, it’s Bruce Lee. He consults with Lanois, an Elmore Leonard creation in Miami shirt and tan: “Danny, can you make this guy sound more convincing?”

It’s a day of decisions. Bono’s not sure if the phrase “midlife crisis” should appear in the song “New York” (“The press will crucify me,” he grins). Mixes are compared and mercilessly berated, while Lanois and U2 play metaphor tennis. As the band scoff haddock and lamb chops in the dining area (gourmet tour catering provided; entertainment possibilities include Bruce Springsteen’s Track collection and The Harder They Come soundtrack), Lanois brings in his latest manipulation of “Beautiful Day.” If U2 get it right, it will be the first single. If they get it wrong, it will be terminated without mercy.

The mix spins Mullen begins to wince and Bono looks sick. He picks up his barely touched plate of food and shovels it into the dustbin.

“I’m afraid that’s put me off my dinner.”

Daniel Lanois’ big eyes look forlorn.

SEVEN WEEKS LATER, Bono sits under a big umbrella in a beach bar on the Cote D’Azur, looking pleased with himself. He tucks heartily into a pizza while unposh French families frolic on the stony beach. Suddenly, a freak wave gurgles right up to the caf�’s terrace and kids clamber over the wall to escape. Bono cackles lustily.

“You know it’s no surprise to me how ugly the world can be, but I have to remind myself to pay attention to how beautiful it can be. To see a wave crashing in. Or a beautiful tree. Or a beach full of breasts, heh heh. [Jamaican accent] All creayshon. [Inhales deeply] Breathing in and out. Eating. Running down a road. Making love. Hitting one chord and kinda knowing what the next one is…”

The album that, shortly, U2 will decide to call All That You Can’t Leave Behind, is almost finished, and U2 are piggybacking a holiday with press interviews. The other halves, Ali Hewson, former belly-dancer Morleigh Steinberg (Mrs. Edge) and the Timotei-fair Ann Acheson (mother of Elvis and Ava Mullen) keep their distance, while little ones scatter about. Bachelor bassist Adam Clayton (cig brand: Silk Cut Extra Mild; home fridge contents: “chicken, potatoes, two rolls of film and some cranberry and orange juice”) looks splendid in a T-shirt depicting the Jimi Hendrix Experience embroidered with sequins. Larry Mullen augments his ageless gay pin-up/Viet vet image with two earrings: a cross on the left and a skull on the right. The Edge, who speaks slowly and has lovely hands, wears a woolly hat screwed onto his head but — unlike everyone else — doesn’t appear to sweat.

“Beautiful Day” has survived and mix hostilities have abated, though mild controversies remain. Edge isn’t sure whether they’ve got the right mix of “Kite” (they have). Others want to include “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” from the Million Dollar Hotel soundtrack (in the end they do). Edge lobbies for a last-minute change to sequencing (Edge wins). But everyone is happy and, as far as U2 precedent goes, this is miraculous. No one alive remembers Larry Mullen being so garrulous.

“It’s true,” says Mullen, his eyes scrunching up like Cartman’s. I remember after the Pop record being so gutted that “Staring at the Sun”…it should have been a fucking huge single but we didn’t have time to finish it properly. And I remember having to do interviews, and being asked what the album was about and [does mean dog eyes] I had no…fucking…idea. All I knew was that if we’d had one more month we could have pulled that song through.”

After Pop, a record no member of U2 will now describe as “finished,” came the deluge. With the PopMart dates already booked, there was a non-negotiable cut-off point and, since PopMart was the most technologically complex tour they’d ever embarked upon, rehearsals were doubly vital. But when 25 April 1997 came around and the film stars and world press flocked to Las Vegas for the insanely anticipated first show, U2 knew in their ice cold bowels that they were in a deep dark place. They could barely play “With or Without You,” let alone “Discoth�que.”

“I have a very vivid memory of what it was like,” shivers Adam Clayton. “I remember opening with ‘Mofo’ and just being so aware of…extreme fear, something I’d never experienced before. My whole body was caked with sweat. I was running with sweat to the degree where it made it difficult to play. And there was this feeling of having no strength in any part of my body.

“I have to say that the whole of the first week was like that, every night. We didn’t know what was going to happen, with us, with the technology. It was like being on a magic carpet that part of you expected to fly, and part of you knew there was no way it could.”

Was the PopMart concept asking a lot of American audiences anyway?

“I suppose in retrospect you kind of have to draw that conclusion. Whatever it was we were playing around with, it wasn’t touching the right buttons. You have to accept that in the end.”

PopMart was the crucible out of which U2 plucked All that You Can’t Leave Behind. The band knew that the recovery they’d somehow achieved by PopMart’s Johannesburg finale on 21 March 1998 had to be capitalised upon straightaway. Mullen’s conviction that “now we should do the ‘pop’ album” and the general assent that recording as “four blokes in a room” would be a refreshing alternative to the sonic questing and experimentation that had characterized Achtung Baby, Zooropa, the Passenger project and Pop, provided two benchmarks. The acknowledgement that Pop was not the record that the world was waiting for in 1997 provided another.

“I’m under no illusion about the difficulty of recapturing ground that we’ve lost,” concedes Mullen. “We haven’t lost it through stupidity or ineptitude. It’s because we wanted to experiment and we wanted to do other things. We followed through on our instincts and will continue to do so.

“But everything has changed. Things were pretty stable. We released records and they were relative successful. Then all of a sudden pop music has become pretty big. The whole landscape has changed and the challenges have changed.”

Everyone in and around U2 is taking about pop music, how it’s stone a march on rock while rock’s been peering up its own rusty sheriff’s badge. You can’t stop them bubbling about Aaliyah, Sonique, Moloko, TLC, Craig Davis and Kelis. Only Adam Clayton is cleaving to a left-field listening agenda: to his Bent and Primal Scream, Doves and Super Furry Animals.

Appropriately, then, All That You Can’t Leave Behind has a crisp, relaxed air. It is simple in its structures, soulful of vocal, reined in by producers and engineers including Steve Lillywhite, Tim Palmer (the Mission/Tin Machine), Michael Hedges (Texas/Manic Street Preachers) and “Biff” Stannard (Spice Girls). Eno’s presence is less audible than theoretical, the spectres of Al Green and Dusty Springfield stroll about and Edge’s guitar sounds more Edge-esque than it has since 1988. It’s a synthesis of every previous U2, a mirror held up to who they have become rather than who they’re pretending to be next and, if a theme has emerged, Mullen thinks that it may be as simple as “home.”

“There is a song called ‘Home’ that we left off the album,” adds Bono, “it goes, ‘Out of jokes, out of smokes, out of punches and on the ropes/On the canvas just inches from where you used to stand/out of fear, out of rage…‘ “

That’s a funny old lyric about “home.”

“Well, I get discouraged by my base emotions. I write songs about high ideas and aspirations and I admire Martin Luther King and John Hume, peaceful people, but in myself I’m capable of aggression of a really brutal kind. If that rears its head and I give in to it and thump somebody, then I feel really low.”

You’ve thumped people?

“I’m always thumping people. I always deeply regret it. It’s a natural instinct that I have to control. It’s made me very polite. I have the politeness of the psychopath, ha ha! Only last week I’m in a club with some mates and someone comes over and goes. You have to leave, there’s a bit of trouble…and I’m thinking, trouble, brilliant! I loathe that in myself, but it’s part of the picture. I’ve only occasionally hit paparazzi, I never do that ‘pop star with bodyguard is hardest man in the Sunset Marquis’ kind of thing. I’m talking about a deep rage.” (Continued in Part 2)