U2 Confessions

Good news. The Irish Times’ Brian Boyd succeeded in coaxing all kinds of funny and surprising facts out of Bono and The Edge when he sat down with them.

The interview was conducted in Bono’s home in Killiney and both men seemed to be completely relaxed and unguarded, even joking around with Boyd, especially when it came to discussing U2’s early days.

The Edge on making ends meet during the leaner years:

“I swear this is true,” says the guitarist. “I was 16, Adam was 17. We were stuck out in Malahide without any bus fare. Adam says: ‘I know, let’s get a bank loan. That’s what banks are for.’ We went down to the Northern Bank in Malahide, but it was lunch hour and it was closed. Adam climbed up the railings and starting knocking on the window of the bank. The manager came to the window with a sandwich in his mouth. I saw the door opening and Adam going in. A few minutes later, he re-emerged and had managed to get a bank loan of £2.”

Bono on dealing with unsavory characters when the band was still playing dives:

“There was this gang called The Black Catholics in (late 1970s) Dublin,” says Bono. “They would try to break up our gigs. But I dealt with it. I knew which bus stop one of them got off at on his way home. I waited for him. It ended after that, that’s all I’ll say.”

The study goes quite for a moment. Until Bono adds “I remember one of them chasing after Adam once. Adam turned to the guy and in his posh voice offered him 50 pence if he would go away,” and they crack up again.

This next fact will definitely come as a surprise to some people: The band still worries about its position in the music industry.

“U2 are still a point that need proving,” says Bono. They still worry, they say. New album, new danger.

And here’s some bad news for bands on the rise: Making an album doesn’t get any easier. Even after almost 30 years of doing it. Both Bono and The Edge reveal to Boyd that the birth of U2’s new album, No Line on the Horizon, was a difficult one.

“We don’t get excited until we hear something we’ve never heard before,” says Edge. “If things sound too regular or normal or predictable we just can’t operate as a band. We needed a shake-up, so we had Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois [two of the album’s producers] contributing to the songwriting – the first time it’s gone outside the band. We’ve had a long, creative relationship with them both, but this gave that relationship a new lease of life … We found those new sounds.”

The Edge cracking wise on Bono’s vocal delivery on the track “Moment of Surrender” from Horizon, which the singer described as “a wine and cigarettes voice”:

“Bono’s been very dedicated to getting that wine and cigarettes effect on his vocal,” says Edge. “He’s selfless like that. He does it for the band and at a great personal cost!”

While the pair are fairly tight-lipped on details of the upcoming tour for Horizon, which marks the band’s first time out under its touring deal with Live Nation, Bono reveals he’s been working on a way to deliver a totally new concert experience to fans.

“It’s all to do with how you can play outdoors without using a proscenium stage with a big bank of speakers on the left and right. Every outdoor show you’ve ever seen has that. So at the moment we’re just trying to get the design architecture right – and the financial architecture. If we can get away with what we want to do, it will mean more people in the venue, better sightlines and everyone will be closer to the action. We want to have a significant percentage of cheap tickets. In this climate you have to give better value.”

So Bono promises that tickets for the trek won’t all require the sale of an organ. We’ll have to wait and see on that one.

One of the most surprising confessions that comes out in the interview is that one of the band’s biggest hits is Bono’s greatest regret.

“Do you want to know what my most humiliating U2 moment is?” he asks. “It’s ‘Where The Streets Have No Name.’ Edge had come up with this amazing 120-beats-per-minute music for it. I had some ideas for the lyrics. I was sleeping in a tent in northern Ethiopia at the time [1985] and I scratched down some thoughts and they were: ‘I want to run, I want to hide, I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside’.

“I thought they were fairly inane, but in the studio Eno and Lanois thought they were perfect. I told them they were only sketches and I could do much better. But Eno is all about capturing the moment, so those words stayed. Now I have to sing them for the rest of my life. And it’s our most successful live song. That’s the U2 contradiction.”

Also covered is a topic that U2 has been silent about since 2006: the band’s decision to move part of its business arm from Ireland to The Netherlands to take advantage of lower tax rates.

“We haven’t commented on it,” says Bono.

“And we don’t comment on it for a very good reason,” adds The Edge, “and that’s because it’s our own private thing. We do business all over the world, we pay taxes all over the world and we are totally tax compliant.”

“We pay millions and millions of dollars in tax,” says Bono. “The thing that stung us was the accusation of hypocrisy for my work as an activist.”

You’d think someone as famous as Bono would be able to brush off criticisms like these. Apparently not. These particular accusations seem to have cut the man some people jokingly call “Saint Bono” pretty deeply.

“It hurts when the criticism comes in internationally,” says Bono. “But I can’t speak up without betraying my relationship with the band – so you take the shit. People who don’t know our music – it’s very easy for them to take a position on us – they run with the stereotypes and caricature of us. People who know the music know that the music reveals the people, not the edifice around it. That’s why we’ve decided to draw a ring around our audience and ourselves. Outside that there’s no point trying to explain ourselves. Without the musical part it’s all irrelevant.”

Boyd also gets Bono and The Edge to offer up opinions on digital music (“The CD is dying and what’s replaced it is the pure download and that’s not good enough for me”), favorite U2 song (“Miss Sarajevo”), illegal downloading (“I’m on enough soap boxes as it is”) and a number of other topics.

But perhaps most shocking of all is this admission from Bono: The negative perceptions some people have about U2 are his fault.

“The thing about U2 that nobody seems to get,” says Bono, “is that the very things people think about us, which is the megalomania and the immodesty, they’re so far from the truth. People don’t see that. We had will.i.am doing some work on the new album and he was shocked by the absence of ego. He said: ‘Your fans have bigger egos than you do.’

“Yes, the guy out front, the performer, has the ego. But people don’t see the other guy – it’s like a Wizard of Oz thing. And I know why people don’t see that. I know it’s because of my mouth.”

Read Brian Boyd’s entire interview in the Irish Times here.