Let's do a radical thing and go back to before the beginning. Your grandparents. My grandfather - my dad's dad - was a comedian at Saint Francis Xavier Hall, in the center of the city. He was a morose man. So I think this idea of laughing a lot and then biting one's own tongue is something that runs in the family. My grandmother on my mother's side was a really big laugh. Which disguised the fact that beneath her dress, she had a big stick with which she reared, I think, eight kids. She used to joke that the contraceptives, which were banned in Ireland, were intercepted at the post office, and - too late!- another kid was born, another mouth to feed. My mother was the oldest of her family and quite petite. Really a delicate flower, but she took on the responsibility of bringing up the younger kids. Both my mother and father were from the center of the city, what they call Dubs. My mother was a Protestant, and my father was a Catholic, and they grew up on the same street. Their love affair was illicit at the time. Ireland was just being born as a country - was at a pitch. But it didn't mean anything to them. They faced the flak and got married. It was a bit of a difficult thing to do. In a mixed marriage the children had to be brought up Catholic. The Protestants made up only about ten percent of the population at the time, and it was an anathema to them. My mother decided to bring us up in the Protestant church, and my old man went along with this. So my old man would drop us off at one place of worship and go to another one. And I really resented that. I was always fighting with him. Always fighting. We were too alike. Was he a disciplinarian? He attempted to be. He was a very strict man. But I was one of those kids who was almost impossible to tie down, from the very beginning. People used to - and family people still sort of - put up the cross whenever I come in. They used to call me the Antichrist [laughs]. How many kids on your block were nicknamed the Antichrist? What's the first thing you can remember? I remember having my photograph taken with my brother and not liking it. I was around three years old. I think we had two little leopards, like ornaments on the mantel, and at the end of the session there was only one leopard left, and I was put away for that. Do you have any idyllic childhood memories? None at all. The little pieces that I can put back together are, if not violent, then aggressive. I can remember my first day in school. I was introduced to this guy, James Mann, who, at age four, had the ambition to being a nuclear physicist, and one of the guys bit his ear. And I took that kid's head and banged it off the iron railing. it's terrible, but that's the sort of thing I remember. I remember the trees outside the back of the houses where we lived, and them tearing those trees down to build an awful development. I remember real anger. What of your mom and dad and the way they got on? To be honest, I don't remember that much about my mother. I forgot what she looks like. I was fourteen or fifteen when she died, but I don't remember I wasn't close to my mother or father. And that's why, when it all went wrong - when my mother died - I felt a real resentment, because I actually had never got a chance...to feel that unconditional love a mother has for a child. There was a feeling of that house pulled down on top of me, because after the death of my mother that house was no longer home - it was just a house. That's what "I will follow" is about. It's a little sketch about the unconditional love a mother has for a child: "If you walk away, walk away I will follow," and "I was on the outside when you said you needed me/I was looking at myself I was blind I could not see." It's a really chronic lyric. There was not a lot of closeness, physically? Not really. I have just found out bits and pieces about my family in the last year or two. Now I want to know. Bofore I didn't. Trying to talk to my old man is like trying to talk to a brick wall. Even now? Even now. DO you know, the first time he really spoke to me was the night of his retirement fromt the post office. I went to his send-off party. I used to hear all the names, Bill O'This and Joseph O'That, and I never knew who they were, and I didn't really know what he did. But at this party a year and a half ago, I met all these people. And they were amazing. It was at a pub, and there was a guy with a fiddle, and they were all singing songs. THere was a guy who had painted on a Hitler mustache who introduced me to his daughter, and I said, "Who are you?" And she said "The Hitler youth." It was like a Fellini movie. It was a world, a world of Irish in Dublin. And afterward, he showed me the place he worked, where I had never been. And he showed me the seat that he used to sit in. And already someone else had moved into that seat. And that night, I got to talk to my old man for the first time. We had a glass of whiskey, and he began to tell me a few things about what it was like growing up. It's been said that artists never get over their childhood, and perhaps, in some way, it's because they don't that they remain artists. I think mabye it should be said that a lot of artists never grow up [laughs]. I think it's certainly true in rock & roll. Rock and roll gives people a chance not to grow up - it puts them in a glass case and protects them from the real world of where they're gonna get their next meal. Who is it - Camus? - who said, "Wealth, my dear friend, is not exactly acquittal, just represive." But in the end, I don't know if being a pop star is any less real that being a city clerk. Is suburbia the real the world? Is the real world half the population of Africa that is starving? I haven't worked it out yet. I always wondered, "What am I? Am I Protestand or Catholic? Am I working-class or middle-class?" I always felt like I was sitting on the fence. Well, the very fact that you were fifteen when you lost your mom and yet can't remember her suggests that there is a lot that you've blocked out. When you were a teenager, you were very angry and uptight, and I wonder how much of that is a result of her death I don't know. As I've said before, the fact that I'm attracted to people like Ghandi and Martin Luther King is because I wes exactly the opposite of that: I was the guy who wouldn't turn the other cheek. Let's say you scuffled a bit. [Laughs] "Scuffle" is a beautiful euphemism Okay, you beat the crap out of people. Well, I'd never start a fight, but I'd always finish it. You were a contentious little S.O.B. It was the way we grew up. Street fights were just the way. I remember picking up a dustbin in a street fight, and I remember thinking to myself, "This is rediculous. I'm not going to hit someone with this." And right then, this guy came up with an iron bar and brought that iron bar down so hard on me. And I just used the lid to protect myself. I would have been dead, stone dead, if I hadn't had that thing. But when you're singing songs, people think you are like the songs you sing about. I think we need to let some air out of that balloon. The songs may represent you because you need to be like the song you sing - not that you are yet those things. Yes. You want to be. And what kind of feelings did you have inside after these violent episodes? I never liked it. Never. I would worry sick about having to go out on the street, in case a guy I had been in a mill with would come back for more. And yet I can remember - not so many years ago - we were playing in a local bar here, and some guy threw a glass. And the glass just missed Edge's arm. And I knew the guy that threw it. There was resentment, because Adam and Edge came from a sort of middle-class background, and people thought, "Oh, U2, they're not really punks!" But I knew where this guy lived. And he lived in a bigger house than I did. And it took all my energy to stop myself from driving a car through his front door that night. Were you curious as a kid, but not in an academic way? I was curious, but I never knew what I wanted to be. One day I'd wake up and want to be a chess player - the best. I'd read a book on it, and at twelve I studied the grandmasters, and I was fascinated. The next day I'd think, "No, I'll be a painter." Because I'd always painted, since I was four years old. So I was just wandering. And I'm still wandering, I suppose. But see, I want it all and I want it now [laughs].You were the first punk in your class - haircut, pants, chain,et cetera. Did you really feel it, or was it just theater? It was theater. I had gotten interested in Patti Smith and then the Sex Pistols. And the great thing about the Ramons was you could play Ramones songs all in three chords - which was all I had then and, in fact, is about all I have now [laughs]. Before that, I was interested in Irish folk music. It was around my family. There was a lot of singsong. And my brother taught me those three chords. He used to play [the Kenny Rogers and the first Edition classic] "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town. "I'm still fascinated by that song. And my old man was into opera, which, as far as I was concerned, was just heavy metal. I like those bawdy opera songs: the king is unfaithful to the queen, then he gets the pox, they have a son, the son grows up and turns into an alligator, and in the end they kill the alligator and make shoes for the king. But because it's sung in Italian, people thinks it's very aloof. Not at all. And when the now-famous note went on the now-famous bulletin board, asking for members to form a band, did you think, "Ah, this is it"? No. At that stage, I was interested in the theater. When I was younger, I ran away from home one day to book myself into an acting school. But there was no acting school. My father used to act at a theater, and I would sit in the front row. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I set up a theater company in the school I was in, because there was none. I didn't know if I would be a good actor. Now, I'd almost like to write for the stage more than to be on the stage. So when the note went up, I had to be talked into it by a friend. Was being onstage the lure? Yeah. And in one of the plays, I sang. I remember the feeling of singing through a microphone and hearing it bounce off the walls. I got a bit of a belt off of that - sort of an electric shock. But even after we started, Adam was the only reason we went any further. He'd say, "I think I know where we can get a gig." And I'd say, "You mean in front of people? But we're crap." He'd say, "So are the Sex Pistols."[Laughs.] There'd been a precendent for people who couldn't play. Yes. You see, the roundabout had just slowed down enough for us to jump on. Any other time, and it wouldn't have worked out. 'Cause before that it was all the worship of the instrumentalist, and you had to be able to play. All we had was raw power. The acting fell by the wayside. And I got a job as a petrolpump attendant so that I could write when the cars weren't coming in. But then we had the oil crisis, and we had these queues for miles, and the cars just kept coming, so I quit. Are Edge, Adam and Larry guys you would have chosen for your friends if you didn't have the music among you? No. No. Now I would, but not then. You claim you're socally inept. I'm very awkward, I'm not a very good pop star. [At this point, room service knocks. A young attendant brings in six Heinekens, and seeing Bono, he almost drops his tray. He nervously asks for an autograph and is obliged.] See, your regal presence totally disarmed this poor guy. You seem like a perfect pop star. Well, I don't feel like a pop star, and I don't think I look like one. What's a pop star supposed to feel like? Well I don't know. But I imagine if you're a pop star, that you don't feel like me. If I was a good pop star, I wouldn't be telling you about the way I grew up, because I'd want to keep those things from the public. I'd want people to believe I just came out of thin air. Sometimes I wish I were that way. At the moment, actually, I'm going for bastard lessons. Where do you begin - Refusing Autographs 101? Like when the twentieth caller knocks on the door to my house, I'm just going to tell them, "Fuck off! Leave me be!" instead of bringing them in for a cup of tea. Which I do, which is just dumb. I think the thing I least like about myself is that I'm reasonable. And being reasonable is a very un-pop-star trait. So I am taking bastard lessons. In 1979 you said, "We're determinded to achieve a position where we have artistic freedom and where we can affect people the way we want to affect them. That position derives from money and success, and we'll work very hard to get there." So you did, and now you're here: pop star. It's true, we did work long and hard to get rid of the anonymity that we now need in order to live. It's an interesting irony. I can remember thinking, back in '77, "Yeah, we are going to take this all the way." Do other people think those things? Was it blind faith or just stupidity? And if your dreams comes true, is it dangerous to think all of your dreams will come true? Well, two tragic things can happen: one is to not get what you want, and the other is to get what you want. Yeah. But we really haven't gotten what we want. you see, we live in a culture where the biggest is often equated with the best. And now people say we are the biggest band in the world. So what? That means nothing to me. No, it must mean something. But our want is to be worthy of the position we've been put in. To be the best - to make a music that hasn't been made before. And I don't know that we'll get to that point. Can you assume it's even possible to get there, playing to crowds of 60.000 people? Aren't the limitations imposed on communicating to that many people contrary to the notion of experimentation? Is this context you become a "product" no matter what your intentions Well, live is not the place to experiment. U2 has always been a very different act live than in the studio. Part of rock & roll is about raw power, and that's what we are about live. In the studio we have experimented, and we will cuntinue to. I suppose what we're looking for is a better synthesis of the two. In the studio you can usually build from improvisations, and yet when you present the material live, it's very formal, structured, repetitive. Yes. U2 live is much like theater: there is a beginning, a middle and an end. On this last tour, we have been experimenting with that form more than ever. I must say, there is a real thrill to being onstage in front of 50,000 or 60,000 people. The event is much larger than the group and the audience. It's an amazing thing to see people united and in atreement, even if only for an hour and a half. Does it ever frighten you, seeing that? No, because I never underestimate the intelligence of the U2 audivence en masse. I actually feel that they know more about the group than we do. We were in the audience when the Clash played Dublin. We just got up out of the audience ourselves and played. So I feel very close to the audience. There's no separation in my own mind. And I know if I told them all to stand on their heads, that they'd tell me where to go. But you chench your fist in a particular way, and all 60,000 will clench their fists accordingly. Is there not something within this gesture that gives you pause? When a Japanese man bows to another man, and the other man bows in response, that's nothing but a sign of concent. When people respond, or when they sing a song I've asked them to sing, they are just being a part of a bigger theatrical event. The idea that they are rather moronically being lemmings, following Adam, Larry, Edge and Bono off the cliff's edge with their fists in the air, does not pay them enough respect. But there is a power inherent in your position, and it would take a certain But there is a power inherent in your position, and it would take a certain amount of duplicity or false humility or your part of suggest that there's not. And that power... Can be taken advantage of. Maybe. And you never have intellectual or emotional hesitations about that kind of power? That kind? No. There are other kinds of power - the kinds that are not seen - that worry me. If you could see into the dressing rooms and the offices of a lot of bands in our position, you would see the real abuse of power. Like making a promoter crawl because you are paying his wages: like making the road crew wait for four hours because you are late for a sound check: like the sexual abuse of people who are turned on by your music. I don't know whether I am guilty of all of those. Maybe I am. But that is not the type of power I worry about in rock & roll On your tour of the States in 1981, you had, for the first time, people grabbing at you for autographs, and you felt like a commodity and were quite depressed by the whole "Gladiators, dinosaur rock" thing, you called it. And then when the group first broke through in the States, a few years back, you said "I believe in U2 in the audiences up to 20,000." And yet now you are playing to fifty, seventy thousand people We have to. To do a tour that lasts three years in length would be the end of us as artists. And to do a shout tour [playing arenas], where we just ignore people and make them pay scalpers for tickets - I don't like. I've even said from the stage, "Don't pay those prices." But they do. They will pay $100 to see U2, and U2 is not worth $100. So on this tour, we've tried to strike a balance of playing indoors and outdoors, so the ones that really want to see us indoors get a chance, and we can play to other people. I think U2 can actually do it. People invented the idea of "stadium acts" - you think of there great chord-crashing dinosaurs. But Stevie Wonder is a stadium act, the Beatles were, Bob Marley was. Let's go back to where we started on this, that is, the sort of public power you are able to exercise at the moment. You've stated a number of times the goal of all U2 songs is to make people think for themselves. To inspire people to do things for themselves. To inspire people to think for themselves. But that's not why I'm in U2: I'm in U2 because it inspires me. I'm here because I couldn't find work anywhere else. And the real reasons to be in a rock and roll band are probably much closer to ego, and to be onstage and have people look at you and think you're a great guy. Those are the real reasons - at least when you're fifteen and sing into a microphone. On the way, since that time, we've thought about what we're doing - and we've accepted some of the traditions of rock and roll and rejected others.Let me play devil's advocate: it seems like standing among an audience of 60,000 people, all singing the same song, can in no way encourage one to think for oneself I disagree. They do think for themselves is my point. But the problem is that in the world we live in, in the West, the doctrine of personal peace and prosperity prevails. If you've got a fridge, a car or two, a vacation once a year, you're okay. And you'll agree to anything, such as voting for whoever can preserve this. People are subject to a lot of influences that attempt to send them to sleep. There is media. People's reaction to violence onscreen: the difference between what is real on the news and what is surreal on Miami Vice has become blurred. We are in a big sleep, where I'm okay, you're okay. And we don't ask questions that have difficult answers. And if U2 is throwing cold water over that kind of thinking and people are waking up - that's fine. But that's not the reason we're there. We're there because this is the way we feel about the world. Now people have to choose: they go to the supermarket and choose what brand of cornflakes to buy and what detergent. They have to make choices. And U2 is just one choice. Isn't there a worry for any serious artist that he represents just such a choice - that he is packaged and sold like a detergent, that he is advertised and marketed in a certain way, that he is commodity? From my point of view, it's just important that we're there, that people have a choice. We are getting to the point where the choices are being dictated for us - records are being banned and choices limited. Rock and roll in the Seventies was just completely banal. I don't want to put U2 up as the alternative, but I think it is a good thing that a song like "With or Without You" was played on Top Forty radio. Why? Because I think it is provocative, both sonically and in what it suggests. When I was growing up and listening to the radio, I would hear maybe one song in every twenty or forty and fifty what I would like, that I would feel was an alternative to the music that other people deemed fit to hear on the radio, that we don't leave the radio just to these products-oriented people. Because there are groups, just as there are record companies, who treat music like a tin of beans - a product to be sold. And yet U2 is a product I don't think of it that way. But the record company may, and the management company must, and the advertisers do, and the promoters do, and the radio programmers do, and the T-shirt and poster manufacturers do... And that is why rock and roll is in the situation if finds itself in in 1987. Because no longer do fans of music run the music business. Fans of money run the music business. Without being too precious about U2, let me say I'm learning to accept T-shirts; what I'm not willing to accept is bad T-shirts. There are traditions in rock and roll I am accepting, but what's important to me is the music. It would be a trap for me to spend my whole life fighting a battle about something - my knuckles would be bleeding from beating on the walls of the music business - when really what my fingers should be wrapped around are the frets of a guitar, trying to write down the way I feel and make it a song. In some ways, intellectually, it's almost a defeat to be where you are. Yes. Talk to Miles Davis about it. Does this thing ever give you the blues? Yeah. What gives me the blues more then anything is the glass case that comes with success in rock & roll. The one area of control, real control, that we have is the music, and so everything must gather around that. And our organisation is set up to protect that. And in order to do that, you take on some of the excess baggage of rock & roll - like a plane - so that you can get home after a show and see your family and your friends who you haven't seen in five years. And if your motive is to protect music, then as far as I'm concerned, those things are okay. Let's go back to the glass case. The glass cage, it could be called. Now, a lot of it has to do with money, and because of who you are - what your values are - you're resistant to even deal with it. Listen, I felt like a rich man even when I had no money. I would live off my girlfriend's pocket money or the people on the street. Money has never had anything to do with how rich I feel. But it is almost vile for me to say money doesn't mean anything to me, because it means a lot to many people. It means a lot if you don't have it. But how do you deal with the fact that you do have it?. You've said it in the past, "I just don't want to see it," which sounds like the first stage of reacting to anything that's traumatic, and that's denial. Yeah [pauses]. Oh boy. All money's done is remove me from my friends and family, which are my lifeblood. It has cut me off. People have said, "You've changed." But sometimes it's not you who has changed but the other people in their reaction to you. Because they are worrying about the price of a round of drinks, and you're not. It's a butt end of stardom. And this fits in perfectly with the U2 sourpuss image - you know, U2 is number one, and they're too stupid to enjoy it [laughs]. Well, as W.C. Fields said, "Start off every day with a smile, and get it over with." Maybe you're the W.C. Fields of rock [Laughs, almost defensively] Well, I do enjoy being in a number-one band, and I enjoy the jet so I can get home while on tour, and I enjoy hearing the record on the radio, so I don't want to come across as being down-in-the-mouth about being number one. I am on top of the world, it's just that else is on top of me. Your great couplet from "New Year's Day" doesn't only apply on a macro level to society but on a micro level to the band: "And so we are told this is the golden age/And gold is the reason for the wars we wage". Yeah, and I'm starting to see the value of being irresponsible. You know, you read about the excesses of the rock & roll stars of the seventies - driving Rolls-Royces into swimming pools. Well, that's better than polishing them, which is the sort of yuppie pop-star ethic we've got in the Eighties.[Laughs]. Brian Eno says something interesting about money. He says that possessions are a way of converting money into trouble. You can almost trace the downfall of some of the great rock & roll bands by the rise of their consumerism. They were consumed by it. You can see what when they got fat and settled down, their music wasn't the same. And I don't want that to happen in U2, 'cause it's the music that is the center of our world - and I don't want that to be replaced by either, one, material wealth, or two, the worry about it. It's said that there's never been a true artist who couldn't handle failure, but that many have run aground on the rocks of success. I suppose I just don't see U2 as a success. I just see U2 as a whole list of failures: the songs we haven't written and the concerts we haven't played. I don't know if we will make it through. I suppose the chances are that we won't. But maybe if we know that, we will. What could stop you?. The fact that you and Edge are the focus musically, and you are the leader lyrically? It's true that the two of us are becoming more interested in the craft of songwriting, as opposed to the band's overall interest in improvising. But I think we've gotten it right in the past - there are four of us, and we are committed to that. What would a U2 song be without Larry playing the drums?. "Pride" started with Larry and Adam. Adam just about wrote the backing for that. Copyright (c) Rolling Stone Press 1994. This book can be bought at Amazon.com ISBN NUMBER 0-330-34691-1