April 05, 2008

The View Presents... The Edge

U2's The Edge was John Kelly's guest on a special episode of 'The View' on RTE One last week.

In 'The View Presents... The Edge' the guitarist talked about the responsibilities of fame, creativity and the band's longevity.

Commenting on how U2 have remained so cohesive a unit over 30 years, he said: "Maybe it's because we were friends before we were a band. So in a sense the friendships were solid, so when it came to those moments of conflicts or difficulty, we kind of were able to skirt around the big conflicts and diffuse the situation and so we're operating in pretty much the same way now as we always did."

Watch the full clip below.

Posted by Jonathan at 12:08 AM | Comments (0)

November 02, 2007

Bono: The Rolling Stone Interview

The U2 frontman sits down for our 40th anniversary to talk about the future, the Buzzcocks and reasons to compromise.

Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone

What is your most cynical vision of the future?

That's a good one. I'm genuinely excited about the future, but it's clear that there's jeopardy. I don't know if you've read Martin Amis' short-story collection Einstein's Monsters. He's writing about the post-splitting-the-atom universe. In an essay at the start, he writes about feeling sick in his stomach because he can't escape the mathematical implications of there being all these nuclear weapons around the world and the odds of them going wrong. He's putting his kids to bed, and he just can't put that thought out of his head. He wrote that in the late Eighties or early Nineties, when there were vaguely organized control systems to hold back Einstein's monsters. What are the odds now?

What's changed?

We don't know where Einstein's monsters are. Are they moving around the world? Are they coming to my city? If you talk about a demonic view of the world, that's my first thought. Unless things calm down, it is clear that if you want to take out the head of a nation, you probably can. Now that's always been true, as we found out in the Sixties, but in the future, I can imagine a situation in which heads of state no longer have a set residence. And it also might be true that you can take a city out if you really want to.

It is absolutely the monster in the room. And you feel it here in Manhattan. You must. But of course you don't talk about it. You don't think about it. But it must change the way you walk. And it must change the shape of your day in some tiny, tiny little increment. That thought is in the back of your head.

So we're in the era of asymmetrical war. The greatest army cannot protect you from hatred that gets busy and organized and has enough of an audience to protect it. There's a moment. Was that true of Caesar? Was that true of Napoleon? No. Might was always right. Strangely, we have now entered a phase where being powerful and having the biggest nuclear arsenal leaves you completely defenseless.

Now let's flip that. That could be a positive. Because if for the first time in history, military capacity doesn't protect you, what would? It would point us in the direction of prevention, rather than protection. When I'm arguing for increased aid to Africa, I always say, "Isn't it cheaper and smarter to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them later?"

We seem to be headed in exactly the opposite direction. Maybe it was possible to think that way right after 9/11, but that opportunity was squandered.

When the French have you on the cover of their most treasured newspaper with the headline WE ARE ALL AMERICANS, something has been stirred! [Laughs]

But this administration destroyed that. I know that you have to deal with a lot of these people...

There was a plan there, you know. I think the president genuinely felt that if we could prove a model of democracy and broad prosperity in the Middle East, it might defuse the situation. I don't believe that, and in the capacity I had, I told them that.

You said that?

I told Paul Wolfowitz, all of them, to go ask the British army what it's like to stand on street corners and get shot at. Remember that during the British army's first years on the streets of Northern Ireland, they were applauded by the Catholic minority. Go look at that, and ask yourself how that all got turned around.

It was always going to go wrong. I remember in the first moments after "shock and awe," I was watching it at home with [my wife] Ali and I said, "These people have just hidden their guns in the basement, took off their uniforms and come out waving American flags. And they've been told to. They knew this was coming, and they know what they're doing."

So you mentioned this to Wolfowitz. Who else did you say this to? Did you say it to Tony Blair?

I said it in all my conversations. To Condi. To Karl Rove. I did not discuss it with President Bush. I try to stick to my pitch, and it's an abuse of my access for me to switch subjects. But I'm a lippy Irish rock star, and I'm more used to putting my foot in my mouth than my fist. So occasionally I'm just going to talk about it.

I want to be very, very clear, however: I understand and agree with the analysis of the problem. There is an imminent threat. It manifested itself on 9/11. It's real and grave. It is as serious a threat as Stalinism and National Socialism were. Let's not pretend it isn't.

I think people as reasoned as Tony Blair looked at the world and didn't want to be Neville Chamberlain, who came back from meeting with Hitler with a piece of paper saying "peace in our time," while Hitler was planning to cross the channel from France.

So what needs to be done?

There's a word all of us have learned to undervalue: compromise. Bill Clinton once rang us, because he was collecting opinions on whether he should give Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams [of Sinn Féin, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army] a visa into the United States. I thought, "These people have put bombs in supermarkets, and many innocent people have lost their lives." So I said, "No. Don't dignify them." And he said, "But shouldn't you always talk to people?" And I said, "Yeah, but you dignify them."

I was wrong. Clinton did exactly the right thing in talking to the Provisional IRA and other extremist elements. Now they have to do the same, in my opinion, with Hamas, and they have to do the same with Al Qaeda. You have to involve them in dialogue.

But then you've also got to try to cut off the oxygen supply of hatred, which is false ideas about who you are as an American, who you are in the West. I know that sounds like limp liberalism, but it's really not.

How would you describe it?

I'm arguing for a demonstration to the world of what we're capable of in the West, with our technology, our innovations, our agriculture, our pharmacology. We've developed this unimaginable prosperity. Let's show the world what we can do with it. America, as I always say, is not just a country, it's an idea. The world needs to see right now what that idea means. Because there's an oncoming train on our track, and it's going to be met one way or another. It isn't going away.

As a kid, did you have a particular vision of what the future would look like?

When I was about sixteen, my head exploded. I had violent outbursts. I smashed things up. I went into myself. And I had a kind of poetic reverie, a couple of them, and one was a vision of the future. It was of a single, a 45. The grooves were going round and round, like a spiral, and things started to repeat much quicker.

I don't know whether this was just a bad pint -- I'm not ruling that out. But I remember staring at the ceiling and seeing a picture of the world speeding up, things repeating quickly. So the Fifties were going to happen again, the Sixties were going to happen again, and then they'd happen quicker. It was postmodern -- there are no new ideas out there, everything is just being repeated. But it was this spiral thing I had. There was the first Buzzcocks EP, which is called Spiral Scratch, and it's like the picture we had in "Vertigo" as well.

Now sometimes when I'm walking down the street, and I see a hippie, a punk and so on, I think, "This is exactly this world I pictured when I was a kid." It's like every age is present in this moment. I don't know what it means, exactly. I don't think it's negative or positive. It's just, we do live in a fractional present. No one mood predominates.

What would be easier for you at this point, giving up U2 or your anti-poverty work?

I can't live without music. I don't think I physically could live without music, because it's the thing that allows me to feel normal. It's like asking a psychotic person to do without their lithium, OK? [Laughs]

But there are people out there whose lives are dependent on people like me who have access to agents of change, and I would have to take a big, deep breath before I gave that up. What I'm hoping is that the social movement that is growing around our issues will be so strong that in the event of somebody like me not being around they won't notice. In the end, social movements carry the day, not rock stars.

Thirteen hundred campuses have signed on to our One Campaign -- as part of our Millennium Development Goals, getting the world's wealthiest nations to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015. Those college kids are redefining their country through the prism of the fight against poverty. Issues like that afford a chance to America to redescribe itself to the world. But they also afford America a chance to redescribe itself to its citizens. That's what's going on.

What do you mean?

People are nauseous about being perceived as the enemy. After Abu Ghraib, reasonable, rational people were saying the most despicable things about America. Imagine that. The country that not only liberated Europe but rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan. The country of Omaha Beach. The heroism of people who gave their lives for people like my dad. I mean, this is the United States of America.

And, by the way, whoever fixes that problem gets elected. People say, "Oh, it's all about the economy." This is the first time it's not. It's about turning that idea around. We're the United States of America, and we do not like being seen as the enemy.

And it's a wave. I think the next generation is going to roll right over us. There's a new kind of hard-headed idealism out there, which is not about "Let's hold hands and wish away the world's problems." People are ready to change the world one brick at a time. I really believe that.

What can that idealism produce?

It is utterly accepted in the U.S. and Europe that you cannot live a life of peace and prosperity if at the end of your avenue there are hungry people without clean water, losing their children because they cannot access a twenty-cent vaccine or dying for the lack of drugs we have falling out of our medicine cabinets.

So, some optimistic thoughts: In the near future, distance will no longer decide who your neighbor is. It will be accepted that the slums of Kibera, Kenya, the rural poverty of Lalibela, Ethiopia, the refugee camps of Darfur, Sudan, are at the end of our lane. In the not-too-distant future, the anopheles mosquito will be all but chased off the planet, saving 3,000 children's lives that right now are lost to malaria every day in Africa.

In the not-too-distant future, the rich world will invest in the education of the poor world, because it is our best protection against young minds being twisted by extremist ideologies -- or growing up without any ideology at all, which could be worse. Nature abhors a vacuum; terrorism loves one.

Has your activism affected how you think about being in U2?

I've spent a lot of time in these two-dimensional worlds -- numbers, values, analysis of statistics. And when I get away from it, being with U2 is such a playground. It's made me realize how sacred music is. It's a kind of sacrament -- like marriage, like friendship. I'm not sure the other three in the band know this, because they -- maybe sensibly -- have avoided that other world. They just think they're in U2, and that's great. But I really know how great it is to be in U2.

Is it as great as what you dreamed it might be like when you were young?

When I was a kid and I was at school, I worked at a gas station. And I would just get wound up thinking about practice on Saturdays -- or Wednesdays sometimes. Just hearing the sound of a drum kit in a room, the silver of the ride cymbal and the skin of a tom-tom. It meant a great deal to me. Then, as it became my job to be in a band, you take for granted that you've got a few hours with your mates in the studio.

I don't anymore. It is sanctuary and escape from the material world of causalities, profit and loss, cynicism and hard-bitten victories over your own indifference or somebody else's. You get into this fucking room and everything seems possible, and I've never really appreciated it more than now. Really and truly. It's this incredible thing. I treasure it. I treasure it now more than ever. I'm terrified that I might lose my first love in the supermarket, in the maw of so many choices of what you can do with your time.

But I also think I'm better for having my brain pummeled in so many different areas.

Has your activism made you more or less idealistic about government?

Just being in D.C., and meeting all the people I've met -- I've now been going there for nearly ten years. They let me in their rooms and they listen to my rhetoric or invective or whatever it turns out to be. And I come away from that city not with nausea but with admiration. These people work like dogs. These lawmakers, they're trying to move between their families back home and Washington. All of them could make much more money in the private sector. Not all, but most of them are there for the right reasons. There's very little glamour. And they're listening to me, who's completely over-rewarded for what I do.

Yes, I have my moments and I lose patience. I'm in a rage sometimes. But my overall feeling when I look at the body politic, which I know now very well, is "God, these people can behave very badly, but they work very hard and they're often motivated by much higher intentions than I thought when I came into the process." I'm amazed by it.

So are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?

It's a problem, because sometimes I don't see obstacles, and if I had, I might not have set out on the course. It's a criticism of me that I've underestimated obstacles.

Do you accept that?

Yeah. But I think I'm less like that now. Now I'm about "Describe Everest, then climb it." Know what you're in for. I think you can achieve much more than you'd ever imagined by getting busy and getting organized. And don't get too interested in what's "possible." The impossible is made possible by a combination of faith, gift and strategy. You need faith for sure -- as Lou Reed says, "A busload of faith to get by." You need some talents, and if you don't have them, you better find people who do. And then: strategy. That's as true of making U2's next album as it is with the One Campaign to make poverty history.

What's the next important challenge ahead?

The next presidential election will be a real moment for America. Talk about the battle of ideas -- I mean, this is it. You will get the country you deserve. You have to ask hard questions of who will be your leader, because we fans of America -- annoying fans, maybe, but real fans -- have a lot at stake. Even those who are not fans -- everybody who values freedom, progressive thinking, innovation, has a stake in America. The country you may own. But not the idea.

Actually, I heard a great one. I was wandering through France, and I ended up in this vineyard. They asked me to sign the visitors' book -- it was a very posh wine: Petrus -- they said, "Do you want to see the other people who have signed here?" I said, "Sure. Show me the first book." Thomas Jefferson. That makes me laugh so much. Here's this guy dreaming up an idea called America, drinking some fancy wine. My kind of guy.

© Rolling Stone, 2007. All rights reserved.

Posted by Jonathan at 12:16 AM | Comments (0)

August 26, 2007

Follow the Bouncing Bono

by Braden Towne, Crawdaddy Magazine

Only four years into their musical career, U2 found themselves at an artistic crossroads. Firmly established as a powerful rock 'n' roll combo by the live set Under a Blood Red Sky, the little Dublin four-piece could merrily continue pounding out spare populist anthems like their preceding efforts. Or they could consider the success of their recent EP the curtain drawn on the first act of a decades-spanning epic and lock themselves in a castle to create an atmospheric masterpiece that would find them heralded as the greatest band of the '80s and beyond.

When Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois assumed the controls for the sessions that would ultimately yield The Unforgettable Fire, the path chosen was resolutely the latter. It may seem outrageous to claim that such a plan was in place when recording began, but with an auspicious degree of talent gathered in a monument to Anglo-Norman nobility, the topic of conversation must have turned to global domination at least once.

Never at a loss for words, here Bono shares the intimate details of the recording process for their seminal work, the finer points and perils of live performing, and the beginning of a creative partnership with a legendary producing duo that would last for five more records, over nearly 10 years. Though political awareness and activism have always been a part of the U2 platform, it's refreshing to hear the inexhaustible singer talking about music for a change.

If there's a word that describes Bono it is energy. And his enthusiasm for life and art is always evident. For a dose of inspiration, tempered with some moderately convincing humility, let Bono bend your ear.

Lisa Robinson interviews Bono, 11/19/1984

Posted by Jonathan at 03:21 PM | Comments (0)

August 05, 2007

The Edge: The Music He Loves

The Edge Talks About U2, Philanthropy and His Biggest Musical Influences

ABC News Nightline, August 03, 2007

By Nicholas Rozon

Back in 1976, the Edge (then known simply as David Evans) teamed up with a few boys from Dublin to form the Larry Mullen Band. Never heard of them? That's because the name only lasted a few seconds.

They soon re-emerged as Feedback, which spun into the Hype, but it wasn't until the quartet decided on U2 -- a name they agreed they hated least -- that the group solidified and began their meteoric rise to the top of the charts.

Years later, the Edge is a guitarist and songwriter for what is undisputedly one of the biggest rock bands in the world, and one that has gone far beyond the world of rock to make a serious impact on global events.

"For a growing number of rock 'n' roll fans, U2 have become the band that matters most, maybe even the only band that matters," declared Rolling Stone in 1985, when they were already one of the world's most popular acts.

Punk Rock Passion

So what songs and artists does this legend listen to the most? For the Edge, it's a variety, ranging from songs by patriarchs of rock like Bob Dylan and the Beatles, to less mainstream acts like the Rebirth Brass Band. But each one is connected to some time or place in his life.

In 1975, the Edge was just 14 years old. He was a year away from meeting his future band mates and had yet to record such hits as "Sunday Bloody Sunday," "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and "With or Without You."

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, a New Jersey girl named Patti Smith busted the world of punk rock wide open. Her debut album, Horses, redefined the genre by fusing rock 'n' roll and punk rock with spoken poetry. The album experienced only modest commercial success but its impact on the rock world was tremendous.

More than 30 years later, the opening track, Smith's cover of the Van Morrison song "Gloria," remains on the Edge's playlist -- a song he says was one of U2's earliest muses.

"That changed everything for me at the time because we were starting to play as a band," said the Edge. "The ideas...we're a band who loves to mix it up with the sexual, the spiritual, whatever, the political, and there in that song she did that so incredibly."

Rock 'n' Roll Roots

Within a few years U2 encountered international acclaim. They had become well known for their powerful live performances and in 1983 won the BRIT Award for best live act. But four studio albums had come and gone and the group had yet to have a No.1 record outside of the U.K.

After the release of their fourth album, The Unforgettable Fire, in 1984, the band began exploring blues, country and gospel music. Their relationships with rock legends such as Van Morrison, Keith Richards and Bob Dylan had inspired them to explore the roots of rock 'n' roll.

During the recording sessions of U2's fifth album, The Joshua Tree, the Edge found inspiration in the form of another debut record -- the Band's Music from Big Pink released in 1968. The album's hit single, "The Weight," made famous by the classic film Easy Rider, particularly stood out for the Edge.

"We were first exploring American music and hearing their work, really delving into it -- it was mind blowing for me," he said. "And that I will always associate with a particular summer up in the hills in Dublin."

The Joshua Tree was a monumental hit. It was a No. 1 record around the globe and went on to become a multiplatinum album, selling over 10 million units worldwide. Suffice to say, the record solidified U2's position as both creative and commercial juggernauts.

Success

Success carried the Edge to nearly every point on the globe. In 20 years of traveling he has accumulated an extraordinary wealth of stories, from nearly having the group's only set of guitars stolen within their first few hours in New York in December 1980, to dancing on top of the bar with Bono in pre-Katrina New Orleans.

"I'd always had amazing times there," he said of New Orleans. "And I remember with Bono one night ending up in some tiny little club in an area of the city I'd never been to, dancing on the bar to this little five-piece funk outfit that didn't have any guitars. It was all brass, drums and whatever. And we were just completely blown away -- that music which was so amazing was totally unknown to us. It was like -- it was like discovering, you know, jazz for the first time or something."

New Orleans definitely left its mark, and now the Edge's playlist is peppered with many of the bands he first encountered around the town with his band mates.

"The Dirty Dozen and the Little Rascals...Joyful music like 'Do Whatcha Wanna' by the Rebirth Brass Band is just this killer groove and just this amazing, joyful feeling," he said. "All these brass bands that are playing music which has incredible sense of rhythm and joy, all the things I look for in great rock 'n' roll."

Music Rising

Now the Edge and other heavyweights of the music industry have started a charity effort to rebuild the musical community left devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The primary goal of the charity, called "Music Rising," is to get these musicians back to work.

"We're using music as a way to try and get these areas kind of to -- to give them a leg up," he said. "And music is a great way to do that because it's really the spirit of that city and that part of America."

The charity is not the only thing that has tied the Edge with New Orleans. U2's performance with Green Day of "The Saints are Coming" at the reopening of the Superdome in September 2006 is now one of the more remarkable moments in the histories of both the band and the city. Regardless of the performance, though, the Edge claims the song would have earned a spot on the playlist on its own merit.

"'The Saints are Coming' was one of my favorite songs as a 16-year-old -- maybe 17 when that came out," he said. "This was very exciting to hear this band, the Skids, and their first album."

Reflecting back on his time in Louisiana, the Edge said that New Orleans music is a very unique aspect of the culture in that it continues to help victims of Katrina "celebrate being alive after everything that had happened."

"There's a strong case to be made that there on the streets of New Orleans was the beginning of that integration of African and Western music which begat jazz, begat R&B, begat rock 'n' roll," said the Edge. "So, you know, I wouldn't be here...if it wasn't for this very unique part of America and these little flukes of history and circumstance. And it's still all there. That's the amazing thing."

Copyright © 2007 ABC News. All rights reserved.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:42 PM | Comments (0)

May 30, 2006

Frontline (The Age of AIDS) Interview: Bono

PBS, May 30, 2006

Bono, née Paul Hewson, is the lead singer of the rock band U2. Throughout his career, he has involved himself in humanitarian causes; in 1997 he began working on debt relief for Africa and in 2002 he formed DATA, a nonprofit organization that stands for Debt AIDS Trade Africa. Here, he explains how his AIDS activism became an extension of that work. He also talks about his alliance with evangelical Christians: "I think [that] of evangelicals polled in 2000, only 6 percent felt it incumbent upon them to respond to the AIDS emergency," he explains. "I was deeply offended by that, so I asked to meet with as many church leaders as I could, and used examples from the Scriptures. 'Isn't this the leprosy of our age?' I argued. 'Isn't this what the Christ spent his time with?'" Bono also recounts his efforts lobbying former Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) with biblical verses and his meetings with President George W. Bush, including "a good old row" about the speed at which antiretroviral drugs were being delivered to Africa under the president's $15 billion plan. "How we respond to the AIDS emergency will describe us for posterity," he tells Frontline. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on Dec. 9, 2005.

This is a very depressing subject. Why do you spend so much time talking about it?

Anyone that's involved in development has discovered that all the good work that's been done in development has been undone by the AIDS emergency.

The first thing I decided to do was never say the word "AIDS" without putting the word "emergency" following it...Six and a half thousand Africans dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease is not a cause; it's an emergency...

Do you find it a difficult subject to deal with?

What I find difficult dealing with is wanting to talk to anyone about some of the sights that we have seen. Seeing people queuing up to die three to a bed, two on top and one underneath, of a preventable, treatable disease more than pisses me off. It makes me ashamed, and more importantly, it makes me put my anger to use.

I think in the history books, in 50 years' time and 100 years' time, this age of AIDS will have a very large chapter, and the way in which our civilization did or did not respond to it will be very telling of us and damning, and certainly for the last 20 years of the 20th century. Hopefully the story of the beginning of the 21st century will bring some light, and our activism will kick in in the next years, and perhaps there will be a vaccine, because one day, the age of AIDS will be over. I want that, and others who work on this want that, of course, sooner -- in the next 10 years if at all possible...

Why did you decide actually to focus on this particular issue, and then what did you do once you made the decision?

Well, we founded an organization called DATA -- Debt AIDS Trade Africa, so the acronym worked. We believe these are the three biggest issues facing Africa. The acronym worked both ways -- Democracy Accountability Transparency Africa as well.

But there is no doubt that we couldn't prevail in any way on debt and trade without dealing with AIDS. You can't run businesses if 10 percent of them are dying. It was an extraordinary statistic, actually, to discover when I was in South Africa the giant corporations, where they had 10 percent, 12 percent of their work force with a death sentence on their head. I mean, it's very hard to do business in that environment.

So those of us that believe in the future of the continent of Africa and see Africans as very noble, royal, entrepreneurial people, we have to make ourselves available there to get them through this phase so that their fate can be the same as South Asia and other countries that were emaciated by poverty but are now thriving.

Africa will thrive. There's aspects to the AIDS problem in Africa, as I'm sure you've discovered, that make the particular strain or clades, as they are called, in some areas of Africa, much more virulent. That's why through heterosexual sex you have this kind of evil flowering, this sort of almost exponential metastasizing of the disease, and through Southeast Africa in particular.

You reached out to the American evangelical community pretty actively. Why did you do that?

I was offended to discover that the religiosity of this country, which is one of the reasons why we are getting places in some ways on debt cancellation -- the churches got behind that -- was not available to the AIDS emergency...

I think [that] of evangelicals polled in 2000, only 6 percent felt it incumbent upon them to respond to the AIDS emergency. I was deeply offended by that, so I asked to meet with as many church leaders as I could, and used examples from the Scriptures. Isn't this the leprosy of the age?, I argued. Isn't this what the Christ spent his time with? Yet the church now is walking across the road and looking the other way, and does that not contradict the very central tenets of the Scriptures that you believe are literally true?

I was amazed at the response, because a lot of people changed their mind, which was amazing. In fact, I would argue now that the evangelical community, particularly the young ones, especially in the Christian music scene, are some of the most active activists we have. So it's kind of thrown me for one, actually. I used to love giving hell about them, and I can't anymore.

There was, of course, an amazing incident [with] [former Sen.] Jesse Helms [R-N.C.], the great old cold warrior himself. After going through this with him and explaining that there was 2,103 verses of Scriptures pertaining to poverty, and that second to redemption, this is the second most important theme, and that sexual behavior, even misbehavior, doesn't seem to be there that much -- it's mentioned a couple of times in the Old Testament -- he was amazing, actually, because he not only was moved by this; he was moved to do something. And he had a press conference where he publicly repented for the way he thought about the AIDS virus. That really helped us with the evangelical...

[Do you get nervous talking to politicians in Washington?]

I'm never nervous...They should be nervous because I'm representing people who they hold the power of life and death over, not me. I wouldn't want to be sitting there. I wouldn't want to be a lawmaker turning down an offer to increase foreign appropriations to deal with the biggest health crisis in 600 years, realizing that there are people who will die as a result of that. I wouldn't want to be that.

So no, I'm not nervous. They should be nervous. I represent young people who can't be in the room, and I try to do it with some grace. I try not to club my way through the argument. I try to speak it quietly and seriously and as delicately as I can, but I rely on the weight of the argument more than my own celebrity or my own, you know, even indignation to do the work.

Jesse Helms is a tough guy; that's well known. But he's also rigorous from his point of view, and our argument is rational and considered, even on the scriptural front, even with considerable backup. You know, Christ only speaks of judgment once, and oddly enough, it's in regard to the poor. I think it's Matthew 23. It's the famous lines: "I was naked and you clothed me. I was a prisoner and you visited me." And then they say to Christ: "What are you talking about? You weren't. I was sick, and you came to me." And he says: "No, I wasn't. But as much as you do this to the least of these, you do it unto me." And the implication is also in the reverse, if you don't do it.

So that's a very powerful piece of Scripture, and he was very moved. Even emotionally, he kind of welled up. As I was leaving the room, he said -- this big, tall, Southern old boy, this amazing character -- he just said, "I want to give you a blessing." He put his arms around me, and then he gave me his blessing. And I take blessings pretty seriously. I would have liked one from Frank Sinatra. I think I got one, actually, now that you mention it. But an older person who's been through so much in their life, coming indeed as he did from a completely different political point of view to myself, it was a very powerful moment for me.

I went out and of course told the assembled press what had happened, and they couldn't believe it. But if that was it, that wouldn't have been enough. He followed through...

Does your own faith motivate you in this?

I think the thing that really motivates me -- of course, it comes from an assembly of worldview, the way you see the world. It's shaped by lots of things, and yes, the Scriptures have certainly made an influence on me. I put Catholic guilt to work pretty good for a rich rock star.

But the thing in the end that really does motivate me is the stupidity of it, in a way. I think stupidity annoys me almost more than anything. I suppose that's it -- it's the missed opportunity.

Here you have -- particularly in Africa, which is 60 percent of the disease -- here you have 40 percent of the continent is Muslim. They are relatively friendly, but as my friend Terry George, the great writer and director of Hotel Rwanda, said, what if Nelson Mandela had turned into Osama bin Laden?

Maybe it's smart to just help people with these crushing problems. These drugs are great advertisements for us in the West, for our ingenuity, our technology, our innovation, particularly in the United States.

I said that to President Bush. I said, "Paint them red, white and blue if you want, but these drugs are the best advertisement you are going to get right now, and that might be important right now."

So above the moral imperatives comes the political imperative to some people. So fine, whatever brings you to the party.

[How do you feel about aligning yourself so closely with some of the rhetoric of the Christian right?]

I have learned to interface -- what I think would be the contemporary term -- with various different lexicons, and people speak very different languages. I've learned to speak in a lot of tongues, and I can live with the bellicose language of some fervent, fire-breathing Christians, sure...

It's not my language, but actually, I don't mind how people come to this, to the front line on this. People have different motivations. I surprise myself [about] how much I've learned from conservatives, not coming from that vein, even conservative Christians whose beliefs I don't share.

But convictions in the end, they can be dangerous, but a world without them is just kind of an awful kind of gray, amorphous mass. They are idealists, some of these people -- now, from my point of view, perhaps narrow-minded; from your point of view, perhaps narrow-minded idealists. But just widen that aperture, and there is a lot of potential there as opposed to the alternative, which is apathy. I think apathy offends me way more than the kind of fervent religiosity.

Talk about your meetings with President Bush in March 2002...Going into the Oval Office, what case did you make to him? We've got footage of you coming out, saying he called AIDS a genocide.

The first time I met President Bush was really to thank him for this $10 billion Millennium Challenge, new approach to AIDS, by rewarding countries that tackle corruption and have poverty-reduction programs in place. A very smart idea -- underfunded still, I might add. It doesn't have the impetus that it should have, but a very good idea. I was there to thank him for that.

But while I was thanking him, I wanted to impress upon him how important the AIDS emergency was in affecting the outcome of development. And he was very well informed about it. I was surprised that he knew as much as he did, because I wasn't there to talk about that. I mean, that wasn't on the schedule.

But he was very interested, and then he described it himself as a genocide. Now, I love the word "genocide," because as ugly a word as it is, it implies complicity, right? Genocide happens because of other people. It's not an accident. I think others in the White House were nervous that he used that word, but I of course used the word, and I'm still using it. I told him later, I said, "Thank you for that word." And he said, "Well, I just meant it in terms of scale, you know." I said, "Well, I like to use it, because it's a very emotive term." So he was helpful there.

To be fair to President Bush, after a series of meetings and after the conservative Christians got busy, … and after a lot of people right across the NGO [non-governmental organization] community also got busy, he really responded, and he responded in a way that no one could ever have imagined.

People laughed out loud in my face when I said a conservative administration is going to pay for antiretroviral drugs for Africans. They just said, "You are out of your mind." In fact, the head of USAID [United States Agency for International Development], Andrew Natsios, had made a comment about: "Listen, it's ridiculous. Africans don't have wristwatches." He's since taken back that comment. I shouldn't bring it up, but I always do. It shows the mind-set...

So when President Bush in 2003 at the State of the Union announced a $15 billion commitment over five years to fight the AIDS emergency, a lot of people were very surprised and shocked. But I was not, because we had worked very closely on it with him, and I was very proud of our part in it as a small organization. But it didn't stop there, because you had to get the money spent, and it wasn't being spent fast enough.

So I had another meeting with President Bush where I had to complain to him about the speed, and I had said, "Look, in the State of the Union you had talked about getting the drugs on bicycles and motorcycles, and where are they?" It got quite heated, and he was like, "Hey, hold on, let me speak here." I was kind of ranting. Being an Irish rock star, you do rant. Afterwards people were saying, "Well, was that a row?" And it was a row, but it was a good old row. I mean, I was kind of impressed he had the passion to make the case.

What was the case? What did he say?

He was saying this is very difficult, and you do not want to do this wrong. He said: "We are doing this right. We are going to do this right, but I'm telling you we are going to do it." And I was going, "Well, let's see it then."...

So a year from that day, this last year, there are 400,000 Africans on antiretroviral drugs paid for by the United States across the Global Health Fund, PEPFAR [the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief], which is the United States' bilateral program. Last year there was none. That is an amazing achievement.

It was very nice for me to be able to go back to him this time and say: "Look, no ranting. You really delivered. We really appreciate it. Now we would like some more funding for the Global Health Fund, but congratulations." I think that's probably the best news he had that week.

Did you make the case that more money from PEPFAR should be or should have gone to the Global Fund [To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria]?

Oh, yeah. But in a way, we have been doing that all the time. He had it up to here with the Global Health Fund, because every person he talked to was hitting him with the Global Health Fund. [Republican Pennsylvania Sen.] Rick Santorum was hitting him on the Global Health Fund. But he delivered on the bilateral program, to be fair...

You talked to him about the administration's position on protection, particularly abstinence?

There is a rumor around that the administration is against condom use, and it's actually not true. The abstinence, be faithful, condoms -- the ABC program -- is basically what the administration's position is.

But there are certain groups, be they Catholic groups or other groups, who will not, of course, be apart of C. Again, you can't expect Catholic missionaries to be selling condoms. We would like them to, but they are not going to, and you've got to respect that.

Because of this language...there are people out there who feel that if they are anti-condom, they will get more cash to spend. It's simply not true, and I had to look at this very hard before my last meeting with the president. It turns out the largest purchaser of condoms on the planet Earth is the United States government. I'm not even sure the president knew that, and I'm not sure he would want to trumpet it out there, but it's actually the hard facts.

You've got to watch the politics of AIDS. The politics of AIDS can work both for and against the victims of AIDS...

You mention treatment. With these treatment programs, there's a moral commitment. When you put somebody on treatment, you're essentially making a promise to them.

That's right.

Can you describe what you see, whether we as a society are aware of the commitment we're making with programs like PEPFAR? Will the money be there and the drugs be there down the line?

Yeah, I think it's an obscenity, the idea of taking people off drugs once you put them on them. I think if that happens, I think all the good that President Bush's historic AIDS initiative did will be completely undone. I told him that, and we have told the same to all these politicians in all the various countries. And it's true of the Global Health Fund...

I hope these leaders understand that when they make a commitment to a family, a man, woman, child with AIDS, that it's a long-term commitment, because if budget cuts bite too hard, you will have the most preposterous sight of people being taken off antiretroviral drugs. If that happens, it will blow up. It will set fire to any good any of us have been working towards... because of course, people will die. It's obvious. You can't take people off these medications...

How do you respond to people who say treatment programs are great, but both the Global Fund and PEPFAR place too much emphasis on treatment [as opposed to prevention]?...The political message is on treatment, and therefore you're not taking all the steps that need to be taken to stop the pandemic.

Any medic will tell you that prevention and treatment are the equal parts of any approach to health.

It is extraordinary that in India and China, you have these sleeping monsters. You would think more time would be spent on making sure that the disease doesn't wake up in those two huge populaces, because 1 percent of a billion people, that's an awful lot of people. And 10 percent, the world has never seen the likes of it. So there has to be a change of behavior, and education has to be apart of it. There is just no way around this.

But I think in a funny way, the thing about the drugs is that just once you have them, you have to hand them out. I think it was [U.N. Millennium Project Director] Jeffrey Sachs, my good friend and mentor in so many ways on so many things, who wrote a piece for the Times about the bubonic plague in Europe in the Middle Ages, where a third of Europe was lost to the black death, as it was called then. He was trying to imagine the scenario where -- he just made it up -- where if China had a treatment for the bubonic plague but hadn't got it to Europe because it was expensive or difficult, how would China be treated in the history books?

That's us, or that was us. We may be just turning the corner now into a place of responsibility for having developed these drugs. And being able to make them in a very cost-efficient way, we have to get them to people.

As I said to you earlier, they won't just transform the lives and communities of the people who receive the drugs; they will also change the way those lives and communities see us, and that might be important. That might just be important at this time.

There is a lot of suspicion in the world about we in the West, our value system. In fact, do we have any values? To be sitting on these technologies and not getting them out to the wider world in this emergency, that would confirm their worst suspicions, I would have thought.

So how we respond to HIV/AIDS tells a lot about [us].

How we respond to the AIDS emergency will describe us for posterity is the truth. You see all the stuff about the Irish peace process. You see it on the nightly news, and it's great -- there's a lot of American Irish people -- but it's a postage stamp in history. This is a whole chapter, the age of AIDS, and we will be defined and described by how we do or don't respond to it.

Copyright © 1995-2006 WGBH Educational Foundation. All rights reserved.

Posted by Jonathan at 02:12 AM | Comments (0)

November 21, 2005

Bono And The Christian Right

(CBS) The members of the Irish rock band U2 have always believed that their group was about something more than making records and playing concerts.

The themes of their music, often about social injustice, ranging from the American civil rights movement to genocide in Bosnia, have helped them sell more than 130 million albums around the world and gross nearly a billion dollars on the concert trail. And offstage, their lead singer, known by his teenage nickname "Bono," is equally impressive. His political activism, working to help erase third world debt and supplying Africa with AIDS drugs, has made him a political force.

Correspondent Ed Bradley takes a look at U2 and the double life of their lead singer.

After 25 years of touring, most critics say U2 is as good today as they've ever been, still selling out some of the world's largest stadiums and arenas when touring around the globe.

"It's only rock and roll where people are burned out at 40. I want to see what can happen with a band if they keep their integrity, keep their commitment to each other, and can we create extraordinary music," says Bono, speaking to 60 Minutes while on tour in Milan, Italy this past summer.

"You know what would have happened - and I'm not making a comparison, because I don't feel worthy to touch their hem - but what would have happened if the Beatles lived, and didn't, you know, disappear up their own arses but actually stayed in contact with the world, were awake. Didn't let their money buy them off. You know I'm still hungry. I still want a lot out of music," Bono says.

Bono has said when fans are screaming, it's not about the band, it's about them. "It's unexplainable what a song means to you. Because, remember, songs, it's not like a movie you see once or twice. A song, it gets under your skin and that's why [we] abandon ourselves to it," says Bono. "It has a sense of kind of uplift, of getting airborne."

"Everything feels possible. And maybe more things are possible than we think," he adds.

And at every concert, the band tries to make that happen. Before the show, fans are asked to join a campaign to help end world poverty. And during the performance, Bono sings of social justice and argues for religious harmony.

Bono's passions are shared and supported by the band, drummer Larry Mullen, Jr., bassist Adam Clayton and the guitarist who calls himself "The Edge."

"I think early on the heroes that we had were people like Bob Marley, John Lennon, The Clash," says The Edge. "And those bands all had the same combination of rock 'n roll, the rage, railing against injustice. And the politics. We connected with that in a major way."

The four of them formed their bond and their politics as teenagers in Dublin, Ireland. Larry Mullen wanted to start a band to play in pubs. Instead, he got one intent to take on the world.

Mullen says being Irish helped shape the bands' political and social concerns. "I mean we lived all our lives with the terrorist situation in northern Ireland. And with the British army and seeing that on the news night after night, atrocity after atrocity," says Mullen. "But more than anything else, for the British folks Irish people were all terrorists. So when we went to Britain, it was always a lot of resistance to U2. And that's why we came to America."

In 1980, American music fans embraced them. By 1987, following their masterwork album "The Joshua Tree," critics began to call them the biggest rock band in the world. Tours and CDs since then, including their latest, have added to their popularity.

But along the way, they found another calling: getting help to the starving, troubled continent of Africa. The band did their part at the 1985 Live Aid concert.

Bono continued on, behind the scenes and in front of news cameras, to lobby world leaders to action.

Bono once said, "I'm available to be used, but I'm not a cheap date." And he stands by that quote. "No, I'm not a cheap date. I'm in the checks business. You know, and not just people signing the checks, but people cashing them. And I'm ready to spend my, whatever you want to call it, the currency of my celebrity, if that's what it takes to get there."

He gets a lot of credit for lobbying President Bush, who he has met several times. Today, the Bush administration contributes to one of his biggest causes, AIDS medication for Africa.

"People openly laughed in my face when I suggested that this administration would distribute antiretroviral drugs to Africa," Bono remembers. "They said, 'You are out of your tiny mind.' There's 200,000 Africans now who owe their lives to America."

How does he get support for his projects? "It was probably that it would be really wrong beating a sort of left-wing drum, taking the usual bleeding-heart-liberal line," says Bono.

Instead, he enlisted the ruling right of American politics.

"Particularly conservative Christians, I was very angry that they were not involved more in the AIDS emergency. I was saying, 'this is the leprosy that we read about in the New Testament, you know. Christ hung out with the lepers. But you're ignoring the AIDS emergency," says Bono. "How can you? And, you know, they said, 'Well, you're right, actually. We have been. And we're sorry. We'll get involved.' And they did."

His proudest achievement may have been helping convince the G8 industrial nations to sign an agreement that will forgive more than $40 billion in loans to Third World countries, 18 of them so far.

"And these countries, instead of paying that money servicing old debts, can spend it on health, education and infrastructure in the countries. It's an amazing achievement," says Bono.

But for all his success as an activist, Bono remains a rock star at the core.

He and the rest of the band members have vacation homes in the South of France, the epicenter of celebrity lifestyle.

How did he end up in the South of Frances, as opposed to Italy or Spain?

"There's been, always been, an Irish/French thing going back to what's called the Flight of Earls. And in the 19th century. So, they're very tolerant of loud Irish people here, as you can see," says Bono laughing. "As you can see I like to keep a low profile," he adds.

Fact is, Bono's celebrity profile could hardly be bigger. Rock star sunglasses aside, he dispenses with the trappings of celebrity as much as possible.

Bono doesn't travel with security and doesn't have a posse. "I've always, you know, our thing, and being in U2, is like, how do you be, but not have to have all that bulls*it that goes with being famous and so, answer number one, live in Ireland. Ok? That helped," says Bono.

Bono also jokes about keeping his low profile in the South of France. "Why live in France? Because the French are so snobbish... The French are so into themselves that they don't even notice you."

Truth is, Bono and the band are treated like royalty on the French Riviera and spend as much time there as possible.

On tour this summer, they commuted to many of their European concerts from the South of France in a private jet.

Poking fun at themselves is something they do well, and often. At the height of their early fame almost 20 years ago, Frank Sinatra joined in at one of his Las Vegas concerts.

"During the show, he stood up, he stopped us and made us kind of stand up and do the wave thing. And we were dressed in, you know, rags, just in comparison," remembers Bono. "And he just stopped. He said, 'You're number one all around the world.' He said, 'Look at you. You haven't spent a dime on your clothes.'"

Today, they do spend millions on their concert production. Every detail of their sets is state-of-the-art, even a cappuccino machine under the stage.

And the attention to detail goes for the music, too. The band gets a lot out of their instruments. Part of their secret is guitar technology.

"It's like a programmable switching system. So I can go through any combination of effects," explains The Edge.

But Larry Mullen makes his job as simple as possible. He doesn't do big drum solos. "It's fairly simple and straightforward. But because of my...I'm not that good. And I concentrate quite hard," he says laughing.

Mullen and Clayton focus on creating the engine that drives the music. Bono and Edge are the navigators, trying to take each song and each concert to new heights.

This is where the band's two worlds collide. Their global fame has given Bono a political voice. U2's politics give their music a little something extra.

And Bono is confident U2 will be remembered in the future.

"Actually oddly enough, I think my work, the activism, will be forgotten. And I hope it will. Because I hope those problems will have gone away," says Bono. "But our music will be here in 50 years and 100 years' time. Fact that our songs occupy a sort of an emotional terrain that didn't exist before our group did."

By John Hamlin © 2005, CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Posted by Jonathan at 05:11 AM | Comments (7)

June 21, 2005

Pooh-Bahs of Poverty

Three big shots, eight very big shows. Bob Geldof, Bono and Richard Curtis talk to Josh Tyrangiel about what on earth they're doing with LIVE 8

By Josh Tyrangiel

In 1985 Bob Geldof gave birth to live aid, the groundbreaking rock- concert series that raised $200 million for African famine relief. Bono of U2 and Richard Curtis (screenwriter of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill) were there. That day inspired them to learn more about Africa and ultimately form their own antipoverty campaigns. Now the three friends are organizing Live 8, a series of free international concerts to be held on July 2 with unprecedented star power (Will Smith is host of a hip-hop-heavy show in Philadelphia; Pink Floyd will reunite in London on the same bill as U2, Coldplay, Madonna and Paul McCartney), all to pressure G-8 leaders to make debt forgiveness, fair trade and increased aid part of their Africa policies.

Time: Bob, for years you insisted you would never revive Live Aid. Why?

Bob Geldof: Not to be immodest, but the first one was perfect in almost every sense. Artistically, people seemed to up the ante, and the performances were pretty great across the board. Huge amounts of money were raised, not a penny lost, and politically it elevated the issue onto the global table. The whole thing just worked, unbelievably. So you f___ with that legacy at your peril. Then there's the personal thing. David Bowie was on a high afterward, and he said, "Let's do this every year." I said, "Go on, you f_______ do it then." It's so exhausting, and you get into terrible trouble at home because you're not there at all.

Richard Curtis: I've already forgotten the name of my fourth child. [Laughter.]

Geldof: The thing that ultimately did it for me was their [Bono's and Curtis'] insistence. In retrospect I think maybe I was ambushed.

[To Bono and Curtis] Did you coordinate your attacks on him?

Bono: Had there been real coordination, we would have been announcing this six months ago, not six weeks ago. It was all a bit haphazard actually. Bob didn't want to repeat himself, and he has a word he uses better than anyone else in the English language, and he just kept repeating that word followed by "off." [Much laughter.] I remember saying, "Look, Bob, if you don't want to do it, please, just don't tell anyone," because the mere threat of staging it at some point actually keeps a fair bit of pressure on certain politicians.

You ultimately decided to time Live 8 around the G-8 Summit. Isn't it a bit odd to stage a rock concert around what's essentially a policy meeting?

Bono: It's proof of how far we've come. The difference between this era and the original manifests itself in the Drop the Debt campaign.

It's the journey from charity to justice. From the tin cupping of Live Aid -- big cups, sure, $200 million cups -- to now, when $25 billion is on the table, and we're not begging for it. Over the years, with the Make Poverty History campaign in Europe and the One campaign in the U.S., we have moved into real politics and real activism. We've cultivated a constituency so that now, when those eight men meet on a golf course, we can apply real pressure to them.

Curtis: We are living in a world where 50,000 people die every single day of simple poverty, and it's not treated like a crisis. There's got to be a moment, an explosive moment of concentration on this issue. The point of Live 8 is to provide the colossal, dramatic moment where everybody gets to grips with it.

Geldof: And we didn't just pick this moment out of the sky. This G-8 is in the U.K., where the Prime Minister was once a young git with the worst haircut save mine. He attended Live Aid and was informed by it, so he's in tune with where we've come from. Then a lot of these G-8 guys are on their last political legs. Schroder's going to lose in Germany. Chirac won't stand because he will lose. Berlusconi? Might have a year left. [Canadian Prime Minister] Paul Martin is clinging on. George Bush can't stand again, and Tony Blair said he wouldn't. It gives us a chance to appeal to their sense of legacy. Bono is the rock god of the Establishment. Richard is the filmmaker of the Establishment.

And I'm just a paddy with a hat on. [Much laughter.]

Curtis: But it's a great hat.

Geldof: I look like one of the guys who'll park your car for you.

Tickets to all the Live 8 concerts are free. Why not charge, and how exactly are you paying for this?

Geldof:It's not enough to do a regular concert. We had to create something grand, and free is pretty grand, I'd say. The funding? It's a massive risk. In the U.K. we raised a lot of it from a text-message ticket lottery. I raised $5 million through an underwriting loan. We did an auction of the dvd rights. You find a way.

What specific skills does each of you bring to organizing something of this scope?

Curtis: I bring a gray woolly jumper. [Laughter.]

Geldof: It's true. His great strength is his complete Englishness. Look at that jumper. The sobriety, the soft tones. More than anything, he stands back and takes a calm position.

Bono: Bob and myself are good at the passionate. But sometimes you might not hear our words for the bluster.

Geldof: Bono's in love with the world. He wants to embrace it. I want to punch its lights out. We're a psychotic Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Bono: The missing piece in a way is in the U.S. What Bob provides with his steel and fund raising and what Richard provides in terms of community in the cinematic arts and as a writer with his ability to deliver a message, I feel like I've been trying to do in the U.S. -- but I'm not American. Really, until today, when Russell Simmons called and offered to help, we haven't had the American sense of ownership that we should. It's a real problem. I think it's going to turn around. But we've started very late.

Have you tailored your message in each G-8 country, and if so, how have you tailored your message to Americans?

Bono: Warren Buffett gave me the best advice on this subject. He said, "Don't appeal to the conscience of America. Appeal to the greatness of America, and you'll get the job done."

Curtis: Insert in there "remarkably accurate impression of Warren Buffett."

Bono: Onstage I talk about my first impression of Americans, which was watching a man walk on the moon. We thought, Americans are mad! But look what they can do when they get organized.

Geldof: America doesn't have a lack of empathy; they just don't know the issues as well. Actually, today I had to defend the Bush Administration in France again. They refuse to accept, because of their political ideology, that he has actually done more than any American President for Africa. But it's empirically so.

There's been a fair bit of criticism about the lack of African musicians on the Live 8 bill. You've announced a separate Afrocentric show in Cornwall, but why not integrate the African acts into the other line-ups? Isn't cultural awareness as important as issue awareness?

Geldof: This is a political event, not a cultural event. In order to get political momentum, one guy with a banner is not enough. You need millions. The lingua franca of the planet, as we learned from Live Aid, is not English -- it's pop music. From Guangzhou to Bogota, they listen to 50 Cent, Eminem, U2 and Coldplay. Do they listen to the more esoteric individual cultures? No. That's reality. Do they listen to Muddy Waters? I wish they did. Then I'd put a bill up there with him and John Lee Hooker.

He's Dead.

Geldof: It'd be difficult. [Laughter.] Even more difficult than putting Pink Floyd back together. Well, not that much more difficult.

Time: You've asked the pope to support Live 8. is there a contradiction in asking the world's most visible opponent of condom use to help you assist people ravaged by AIDS?

Geldof: The condom issue is relevant, but it's not the single relevant point. Ratzinger [now Pope Benedict XVI], from what I understand, put the spinal cord into John Paul's theology on the poor. His more profound theologies are to do with the psalm of the poor, if you like. I just invited him to sing a psalm up at Edinburgh.

Does he have a band?

Geldof: Don't know. I wrote to him what I thought was a coherent letter and got back a signed photograph. [Laughs.] I pointed out to one of the Cardinals that I didn't require a picture, signed or otherwise.

Richard, you aren't performing at Live 8, but you've made The Girl in the Cafe [which will air on HBO this Saturday]. Are you sure a romantic comedy about poverty and the G-8 is a good way to get people to engage in the issues?

Curtis: Well, we're all limited in what we can do. You don't ask Bono to write an opera on the subject of something political, and as I was trying to address a passion of mine, it seemed apt that I should do it in the kind of way that I'd written films before. If I'd tried to write a serious political drama, I wouldn't have known where to begin. So I tried to write about politics from the point of view of a normal person.

Geldof: It's quite powerful. I saw it the other night, and my girlfriend was crying. She fell in love with Richard immediately. Mr. F_______ Sensitivity and all.

Which of the G-8 leaders do you think remains the toughest nut to crack?

Bono: The most important and toughest nut is still President Bush. He feels he's already doubled and tripled aid to Africa, which he has. But he started from far too low a place. He can stand there and say he paid at the office already. He shouldn't, because he'll be left out of the history books. But it's hard for him because of the expense of the war and the debts. But I have a hunch that he will step forward with something. And it'll take somebody like him...

You're trying to lobby him right now, aren't you?

Geldof: We'll see if it works.

Copyright © 2005 Time Magazine. All rights reserved.

Posted by Jonathan at 01:50 AM | Comments (4)

May 23, 2005

Bono: "We Need to Talk"

U2's frontman sits down with Greg Kot to 'clear the air' about negative reviews, the band's direction and the role of rock 'n' roll

By Greg Kot, Chicago Tribune music critic

Bono is steamed.

It's not every day that I answer my cell phone and hear the lead singer of U2 expressing serious disagreement with something I've written, but that day has arrived.

"You've offended us," he says as I weave up Lake Shore Drive during evening rush hour, trying not to crash into a concrete barrier while I reach for my notebook. "There's a dark cloud over us and we need to talk."

I've covered the band for 15 years, interviewed Bono a half-dozen times and attended virtually every one of U2's Chicago concerts since the Irish quartet first played at Park West in 1981. Along with R.E.M., U2 is the most important mainstream rock band of my generation, a band that set a new standard for how an arena rock concert could feel and what it could communicate. In the '90s, Bono, guitarist The Edge, drummer Larry Mullen Jr. and bassist Adam Clayton gave their well-honed approach a twist on such adventurous albums as "Achtung Baby" (1991), "Zooropa" (1993), the "Passengers: Original Soundtracks I" side project (1995) and "Pop" (1997).

But "Pop" bombed commercially by U2 standards, and the band seemed to lose its nerve. It made two consecutive albums, "All That You Can't Leave Behind" (2000) and "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" (2004), that retreated from the innovations of the '90s and settled for a retro '80s sound. In February, the Tribune published an article in which I chastised the band for a series of dubious artistic and business decisions. It was prompted by a flood of irate e-mails from fans who had paid $40 to join U2's fan club in order to gain access to pre-sale tickets for the band's North American tour. The sale was a public-relations disaster. Some fan-club members reported they couldn't even get tickets, or paid nearly $200 for third-balcony seats, while scalpers were selling tickets on eBay for more than $600. It was the latest in a series of missteps that prompted me to question whether this once-vital band was turning into the Rolling Stones, more of a corporation focused on perpetuating itself than a creative force.

There was the ubiquitous television ad (for which they were not paid) in which "Vertigo," the first single from "Atomic Bomb," was turned into a commercial for Apple's portable music device, the iPod. There were the unusually conservative albums, evidence that the band had run out of ideas or the will to challenge itself and its audience. There was the live appearance at the Super Bowl halftime in February 2002, the type of marketing opportunity that presented even the most idealistic brand of rock as just another product.

It was these criticisms that prompted Bono's Lake Shore Drive call. A day after that conversation, I attended the first concert in U2's four-night sold-out run at the United Center. My review focused on the tired set list. U2 played some new songs early in the two-hour performance, but instead of building a case for the new album and possibly redeeming it, the quartet reserved all the big-bang moments for its greatest hits, songs that had been in the set list for a decade or more. They sounded more than ever like the bands they once arose to replace, the dinosaur acts of the '60s.

All of this is part of what should be the relationship among the artist, the critic and even the audience, which at the United Center was wildly cheering (as they always do) every note. Critics, on the other hand, are not cheerleaders. They are paid to honestly and passionately react to what the artist does -- for better or worse. When it's the latter, audiences are often more vocal in their defense than the artists. But Bono was different.

After the review appeared in the Tribune, Bono invited me to attend another show. Later, he would acknowledge that my review of the first concert wasn't off base. "We weren't at our best," he said. When I attended the final show of the four-night stand, the song deck had been shuffled, and the band grew more daring. A new song that wasn't in the first night's set, "Original of the Species," was a highlight. It's a soul ballad with a melody so suggestive that it compelled me to go back and hear what I had missed the first time on the "Atomic Bomb" album. If not a return to the old boldness, the performance certainly made me aware of something that I had missed about the album several months before: the classic beauty of some of the less-immediate songs.

The next morning, Bono and I met at a corner table in a swanky restaurant overlooking Michigan Avenue. "Stick 'em up," he rasped as he approached from behind, finger on an imaginary trigger pressing into my left kidney. It was 9 a.m., and the previous night's concert had left the unshaven singer a touch hoarse. But he was in a spry mood and claimed to do all his best work before noon. "I sometimes wish we could play our concerts right after I wake up," he said, peering out from behind his tinted wraparound glasses after ordering a breakfast of poached eggs and toast. The ire in his voice of the previous week had softened to a contentious but melodious brogue.

"Larry [Mullen, the band's drummer] is going to kill me for doing this," Bono said. "But I want this on the record. Some of what is going around as a result of your article is not just unhelpful to our group and our relationship to our audience, but just really problematic for what in the broad sense you might call rock music. The things you think are wrong with it, and the things that I think are wrong with rock music, are polar opposite. Your vision of rock and mine are 180 degrees apart. And that's why I need to talk to you."

A portion of that 90-minute conversation, edited for length, clarity and language, follows.

KOT: You're an important band for my generation. A band that led by example: This is how to do it, how to be a successful band without compromising your principles. But when the ticket sale went wrong this year, I got hundreds of e-mails from fans who felt you had let them down, that their loyalty was betrayed.

BONO: Everybody in this band knows about that debacle, and regrets it, and we've taken steps to prevent it from happening again. I think most fans understand what happened. Our eyes were not on that ball the way they normally would be. Our eyes were on trying to determine whether we would be going on tour at all. There are things that we can't discuss in the interview that were going on within the band that just took precedence. Most U2 fans knew what that was [serious health problems in the family of a band member]. I thought it was really disingenuous of them and you not to recognize that this is not normal behavior from this band. Complain, yeah. Something did go wrong. That was a mistake, and we tried to put it right.

KOT: The first I heard about the internal problems in the band was when Larry apologized about it at the Grammys. Before the article was published, I tried for three weeks to get information from the band, to interview you. Yes, this was not normal behavior from U2. Instead, you steer me to the record company president and the tour promoter. You let these business guys answer for you.

BONO: I'm really sorry about that. It's our fault that didn't happen. But it's done, and we've taken care of it.

KOT: The ticket sale to me was just the tip of a larger issue, which is: Is the band losing sight of what it once was? The iPod ad, the Super Bowl halftime appearance, the Grammy Awards appearances -- I didn't think U2 was about that sort of promotion.

BONO: That's a really important point that I want to get across to you. There's this poverty of ambition, in terms of what rock people will do to promote their work. That's a critical issue to me. The excitement of punk rock, in the Irish and UK scene when we were coming up, was seeing our favorite band on "Top of the Pops," right next to the "enemy." That would be exciting. We did talk shows, TV shows, back then. The great moments of rock 'n' roll were never off in some corner of the music world, in a self-constructed ghetto. I don't like that kind of thinking. I know some of it exists, and some of our best friends are part of it. It's not for me. Progressive rock was the enemy in 1976. And it still is. And it has many, many faces. This beast is lurking everywhere. It can describe itself as indie rock. It's the same [blanking] thing. It's misery. I have seen so many great minds struck down by it. . . . When you suggest we're betraying ourselves by doing TV shows and promotional stuff, to me the Super Bowl was our Ed Sullivan moment. It just came 25 years later. I didn't expect it. But it is one of the moments I'm most proud of in my life.

KOT: Why is the idea of associating a song with a product a good idea?

BONO: I accept that that is alarming. I really do. Our being on TV, I don't have a problem with that -- we should be on TV. But OK, associating our music with a product. You've got to deal with the devil. Let's have a look. The devil here is a bunch of creative minds, more creative than a lot of people in rock bands. The lead singer is Steve Jobs. These men have helped design the most beautiful object art in music culture since the electric guitar. That's the iPod. The job of art is to chase ugliness away. Everywhere we look we see ugly cars, ugly buildings . . . [he pauses, and looks out the window at the Chicago skyline]. . . . You're lucky here in Chicago on that front. But you see ugly objects in the workplace. Everywhere. And these people are making beautiful objects. Selling out is doing something you don't really want to do for money. That's what selling out is. We asked to be in the ad. We could see where rock music is, fighting for relevance next to hip-hop. And I love hip-hop. It's the new black entrepreneur. It's about being out there, loud and proud about what you're doing. Selling it on the street corner if you have to. From pent-house to pavement. Advertising the new song in another song. Taking on the world. Meanwhile, a bunch of white, middle-class kids are practicing in Daddy's garage, saying [adopts fake Midwestern whine], "No, man, that is just so un-cool." As hard as it is, as ghetto as it is, hip-hop is pop music. It's the sound of music getting out of the ghetto, while rock is looking for a ghetto. We never wanted to be a garage band. We wanted to get as quick as we could out of the garage. The people who say they like the garage usually have two or three cars parked outside. Rock music is niche. We want people who aren't in our niche listening to our music. If you pour your life into songs, you want them to be heard. It's a desire to communicate. A deep desire to communicate inspires songwriting. Rock music was most exciting when it was in the 45 [rpm single], when it was disciplined into a single. Whether it was the Sex Pistols, Clash, Buzzcocks, Nirvana, the Beatles, the Stones. The 45 is the pure rock to me. That is why I wanted to be in a band.

KOT: I understand that, but I've seen some of my favorite songs corrupted because of that attitude. [Iggy Pop's] "Lust for Life" is now a Jamaican vacation commercial. I don't know if I want to listen to that song anymore.

BONO: If I love the song, I love the song. We looked at the iPod commercial as a rock video. We chose the director. We thought, how are we going to get our single off in the days when rock music is niche? When it's unlikely to get a three-minute punk-rock song on top of the radio? So we piggybacked this phenomenon to get ourselves to a new, younger audience, and we succeeded. And it's exciting. I'm proud of the commercial, I'm proud of the association. We have turned down enormous sums of money to put our songs in a commercial, where we felt, to your point, where it might change the way people appreciated the song. We were offered $23 million for just the music to "Where the Streets Have No Name." We thought we could do a lot of good with that money. Give it away. But if a show is a little off, and there's a hole, that's the one song we can guarantee that God will walk through the room as soon as we play it. So the idea that when we played it, people would go, "That's the 'such-and-such' commercial," we couldn't live with it. Had it been a cool thing, or didn't have a bad association, or it was a different song, we might've done it. But we have to start thinking about new ways of getting our songs across, of communicating in this new world, with so many channels, with rock music becoming a niche. I hear so many songwriters describe their songs as their children, that they have to look after them. [Nonsense!] They're your parents, they tell you what to do. They tell you how to dress, how to behave when you're playing them. They tell you what the video looks like. If you listen to them, they manage you. And if you get it right, they pay for your retirement [laughs]. Because songs demand to be heard. "Vertigo," which you didn't like, is deceptively simple. That riff, you can think, "Aw yeah, another rock song." It doesn't become great the first time you hear it. It becomes great the thousandth time you hear it. And that's true of a lot of rock riffs. So we have to get the density of exposure for that to be a hit.

KOT: You told me the other day that U2 had "Kid A'd" itself to death [a reference to Radiohead's 2000 progressive-rock album "Kid A"]. It was a funny line, but I'm disappointed to hear that.

BONO: I want to hear Radiohead, extraordinary band that they are, on MTV. I want them setting fire to the imaginations of 16-, 15-, 14-year-old kids. I was 14 when John Lennon set fire to my imagination. At that age, you're just [angry], and your moods swing, and it's an incredible time to be hit with something like that. Our last two albums are essentially about the combo. We used the limitations of the combo. We had 10 years of experimentation. We decided to rope it in, and tie ourselves to only one thing. And that's the only discipline. Is it a great song? Is it fresh? Experimenting in rock is at its best when you dream from the perimeters and bring it back to the center. All my favorite innovators disappear into the woods and bring something back, and you get to hear the songs distilled from those experiments. I used "Kid A" as an example, because I love the album. We did our "Zooropa," we did our "Passengers," even our "Pop" experiment. There were great ideas on that album, but we didn't have the discipline to screw the thing down and turn them into magic pop songs. We'd become progressive rock! Ahhh!

KOT: You're killing me now. I thought those '90s albums were great. I didn't understand "Achtung Baby" right away. But after seeing the tour, I realized it was your best album. I still feel that way. And I loved "Zooropa" in that way, and "Pas-sengers." I even liked "Pop." To me, you guys were showing us how it should be done. You were [screwing] with our heads and making great music. You were doing those weird ballads from "Pop" as an encore at Soldier Field [in 1997]. I loved that you were so far out on a limb with saw in hand, and you were trying things, pushing things. And now you never play songs from those albums anymore. What happened?

BONO: We have ideas that we want to communicate [in a concert], not just a bunch of songs. If we get it right, it feels like one song. What band at our level would play 10 songs, seven from the new album and three from our first album? The reason we do that is because this album and our first album have very similar themes. The first is an ode to innocence, as it's being held onto. The latest is an ode to innocence, as it's been remembered, with the thought that you can get back to it. There's nothing in U2's catalog that sounds remotely like "Vertigo." It's completely fresh. "Ver-tigo" is actually quite a gem, contrary to what you say, and it's very new. For the second half of the show, we take on this notion of the journey of equality. This is our generation's challenge. So we thought about using flags as a backdrop during "Where the Streets Have No Name." I remember singing it the first night: It's not a very good lyric, but it has really great ideas suggested in the lyric, the idea that you could go on a journey to that other place. That lyric was written in a dusty field in northern Ethiopia, and I can finally make sense of it because of what we're talking about in this show. And then we go into "One," and we could do a new arrangement of "One" as you might want us to, but you see, I'm only one member of this band, and Edge is three. And if he thinks an arrangement is perfect, why mess with it? He says, "I'm not jamming here. That's a guitar melody. I've written it. I can't improve on it." Adam and I are the jazz men in the band. But the Teutonic Larry Mullen and the Presbyterian Edge always demand, "No fat. Back to the original arrangement. We're not going to change the bass line just because we feel like it."

KOT: It helped when you put "Original of the Species" in the set last night. It made me want to hear what I missed on the re-cord. That's what was lacking in the first show [at the United Center].

BONO: It's a classic, especially on the album. We have to figure out how are we going to get that song on MTV. Those songs do not come around easy. The melodies of most songs are A-B, A-B, and this is A-B-C-D. The construction of it is unique. And I want you to want us to have that song out on the radio. Because it's about other bands [who value songwriting] coming through. It's not just us. Rap-metal nearly put the white race in jeopardy [as a creative force]. It's a travesty. Those [rap-metal] people should just take suicide pills and go away. What we have to offer, if we're lucky, are lyrics, some interesting arrangements and beautiful melody. That's what rock music can do right now. To be relevant, to set the imagination off on a new generation coming up. Songs that up the ante.

KOT: It sounds like "Pop" didn't work for you because it didn't sell. To my mind, it worked because it was a good, daring album. There's no shame in not selling.

BONO: It didn't communicate the way it was intended to. It was supposed to change the mood of that summer [1997]. An album changes the mood of a summer when you walk out of a pub and you have those songs in your head. And you hear them coming from a car, an open window. It changes the mood of the season. Instead it became a niche record. And I know you're a man who appreciates the niche. And I'm glad you appreciate that one, but that's not what it was intended to be. It's not about sales; we don't need the cash. It's about your ambition for the song. With "Pop," I always think if we'd just had another month, we could have finished it. But we did a really bad thing. We let the manager book the tour, known in this camp as the worst decision U2 ever made, and we had to wrap up the album sooner than we wanted. You don't need an album to communicate for you to enjoy it, you don't need it to be trimmed of fat to enjoy it, because you're enjoying the ideas, the textures. But for me to enjoy it, I need it to do that [communicate on a wider level].

KOT: The last two albums look back. With "All That You Can't Leave Behind," I thought you made your retro record, you'd made your [version of the Stones' 1978 album] "Some Girls," an album that sums up all your best moves in a concise way. You're allowed to make that album, once. Now you've made "All That You Can't Leave Behind," and you're looking back and I think, whoops, you really are turning into the Stones. I expected more; I expected you to break out of that box.

BONO: Hey, there are some amazing songs on [the Stones' 1994 album] "Voodoo Lounge." But what you're missing is that each time [in history] has a mood. You think it's looking back-ward; I think it's looking forward. I think to be in a studio, tied to the four-piece band setup right now is a very modern thing to do. And to use that mystery and power to write songs, we did two records like that. This one goes even further than the last one in that direction. You get beauty like "Original of the Species" that you can play on a piano. Just put piano and voice on that song, and it's special. That's not retreat. That is progressive. That is progress.

KOT: The strength of your band has always been that you build a case for your new music on the road. And it's my job to say when you don't.

BONO: As a writer who cares deeply about music, you're right to give rock bands a kicking when they deserve it. And we have deserved it at times. But you also need to explain to us how rock can progress. And I would like it if writers would step back and look at what we've done . . . [apart from] the codified rules and regulations that are suffocating rock music right now. Great groups were broken up, like the Clash, because of ridiculous concepts like not selling out. It's the cultural revolution in China all over again: Let's rid rock music of thinkers; let's rid rock music of big ideas. I saw it destroy great groups like Echo and the Bunnymen, extraordinary talents who crashed and burned on these things. You tell me about the hundreds of e-mails you got, well I got them with every single turn this band has made. I got them when we made the "War" album. I got them when we made "Joshua Tree." I got them when we made "Achtung Baby." Of course we're going to lose fans along the way who don't like what we're doing. But you need to understand what we're actually trying to do, and that's why we had to have this talk.

KOT: I had to laugh, because at last night's show you said that "some really annoying people are standing up" for what they believe in, "and God bless them." That reminds me of you, including the annoying part.

BONO: [Laughs] Yes, you're right.

KOT: But you do have the courage of your convictions. You don't care what people think of you for having those convictions. You sparked a weeklong debate in this town about music, and what kind of social role it should play, and why people care about it, and why they should care about it.

BONO: We've always annoyed people. Around the time of "Zoo TV," we were in danger of being cool, but we fixed that [laughs]. Now there are loads of people who would love to murder me on a daily basis. Stirring it up, it's good. Our definition of art is putting your head above the parapet, and be ready for the custard pie. I happen to love the taste of it.

- - -

Greg Kot on U2

A look back at the U2 reviews written by Tribune music critic Greg Kot:

2005 UNITED CENTER CONCERT

May 9, 2005: It appears U2 is falling into the same trap as the Rolling Stones: Charging big money for a stadium show obligates the band to turn into a hits jukebox. But especially in a city such as Chicago, where U2 has been embraced like few other bands, the quartet can afford to take more chances. The promise of U2 has always been big music tied in with conviction, imagination and innovation. Now the band sounds like it believes less in its ability to surprise and dazzle with its new music, and more in the necessity to recycle its past. If that trend continues, U2's avid concern for social justice won't be enough to keep it relevant.

U2'S MIDLIFE CRISIS

Feb. 13, 2005: In recent years, their business practices have become more suspect, their attention-seeking more transparent, their principles more readily compromised, and their music less challenging.

"HOW TO DISMANTLE AN ATOMIC BOMB"

Nov. 21, 2004: Fans who embrace this album will undoubtedly be comforted by how closely it hews to the band's trademark sound. But U2 carries weight and meaning because it has always challenged its fans as much as embraced them. "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" shrinks from that high standard by offering U2 by the numbers.

2001 UNITED CENTER CONCERT

Oct. 17, 2001: After the events of Sept. 11, the stakes have been raised for touring rock bands. . . . U2's songs have always addressed the big subjects: war and peace, love and betrayal, sin and faith. And those themes -- once so easy to take for granted only a few months ago -- resonated more deeply than ever for an audience clearly starved for some sort of spiritual sustenance.

"ALL THAT YOU CAN'T LEAVE BEHIND"

Oct. 31, 2000: Still, for all its lack of bold experimentation, "All That You Can't Leave Behind" cuts deeper then any mere rehash of old glories. In reclaiming the indelible, wall-to-wall tunefulness that first won the band a home on commercial radio, the new album recalls the Rolling Stones' last great release, "Some Girls."

1997 SOLDIER FIELD CONCERT ("POP MART" TOUR)

June 30, 1997: They needed all the personality they could muster not to become a mere soundtrack for their special effects. . . . The most resonant moments were the most intimate, such as a haunting "If You Wear That Velvet Dress" performed as an atypically hushed encore. . . . Those who came looking to hear only the old U2 missed the beauty of the new as it soared quietly, in the shadow of its own monster.

"POP"

March 2, 1997: U2 has done its share of falling down. Now they sit off to the side trying to sort out the mess. Their subject is the illusion of instant gratification, the discovery that what they "thought was freedom was just greed," and fittingly they make music that is often slippery and enigmatic.

"ZOOROPA"

July 4, 1993: The lack of preciousness about preserving what once was thought of as the group's signature sound is refreshing. In the most convincing manner possible, "Zooropa" has finished the job started by "Achtung Baby!"

1992 "ZOO TV" TOUR OPENER IN FLORIDA

March 2, 1992: Once architects of a black-and-white world, the band was now feeling and stumbling its way toward some new, undetermined destination with exhilarating force.

"ACHTUNG BABY!"

Nov. 17, 1991: Although no one will mistake it for the latest Nirvana release, "Achtung Baby!" -- from its fanciful title on down -- shows the band in a grittier light: disrupting, rather than fulfilling, expectations.

Copyright © 2005 Chicago Tribune. All rights reserved.

Posted by Jonathan at 02:06 AM | Comments (33)

May 02, 2005

Jim DeRogatis talks with U2's Larry Mullen Jr.

By Jim DeRogatis, Chicago Sun-Times Pop Music Critic

Despite its status as a multi-platinum, arena-filling mega-band, U2 has always maintained a reputation for caring about its fans. But when tickets went on sale in late January for its Vertigo 2005 Tour, something went wrong.

Many of the faithful who paid $40 to join the band's fan club found themselves shut out when tickets went on sale via a system that ignored the special presale privileges and issued random codes instead. As a result, many of the prime tickets wound up with scalpers who have been peddling them for more than 20 times face value.

The group scheduled additional shows to make amends -- U2 performs four nights here beginning Saturday, then will return to Chicago on Sept. 20-21 -- but the band was stung nonetheless by criticism from fans and the press.

Drummer Larry Mullen Jr. seemed especially chagrined, and when the band won a Grammy for best rock performance by a Group with Vocals in February, he edged its always loquacious frontman Bono away from the mike so that he could issue a public and heartfelt apology.

Longtime fans have always considered Mullen the conscience and truest moral compass of the group, as well as one of the most distinctive drummers in rock.

In 1976, inspired by the Sex Pistols and London's punk explosion, a 14-year-old Mullen placed an ad on the bulletin board of Dublin's Mount Temple High School, eliciting responses from bassist Adam Clayton, guitarist Dave Evans (later the Edge), and an outspoken chap named Paul Hewson who, even though he couldn't sing particularly well at the time, brazenly rechristened himself Bono Vox (Latin for "good voice").

The rest, as VH1's Behind the Music is fond of saying, is history.

I had a long and wide-ranging conversation Monday with the man many consider the heart of U2 as the band made its way toward Chicago. Here are the highlights.

Q. I was moved by your comments at the Grammys, Larry. What happened with the ticket snafu, and why were you so upset about it?

A. We've always been a band that's depended on its audience to carry it through, and we've put them through a lot. We've experimented on our audience, and they've been incredibly loyal to us, so we're kind of sensitive to our audience -- to what they feel and what they think. We came out of being fans: We were fans of music, and we went to gigs.

The reason we charge $165 [for some seats] is so that we can also sell a ticket for $49.50 [for general admission on the floor] -- that's the point. We're selling the best seats in the house to those who can probably afford them, and those who sit in those seats subsidize the others. I think that's fair and that's the way it should be.

We're very conscious of pricing and the ticketing and how it happens, but this time around, the tour was on and the tour was off because of a family illness that I can't go into the details of. The tour wasn't going to happen for a long period of time, so the only way it could go forward was if we changed it, and it got changed at the last minute because the decision to do it came at the last minute. All the plans we'd made for this leg of the tour were completely canceled and thrown out, and it was turned around in a couple of days.

The rules that applied to the original tour didn't get changed in time, so it meant that when the tickets went on sale, you had complete pandemonium. We ended up with this crisis situation, and people felt that they had been had, because we hadn't explained to them, because we couldn't, why the tour had been changed.

Q. It must hurt when you see scalpers getting tickets that were intended for fan club members.

A. It's like I said in the note on the Web site: The idea that your loyal audience is competing with scalpers for tickets is appalling. Unfortunately, it is now part and parcel of what happens. There aren't laws to prevent it. But I think what really upset me more than anything else was the assertion by various fan Web sites who got on some kind of bandwagon where there were accusations of impropriety by the band -- that this was some kind of money-grabbing move and we didn't care about our fans. That's what really upset me more than anything else.

I'm a private kind of person. I love being in the band, and it's my life. I work hard at it, but there are things that I'm not very good at. One of them is meeting the fans and being a man of the people -- I'm not very good at it, and I don't feel particularly comfortable in that position. Bono, on the other hand, thrives on it. Because he does it, it means I'm not under the same kind of pressure. People have taken that as me being surly or disrespectful, but that's not the truth.

The reality is that behind the scenes, I take a real interest in what's happening, with ticketing, with U2.com, with all those things. This time around, because everything was up in the air, I didn't have my finger on the pulse, and I was angry that I hadn't been more in charge and actually taken the bull by the balls and stopped the tickets going on sale the way they did. I felt guilty about that, and I felt that a lot of people, loyal U2 fans, were being treated badly, not because of anything that we'd done, just because the system had broken down.

Q. A band at your level is a major international corporation. Does the machine ever get so big that you lose control?

A. When we moved out of the clubs into the theaters, it was like, "Oh, my God, they've moved into the theaters; it's a sellout!" Then we moved out of the theaters into arenas, and it was, "Oh, they were so much better in theaters; they've sold out!" Then it was, "Oh, my God, they've gone to stadiums!" Or, "Oh my God, they're doing the Super Bowl; what a sellout!" So every time, you always end up pissing off somebody.

As for the question of being out of control, of course as it gets bigger, there are more people involved. We work really hard at trying to keep our finger on the pulse, but sometimes it's just not possible, and sometimes things fall between the cracks. But generally speaking, decisions are made by the band, and they're made in a relatively democratic way.

The iPod idea came from the band; it didn't come from Steve Jobs and Apple. It was something we were happy to stand over as a band. We make decisions through consensus, and we stand by them. If people are unhappy with them, so be it. Things are not always what they seem. We wanted to play to big audiences; we want to be on the radio. We are greedy; we are hungry; we are never satisfied.

I think for some sections of our audience, they wanted to keep us as their own, and we don't feel like that. We appreciate our audience, but we want to get new people in, we want to be on the radio, we wanted to be on the iPod commercial because it is the greatest piece of pop art since the '60s.

It's an amazing design, and it's very cool; we want our music on that. We asked them if we could be in that commercial. We felt like, "Why should there be dancers dancing to a U2 song? Why aren't U2 in it?" And it did what we wanted it to do, and we got to an audience that we never got to before.

Q. The argument against it, Larry, is that when I close my eyes and listen to Achtung Baby, the images it creates in my head are infinitely richer than even the best videos the band has ever made. Now, every time I hear "Vertigo," I can't think of anything besides that damn commercial.

A. I understand and appreciate that; I really do. But our job is to move forward and bring our music to a bigger audience. When you sign on the dotted line for that record deal, you are basically joining the commercial world. That's what we do.

You can't deny that that's what this is: It's part of commerce. You can hide behind this attitude of, "We don't want to be famous; we don't want the money." We're over that. We were over it when we started. We always wanted to be the band that would be part of breaking through, and this just seemed like a perfectly natural progression for us.

Q. Let's talk about the artistic ambition of the last two albums. I was disappointed that All That You Can't Leave Behind and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb lacked the edge that characterized Achtung Baby and Zooropa. At the time, I interviewed the producer of those albums, Brian Eno, who said his role was to come in and erase anything that sounded too much like U2, forcing the band to move in new directions. The more time passes, the more I realize how brave that was.

A. I disagree with you; that was then, and this is now. We've always been a band that has tried to walk away from the past and move into new areas and do new things, and we've always done that. But we got to a stage where the band as a band wasn't functioning. It was functioning like individuals, and the band wasn't performing and playing in a room. We'd become so acute in our distaste for anything U2 that it was just becoming impossible to be creative as a band.

We took the decision that what we'd do is get back into a room and play as a band -- to do what we do. We hadn't done it for years, and that's what this is. It's not a commercial decision: "Oh, let's go back to what we know, because maybe we'll get back onto the charts." It's hard for people to appreciate that. A lot of people go, "Bollocks, all you want to do is sell more records and you'll do anything to do that." That's just not the case. We wanted to get back to being a band.

After The Joshua Tree, we chopped it down with Achtung Baby and then Zooropa, and then with Pop. They were great things, and we're very proud of those things, and we will do that again. But there's a certain stage where you've actually just got to go back to what you know.

I think on this record, the Edge is on fire. I couldn't disagree with you more about what he's doing. Of course there are references back to the past, but I like that. I like getting into a room and playing with the band and doing those things we used to do. I think what Brian Eno brought was invaluable, and Daniel Lanois as well. But we've got to move on, we've got to change, and we've got to take references from the past and bring them into the future. And that's what we've done.

Q. But U2 never wanted to be a band like Pink Floyd or the Rolling Stones, which basically became massive money-making oldies shows.

A. And we won't! With respect to you and your colleagues, when it's time for U2 to get the bullet in the head, we'll do it ourselves, thank you very much! But we're greedy, and we want to push boundaries. We want to do things that nobody else has done before, and we will do whatever we have to do to achieve that. We're never satisfied. We never feel like we've made our greatest record. We always feel we can do better, we can be better, and that's constant. After every record, we sit down and go, "OK, what was wrong with that? What was right with it?" And next time around, we fix it. We constantly do that, and that's why U2 survives.

There's a very deep unhappiness in U2, because there's a sense that we achieved great success and became a really big band, but we were never a really great band. There was always that thing that we were given all these accolades, but we didn't really deserve it. We got it because we managed to do very well live, and it was all about being big. Being big means s--- to us. It's being great that we want, and that's what we strive for.

Q. That sense of satisfaction destroys so many bands. But you're saying that with U2, it's exactly the opposite.

A. It's the exact opposite: We are not happy. [Laughs] It's like, "How can you be unhappy when you're selling out a tour and your record's doing well?" But it's not that kind of unhappiness. It's a creative dissatisfaction.

We want to do better, we want to compete on the highest level, and that means competing on radio, and competing with people like Britney Spears and all those pop artists who are at the top of their game. The songs that are written for them are pretty spectacular, and we want to compete with that. Why else do this? There's no other reason. None of us need to do it, we're all financially secure, and for a lot of bands, that's a huge turn-off. "I've got the kids now, I've got the money, what do I need this for?" This is revenge for us.

Q. Why do you care about competing with Britney Spears? You grew up loving the Sex Pistols, and they didn't care about competing in that world.

A. I'm not sure about that; that was a huge commercial idea. For [Sex Pistols manager] Malcolm McLaren, it was all about that: getting the money and doing whatever he had to do to make it controversial. There's little difference between that and Britney Spears taking her clothes off. It's the same instinct. It's all about selling records and getting the cash.

There is no such thing as anything in the music business at its purest form. It's all cursed by commerce, and you can't get away from it. I don't want to be in a band that's treading water. I want to have my 17-year-old niece or nephew say, "I love that new single." I really want that, because I don't want to be relegated into, "That used to be relevant, it's no longer relevant." If that's not possible, then we will stop.

So why is it important? It just is. It's too easy to accept second best. To compete at this level takes huge brain power and a lot of work, but it's what we do, and we thrive on it. There's nothing like when a 17-year-old comes up and says, "Hey, man, I think what you're doing is cool." It might sound absolutely childish, but those are the things that make you want to continue on. When you look at your audience and see the huge variation from students, college kids, and all the way up.

We're Irish, and when we started out, we were always sort of the runt of the pack. Everybody else was cooler than us; everybody else was better than us; they were all better musicians than us. We were always that band.

We came to America and people embraced us, and they have been embracing us ever since. There's a certain responsibility that goes with that, and it's, "We've got to do this. We've got to remain relevant. We've got to make great music." That's a challenge, and we thrive on it.

Q. And is it still fun at the end of the day?

A. It really is, and in a way that it hasn't been for 25 years. The band is playing better, and Bono is singing better, and there seems to be a real freedom in what we're doing. Sometimes onstage, it just feels excruciating, because you're trying to hold it down, and you never know what's going to happen.

I don't feel like that now. I'm enjoying the shows, and it's just got a different level of maturity. It's a lot less tense and not trying so hard to be perfect. If you make a mistake, it's OK. I listened to a CD of the last show, and there are a lot of fluffs, but it's OK. There was time when we were all striving for that perfection, and now it's, "It doesn't matter; it's the spirit of the show."

Copyright 2005 © Chicago Sun-Times. All rights reserved.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:27 AM | Comments (13)

March 29, 2000

The Million Dollar Man

Hot Press Cover Story, March 29, 2000 (Issue Vol. 24 No. 05)

The Million Dollar Man

BONO on stalkers, women, Lypton Village, love . . . oh, and The Million Dollar Hotel.

Interview: Peter Murphy.
Occasional contributor: Wim Wenders.

If it's Paris it must be Spring. Bono's been out roaming the city of light with Miles' 1957 opus L'Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud on the headphones, feeling like . . . well, a million dollars suggests itself as an appropriate image, but although the singer's approaching 40 this May, he's not that green and crinkly just yet.

Still, since the PopMart tour ground to a halt roughly this time two years ago, Bono's experienced some pretty out-there stuff, even by his standards. For a start, he fathered a third child, Elijah, lost a laptop containing lyrics for the new U2 album (a replay of when his notebooks were stolen before the October sessions), had a telephoto lens poked up his arse courtesy of the Irish tabloids and received the MTV Free Your Mind award last November.

He also refereed Hume and Trimble live on stage in the run up to the Good Friday Agreement, lobbied the Clinton and Blair administrations on behalf of Jubilee 2000, debated Radiohead albums with hardline Republican House Budget Committee chairman John Kasich, blagged meetings with the secretary to the American treasury, the chairmen of Amex, American Express and the Federal reserve . . . and lost his sunglasses to The Pope. The only major player he hasn't crunched numbers with yet is God, but he's probably working on it. By the time you read this, U2 will have been granted the freedom of Dublin – allowed to graze their sheep on College Green forevermore.

And now there's the film, The Million Dollar Hotel, adapted by Nicholas Klein from an original story by Bono (who also co-produced) and directed by Wim Wenders. It says a lot about Hollywood that the singer can get at least $100 billion worth of Third World debt written off in 18 months, but it took him 12 years to get this movie made (at one point in the early '90s, it looked like Winona Ryder and Gary Oldman might take the lead roles, but financing fell through).

You've probably heard a rough synopsis of the film by now. The singer has called the story "a dark fable about the redemptive power of love", but there are also elements of murder mystery, art-farce and even hints of science fiction. The action (or, this being a Wenders film, absence of it) takes place in The Million Dollar Hotel, a rundown establishment in downtown Los Angeles which Bono first set eyes on at a photo shoot in 1987.

The yarn follows FBI agent Skinner (Mel Gibson) and his attempts to investigate the possible murder of the hotel's rich kid benefactor Izzy. He sets about interrogating the clientele of misfits and misfortunates: the simple, smitten Tom Tom (Jeremy Davies); the damaged damned-sel Eloise (Milla Jovovich); native American artist Geronimo (Jimmy Smits); John Lennon obsessive Dixie, who claims to have written all the Beatles' tunes (Peter Stormare); Vivien (a reliably oddball Amanda Plummer) and Shorty (Bud Cort, star of cult classic Harold & Maude). These denizens all participate in a hoax which mythologises the deceased Izzy as a "painter saint", attracting the bright lights of the media to the hotel. And throughout all this, Skinner exploits Tom Tom's love for Eloise as a means of finding Izzy's killer.

The Million Dollar Hotel won the Silver Eagle prize at the 50th Berlin Film Festival a few weeks ago, but like all Wenders' films of the last decade (excepting maybe Beyond The Clouds, the director's collaboration with Michaelangelo Antonioni), it has received a mixed response. Certainly, blockbuster fans lured by the U2 connection and Mel Gibson might well be bewildered by what is ostensibly an arthouse movie. Bono is frank and philosophical about this, but maintains that even hostile critics have asked to see it a second time, still haunted by Wenders' tone poem.

And when Bono describes his film maker friend as a "jazzman", an old hand at – to use the director's own phrase – "flying blind without instruments", he pinpoints what makes the German such a bewitching and bewildering artist. The impact of his work is residual, not immediate. Even with his most confused work, the themes continue to resound in your inner ear after the film has ended, just as the characters take up residence in your head.

So, after all the hoo-ha generated by Bono's involvement has subsided, The Million Dollar Hotel should eventually find its own spirit level, perhaps somewhere between Jarmusch at his quirkiest and Lynch at his most benign. For his part, upon being congratulated on finally getting his creation onto the screen, Mr Vox quips, "Bono voyage!" then chews over the suggestion that the new movie constitutes a kind of lens through which to view U2's travelling asylum. After all, as long ago as December 1988, musing on the itinerant life in a Hot Press interview with Liam Mackey, he admitted that, "the demons follow you home to the padded cell of the hotel room." Familiar imagery, no?

"Yeah, there was always a fire escape, though," he chuckles. "And I've taken full advantage of that. I think it is sad but true that I know a lot about hotels. And having spent most of my life in them, now, the final chapter in the Spinal Tap episode is owning one: the guy comes back from touring and actually builds his own Holiday Inn room! But my experience in hotels has for the large part been the plate glass window to separate you from the storms outside, whereas the experience of the people in the Million Dollar Hotel is rather the opposite. It's a real community. Milla Jovovich and Jeremy Davies became very friendly with a lot of the people still living in the hotel as it was still operational when we were shooting there on the weekends – in fact we'd have to drag her out of it. And it's important not to caricature their lives.

"All cinema, all theatre is to a degree voyeurism," he continues. "You get to stare at people up close. But we tried to do it with some respect, and of course a lot of the lives in the hotel are not such archetypes as the ones that we cast for the movie – there's a lot of decent people just getting on about their day and people who arrived in LA looking for some reasonably priced accommodation."

These hotel chronicles also incorporate allusions to other films such as Milos Forman's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Tod Browning's Freaks (Skinner himself is a genetic mishap, forced to wear a back brace as a result of a botched attempt to remove a third arm – "One of us!"). Shades of U2's origins in the Lypton Village construct here, the artistic collective as a dysfunctional family, misfits getting by in the straight world by commodifying their deviancy.

"That's interesting," Bono concedes. "Well, in the movie, I suppose everybody has a front of one sort or another, but with the scam they have a chance for the first time to come together and they develop a united front which brings them all out of each other. They all have to co-operate with a lie in order to discover their potential. And I suppose if you wanted to stretch the metaphor to The Village and Ballymun/Finglas 1976/77, that's certainly the way it worked for us then.

"But we, I suppose, in a very suburban way, were still dressing up," he continues. "It was a sort of Hallowe'en madness, and even though behind where Gavin lived there was, as it was known, 'The Mentaller', I think the urban experience of people who have fallen out of the sort of health insurance/social services loop is a very different experience, and I would not try to compare ours [to it]. It's a shock, but in the late 80s in America you could still starve. I mean, Reagan closed down a lot of these mental hospitals and hence some of the clientele at the Million Dollar Hotel were in fact outpatients from mental hospitals. That was the point that I discovered them in 1988."

Several people have pointed out the similarities between Tom Tom and a young Gavin Friday, Dave-Id, Bono's own appetite for mischief . . .

"I can't really comment. You know, we all kinda resemble each other with a few drinks; Gavin, Dave-Id, myself, there's a few people, if you put them into the blender, you might get to Tom Tom. But the key is the rhythm."

And also the tone. The Million Dollar Hotel is hardly existential slapstick, but it does contain more wry, side-of-the-mouth moments than your average Wenders film.

"It's true, it has a touch of comedy," the director himself testifies the next day, speaking from Munich. "Jon Hassell, the trumpet player on the soundtrack, when he saw it he found the right category for it, he called it a 'screwball tragedy'."

Hassell also provides what Bono recently described as "the blue mood verging on purple", working alongside Greg Cohen, Bill Frisell, Brian Blade, Adam Dorn, Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, under the auspices of maestro Hal Willner (himself no slouch at constructing elaborate dreamscapes). The result is an album where the songs proper are as rich in atmosphere as crafty Badalamenti-esque interludes like 'Funny Face' and 'Bathtub'.

"I think it's the first time in a while where songs are used as score, where the scenes were actually cut with the songs in mind, as opposed to songs just coming in to provide music," Bono suggests, perhaps providing ammunition for those who've compared the film to a music video. "Recording the soundtrack was a piece of piss. We did it in ten days. It was effortless, we just put up the pictures, we got three giant monitors in the studio, and everyone just kind of responded to the picture. It was a thrill. And Jon Hassell is really the sort of keeper of the flame at the moment, there's no-one who plays trumpet like him. He doesn't like the words 'jazz' or 'new age', in fact, that's the reason why no-one can find his listing in the record shop – he just keeps refusing to come in under any heading. I don't blame him. But he's certainly a man who lives up to his name!"

Let's play paradoxes awhile. Bono's uneasi-ness with the very myths and legends on which rock 'n' roll was founded is central to what makes U2 a great rock 'n' roll band. The quartet's querying of core rock 'n' roll fallacies such as the burn-out/fade-away clause – their essential contrariness – eventually qualified them for the iconic status they seemed to covet so zealously around about Rattle & Hum time.

Bono's distrust of the Jesus Cobain complex seems to manifest itself in The Million Dollar Hotel through a kind of implied antipathy towards the character of Izzy – to all intents and purposes a trust fund brat on the slum. Put this to the singer though, and he somewhat surprisingly turns the argument around by aligning himself with the death-tripper.

"Izzy, to my mind, represents our position," he says, "because with him comes the cameras, the TV anchor people, the journalists and the writers, which is exactly what we've done to that hotel by my writing the movie."

Scratch that theory then. Let's try another angle. In the film, the friction between Skinner and Dixie the Beatles freak is quite timely, given not only recent disclosures about the FBI Lennon file, but also the imminent release of Mark Chapman. Has Bono ever suffered from crazies claiming to have written 'Pride' or 'Sunday Bloody Sunday'?

"Yeah, I've had some very direct experience of stalking," he admits. "I don't want to get into names or places because it can be an ongoing problem, but let's say I and the office of U2 have had experience of armed and dangerous stalkers at the time when this piece was written.

"There was an amusing incident in a hotel in Los Angeles around about that time, where the stalker had committed a date for revenge on not receiving his royalties. And so they had a load of FBI people around the place where I was staying, it was one of these bungalows you get in the grounds of the hotel. So anyway, midnight had passed and I wasn't dead – at least as far as I could make out – and I went asleep and I guess it was in the back of my mind. And I woke up to this 'Bang!', y'know, a very loud crack, and I was up firing telephones and lashing out in the dark with Cuban heels and anything I could find in the direction of the bang. But it was just my suitcase had fallen off the edge of the bed (laughs). Anyway, he went away eventually and I think he bothered somebody else."

How did Bono feel about making a cameo appearance in Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho, fixated on by the deranged Bateman?

"Somebody showed me that . . . what was his first book?"

Less Than Zero.

"I read that, I didn't actually get onto American Psycho. In New York at the time, the bit I did read didn't feel like fiction. Somebody showed me the passage (but) it was a long time ago, so I can't really remember a response."

Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief – in The Million Dollar Hotel's art forgery sub-plot, Julian Sands' dealer character Terence Scopey appraises Izzy's paintings as garbage, "but important garbage". In this scene, he could almost be reiterating U2's celebration of precious detritus on the Zoo TV extravaganza. Remembering dramatis personae like The Mirrorball Man and The Fly, it's perhaps no surprise that U2's frontman identifies with the hypemeister.

"It's a great moment," he laughs. "Wim asked me to play a few of the parts in the movie and the last one I turned down was the part of Scopey the art dealer, and indeed Julian Sands was wearing a pair of my glasses. I have to say, it's one of my favourite scenes. There's a few scenes are worth going back to see a few times, that's certainly one of them (adopts Scopey's voice): "Large . . . dark . . . important .. . . erotic . . . I can sell it!' He's a really exceptional actor actually, I'm very glad he did it. The artist . . . as you know we got Julian Schnabel to actually paint the paintings, and of course he would stand by Scopey's scene. In so many ways the dealer has become the artist."

While we're on the art tack, let's freeze frame the scene where Eloise and Tom Tom, on the run from the police, lie side by side in a room in the hotel with hands clamped over each other's mouths, an image which could almost be a still from Achtung Baby. One of the trains of thought Bono was fond of joyriding around Zoo-time referenced their televisual-surrealist impressions of The Gulf War to Picasso's 'Guernica', the painter's howl of response to the bombardment of the small Spanish town in 1937. Similarly, Dali's 'Autumn Cannibalism', which depicts the Spanish civil war as lovers devouring each other with knives and forks, just might constitute the visual link between The Gulf's global theatre of hate (Zoo TV) and love's private kitchen stink (Achtung Baby).

Bono: "Well, one of the lines of questioning that you're on is sharp in that the movie, though it was started in the '80s, with our kind of fan club relationship to America, has in its visuals that appreciation of Americana and the sort of Hopper-like pictures, and yet in its scenes, it's very much like where we went in the '90s, and I think it does bridge those two very well."

Another invisible middleman here might be Sam Shepard, whose writings were a catalyst for Rattle & Hum's finest track 'Hawkmoon 269' and whose Motel Chronicles formed the basis for Wenders' Paris Texas. In that '984 movie, the director, often criticised for idealising women, painted Nastassja Kinski with just the right amount of innocence and experience. Eloise could almost be her character's kid sister, and one of the film's more fruitful contradictions stems from the rub between Wenders' tendency to worship and Bono's more t