The Frontman Read online

  Commercial success didn’t immediately follow upon McGuinness’s manoeuvres, but his ambition and U2’s discipline meant that they left no stone unturned. Ireland was, unbeknown to itself, coming to the end of its era of the showbands, typically eight-piece sharp-suited groups who toured the highways and byways playing cover songs for dancing. These bands were still, in 1979, making more money than the small collection of post-punk groups like U2 that constituted an incestuous Dublin scene. The Boomtown Rats were big, but their profits seemed to underline the truism that London was where the action was. McGuinness eventually took his ‘Baby Band’17 to play in London, but built them up even to London journalists and industry scouts as Dublin’s quintessential live act. He got them signed to a small, non-exclusive deal with the CBS subsidiary in Ireland, and built their live following remorselessly, putting on a famous series of Saturday-afternoon shows in the half-derelict Dandelion Market next to St Stephen’s Green to cater for U2’s under-eighteen following, who couldn’t go to pub and club gigs. The shows at the ‘Dando’ would become the stuff of legend: few Dubliners of a certain age will admit to having not seen them there, though a few will tell you they were rotten. The climax of McGuinness’s efforts came when – as something of a last throw of the dice – he booked them to tour Ireland and to play the National Stadium on Dublin’s South Circular Road. ‘National Stadium’ is a grand name for a boxing venue that seated a couple of thousand people, but McGuinness put them there knowing full well that they couldn’t possibly fill it: top international acts sometimes failed to do so. Sure enough, there were hundreds of empty seats when U2 took the stage on 26 February 1980, but the declaration of importance and ambition of that winter was enough to seal a good deal at last with Bill Stewart – a British army intelligence officer turned ad-man turned music scout – on behalf of an international label, Island Records, which had made its fortune with Bob Marley but, according to Graham, was a bit at a loss when it came to the current state of rock.18

  That was okay, because U2 didn’t sound like they had much of a clue either. Listen to the first U2 singles and you may find it hard to believe that this is a ‘great’ band working in the aftermath of, say, the Clash’s London Calling – released a few months before U2 signed with Island. Musical range, lyrical wit, political sensibility: U2 had none of the above. They were, it’s true, still young, five or six years younger than the youngest members of the Clash, but youth alone doesn’t fully explain just how callow they sound. It’s easy to conclude that this is an Eagles cover-band that picked up some pace from punk and some posturing from David Bowie but simply hadn’t listened to enough good, passionate music to understand how it might work technically and emotionally. Their devotion, meanwhile, to what authors Sean Campbell and Gerry Smyth have identified as the main animating discourse of Irish ‘beat’ music in its formative decades, ‘creative self-expression’ – the idea that one performed music in order to explore and reveal allegedly deep emotional truths – is all too earnestly apparent in these tracks.19 Bono was writing almost all of the lyrics, but from the start the four members of U2 shared the song-writing credits, and eventually the royalties, equally.

  While many English bands in this period went chasing after black sounds, mainly reggae and ska, U2 were a whiter shade of pale. A series of ‘London spies’ – talent-spotters from the big city – had previously found the band ‘gauche and formless’,20 and it’s easy to hear why. Yes, there is something interesting and different about Edge’s guitar-playing – and once he had added an echo-unit to his paraphernalia that playing would remain the band’s major sonic contribution to the rock canon over the coming decade or three. But to understand why this mediocre band was preparing to take on the world requires some understanding of what Bono contributed, other than banal lyrics and what was then still a fairly ordinary voice.

  One thing was his stagecraft. He and his friend Gavin Friday (of arty band Virgin Prunes) had studied theatre techniques with a teacher, Conal Kearney, who had himself studied with the internationally famous mime artist Marcel Marceau; Irish actor and playwright Mannix Flynn, who would later go on to national fame with his robust explorations of his traumatic youth, also helped out. Bono was a ‘boy from the northside’ with a sophisticated, trained sense derived from leading practitioners of how to use his body and eyes to seduce an audience.21 Then there was his charm, a sort of face-to-face stagecraft. Bono was, by all accounts, friendly and un-aloof, his motor-mouth not suggestive of excessive calculation, despite Bill Graham’s conclusion that Bono and U2 ‘were always rather skilled at discovering people to discover them’.22 Hot Press fell into U2’s orbit, and has remained there permanently. Bono just happened to be especially good at making friends with, say, Ireland’s best music writer, Graham, and Ireland’s favourite rock DJ, Dave Fanning. Writing in 1985, Fanning, who would remain a favoured insider for decades, freely admitted that U2’s initial charm had little to do with music: it was ‘Bono’s histrionics which gave U2 an air of more substance than was suggested by the evidence of their overall performance’, he wrote. More than their records, their ‘late night rock show interviews’ on his own pirate-radio show meant that ‘insomniacs all over Dublin could quite clearly see U2’s unique passion, commitment and dedication to the idea of the potential of the song as something heartfelt and special, and the uplifting power of live performance’.23 In other words, Bono talked a great gig.

  When the time came, he wove similar personal magic in London, New York and beyond. Bono ‘had the ability to persuade the interviewer that U2 were his own private discovery and that the journalist had been cast by the fates to play his own absolutely personalized role in U2’s crusade against the forces of darkness’, wrote Graham.24

  Where the journalists and DJs went, other listeners followed. It’s a pop-critical cliché to say that vague lyrics like Bono’s invite you to project your own circumstances into the emotions they evoke. But in the case of U2, the invitation came embossed and with a charming, effusive personal greeting from the lyricist himself. How could anyone resist?

  WAR: NEGOTIATING IRISH POLITICS

  Bono and U2 were, however, stuck with their Irishness, and in the early 1980s, with violence raging in Northern Ireland and the republican hunger-strikes escalating both tension and international interest, it was not always easy to be vague about one’s views and commitments. While their near-contemporaries, Derry’s the Undertones, could skirt artfully around the Troubles of which they were indubitably children, the bombastic and moralising U2 found the crisis that they had, and had not, lived through to be a more difficult and almost unavoidable subject.

  In truth, they were probably unambivalent about the Northern crisis, insofar as any people living on the island could be. In keeping with the by now established consensus of most of their class in the Republic, they probably believed the Provisional IRA to be thugs and murderers whose campaign of violence must somehow be stopped, though the worst excesses of British and, especially, loyalist-paramilitary violence evoked some distaste too. For the most part, at least in U2’s well-off and liberal circles, fundamental critiques of the Northern state established by the partition of the island in 1921 had faded, and those who attempted to raise them again were often derided as ‘sneaking regarders’ of republican violence, apologists for the IRA. This suite of views would pose little problem for U2’s entrée into culturally enlightened society in Britain, where only a few brave Irish immigrant groups and leftists were prepared to stand up, even amid occasional IRA bombs, for the right of Northern Irish nationalists to resist discrimination and state violence, and to insist that Britain withdraw its troops from Northern Ireland. But it would pose more of a problem in the US, where open adherence to ‘the cause’ was more widespread in and beyond Irish communities.

  Thus, for example, U2’s plans to ride a float in the 1982 New York St Patrick’s Day parade were abandoned when they learned that dead IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands had been named as honorary grand mars
hal. The hunger-strikers – seeking political status in Northern prisons against a British government, led by Margaret Thatcher, that insisted on treating them as criminals – evoked great respect in the US and around the world. In Northern Ireland the respect was sufficient to see Sands elected as MP in Fermanagh and South Tyrone just weeks before he starved to death. In U2’s Dublin, however, Sands was beyond the pale, and even an association as remote as would have been represented by a then still obscure U2 on a float in that parade was more than they could bear.25

  ‘Of necessity, Irish rock has striven to escape into a non-sectarian space, even at the cost of being apolitical’, Bill Graham wrote with typical certainty in 1981. While this quest for safe spaces was understandable for those working in the midst of the conflict, the nature of the ‘necessity’ for a Southern-based band is never explained by the highly influential Graham. But the punishment for transgressing the rules that said music should be escapist, for engaging with the Troubles beyond bland condemnation or rocking through the heartache, is evident in the same article in which Graham makes that strange and prescriptive assertion. It’s a Hot Press interview with the great trad-rock fusion group Moving Hearts, in which Graham excoriates them for supporting the hunger-strike campaign and badgers them to clarify whether they support the IRA itself.26

  The unstated assumption is that it was ‘apolitical’, just common sense, to oppose the IRA. Even if they had been inclined to do so, it would have been unwise in the Ireland of the 1980s and early 1990s for U2 to adopt anything other than this version of an apolitical stance – a studied pseudo-neutrality that was essentially an endorsement of the political status quo (or the status quo if only the thugs would stop all the killing). Certainly, the tightly enforced Dublin consensus went, there was no injustice in the North that was worth shedding blood over, and the reasons many Northern Catholics felt otherwise – from discrimination and segregation in jobs and housing to the historic splitting of the island of Ireland and the ongoing provocation of a British military presence – were largely ignored in favour of a generic deploring of violence. (The hypocrisy of this rhetorical pacifism was exposed every time its proponents refused to condemn various acts of violence by, say, the US or British government.)

  The personification of this consensus was Garret FitzGerald, who served as taoiseach (prime minister) for most of the 1980s, heading coalitions between his own Fine Gael party and the Labour Party. Virtually every biography of Bono tells of his admiration for FitzGerald, who combined bristling contempt for Northern republicans (his response to a desperate delegation of hunger-strikers’ families was to ‘lay all the blame for the hunger strikers on the republican movement and to suggest an immediate unilateral end to their military campaign’27) with a determination to launch a ‘crusade’ to reduce the Catholic hierarchy’s influence over social legislation in the Republic. This was an alluring combination not merely for Bono but for a generation of Irish social liberals who saw the vaguely professorial Fitzgerald as someone who could lead the state away from the backwardness represented by Catholic nationalism.

  But the hapless FitzGerald saw his crusade backfire in 1983 when anti-abortion activists successfully campaigned to have a ‘pro-life’ amendment added to the constitution, and again in 1986 when his attempt to introduce divorce was defeated. Bono and U2 were nowhere to be seen in either of these bitter referendum campaigns, though Bono had chanced an election photo-op with FitzGerald in 1982. In September 1983, just a few days after the disastrous abortion referendum, FitzGerald appointed the increasingly famous Bono as a member of a minor face-saving distraction called the ‘National Youth Policy Committee’, a new and (it turned out) short-lived initiative, chaired by a high-court judge but without any actual powers, that allegedly aimed to address the myriad social and cultural problems faced by young people in those recessionary times.28 One hagiographic biography of Bono, written long after the fact, suggests without citing any evidence that Bono resigned after a few months, in frustration at the committee’s bureaucracy,29 but there is no sign in the Irish Times archives of his doing so publicly, and thus embarrassing his friends in government. (U2 did not put all its eggs in one political basket: the hard-headed McGuinness was closer to the opposition Fianna Fail party – a fact that kept U2 close to the levers of power after 1987, when that party settled into government for twenty-one of the next twenty-four years; McGuinness himself would serve on the state’s Arts Council, an important funding body, for more than a decade.)

  To paint Bono in his proper Dublin middle-class Fine Gael colours is not to endorse those who were conducting the ‘armed struggle’ in Northern Ireland. Most people genuinely abhorred the violence of the IRA. However, it is obvious in retrospect that the ongoing campaign of vilification and demonisation of Northern Irish nationalist communities during this period deepened their marginalisation and made it easier to ignore the reasons those communities supported the ‘Provos’ (Provisional IRA). And thus it prolonged the violent conflict.

  It is in this context that one can see what a faintly absurd statement of the obvious it was for Bono to introduce the 1983 song ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ in concert after concert with the famous words, ‘This is not a rebel song’ – a ‘rebel song’ being, in Irish parlance, a pub-republican come-all-ye that denounces the Brits and/or celebrates the resistance to them. And yet there was a certain revisionist something-like-genius in the way that song – its writing started by The Edge and completed by Bono – appropriated republican ideas, including that of ‘Bloody Sunday’ itself, to create the impression that U2 were in some way the true rebels for the way they bravely rejected rebellion.

  Bloody Sunday can refer to two events in Irish history: a date during the War of Independence in 1920 when the IRA killed British intelligence officers across Dublin, and soldiers retaliated by shooting into a Gaelic-football crowd in Croke Park, killing fourteen spectators; or an afternoon in 1972 when British paratroopers again killed fourteen unarmed civilians, this time after a civil rights march in Derry, in Northern Ireland.30 Thus the term ‘Bloody Sunday’ mainly denotes the idea, and reality, of brutal and indiscriminate state violence. The U2 song, however, says nothing about who perpetuated the scenes of carnage that it vaguely describes, and makes no reference to the state. Indeed, in its original form, in lyrics written by The Edge, the song started out with a direct condemnation of the IRA and, implicitly, of those supporting its members’ rights in situations such as the hunger-strikes that had taken place so recently when the song was written: ‘Don’t talk to me about the rights of the IRA.’31 This line is especially revealing of its writer’s ignorance, or at least his readiness to offend Northern nationalists: the innocent dead of Bloody Sunday in Derry were protesting against Britain’s internment-without-trial of suspected republicans; so in a sense Bloody Sunday’s victims, the apparent object of the song’s sympathy, had died for trying to ‘talk about the rights of the IRA’ – and of course of the many non-IRA members who had been picked up in violent military trawls of nationalist communities.

  The group thought better of that ‘Don’t talk to me …’ line, which turned into ‘I can’t believe the news today’. It’s perhaps the most fateful edit of U2’s entire career, moving the song just far enough into ambiguity to ensure it would anger no one. The protagonist is someone watching the war on television, and the repetition in the song title conveys the weariness of someone observing a society that has degenerated into savagery. How long are we going to have to keep watching this, the song asks, with ‘bloody’ a curse that in Ireland and Britain commonly suggests ‘boring’ as much as it does ‘horrible’, as in the title of John Schlesinger’s 1971 film from which the track borrows its name. There are some portentous ruminations on the observers’ mediated distance from the events – ‘And it’s true we are immune / When fact is fiction and TV reality’ – and a Christian coda after the instrumental break; there’s also some powerful noise coming from the band; what there isn’t is an ounce of
insight, empathy or courage.

  Writing in 1987, Irish journalist Brian Trench cogently observed that the song ‘turned part of the current war in the North into an anthem for no particular people with no particular aim’. Years later, Northern Irish academic Bill Rolston, in the course of proposing a typology of how songs dealt with the conflict, persuasively assigned ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ to his third of four categories, songs of accusation, which ‘condemn the protagonists’ but concentrate their ire on republicans. The song has even been read as first proposing, then rejecting, the ‘simple republican solution’ embodied in the phrase ‘We can be as one tonight’, abandoning that in favour of a militantly Protestant cry of ‘onward Christian soldiers’.32 One recalls with some sense of irony that this was one of a set of songs that Bono wrote in response to criticism aimed at his previous song-writing of ‘not being specific enough in the lyrics’.33

  U2 drummer, Larry Mullen Jr, said in 1983 that the song was born partly out of annoyance at the pub-and-pew republicanism of Irish-Americans. ‘Americans don’t understand it. They call it a religious war, but it has nothing to do with religion. During the hunger strikes, the IRA would say, “God is with me. I went to Mass every Sunday.” And the Unionists said virtually the same thing. And then they go out and murder each other.’34 But you can search high and wide to no avail for an IRA statement to the effect that it was a religious war and that God would take the side of mass-goers.