U2 is like a family to me but we’ve sometimes run out of love, reveals pop legend Bono in new memoir
FOR more than four decades, U2 have commanded the world stage.
The line-up of Dublin schoolfriends Bono, The Edge, and Larry Mullen Jr has remained constant and unbreakable.
In this extract from Bono’s memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, the singer reflects on his incredible journey with the band he calls “my brothers, these fellow travellers”.
It’s November, 2018, and he’s standing on stage with them in Berlin . . .
Scene 4. Onstage, Berlin, November 2018
IT’S the last night of singing our songs of innocence and experience.
We’re in Berlin, playing a song called Acrobat on the circular stage, and it is an acrobatic feat that I’m witnessing.
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Four men dressed as street performers on the high wire. Not falling off, walking across it, dancing on the pinhead of gravity.
We are high on a song we haven’t played in 20 years — it is so difficult to play — but tonight Edge, as they say in guitar magazines, is “shredding” his cream Les Paul. The Zen Presbyterian now as High Mass as Halloween.
A whirling dervish in some kind of guitar exorcism, expelling the devil from me in the stage drama where I have blacked-out voodoo eyes. Releasing the bat in all our hells.
I look at Larry, who has become the drummer that his father always wanted him to be. A true jazzman, leaving far behind anyone’s expectations except his own.
I watch him rolling around the top of his kit, no longer a student, a master — his sticks slapping the skins and snapping the snares as if he were Buddy Rich or some bebop Irishman out of the 1950s.
He has become , surely the name of a jazzman, a nod to another era when being junior meant there was a senior. Meant you had a father. You had lineage.
The quotation marks around “Jr.” were an ironic dig at jazz from us punks. I always look forward to the moment of heraldry in the show when I can hail: “On the drums, Larry Mullen Jr.”
The crowd roars, but tonight I don’t hear them, I’m in a trance where the high-decibel scream is sucked into silence. I can’t hear anything
The greatest bluff in an era of so many was no bluff at all.
A century later the boy with no Plan B, the teenager with no idea in his head other than four strings are better than six, is now in complete control of his bass and his life.
Adam Clayton Superstar is exactly the same as he ever was and entirely different.
Yes, he is flirting with every woman he can meet eyes with from the stage, but now he has a wife and two children and so much more wisdom than the knowledge of the world he once sought.
I introduce him as a luxury good, tease him for teasing our female audience, but I am in awe of how far we have travelled.
Maybe Adam has travelled the greatest distance from the clichéd corpse he could have been to the no-cliché-at-all life force that he has become.
Flirting with every woman
As the guitar solo crescendos, here’s The Edge, this singular talent and freak of nature, still ringing those bell-like harmonics that he made famous on our first single.
I see him earlier still, at 15, sitting in the green corridor in the new breeze-block building, guitar in hand, plucking the sounds from his favourite LP, Close To The Edge, by the prog rockers Yes.
The boy who would buy a guitar the same shape as his head, the could-be code writer and code breaker who became the programmer of hearts and minds.
“Edge is from the future,” I am about to tell everyone, as I often do, “and he says it’s better there.”
But in this moment I’m having there is no everyone. It’s just the four of us in the music room in Mount Temple, and this Edge is from the past.
I tell him that the three of us owe so much of our present to him, to the hours and days, the months and years of staying in his bedroom and getting it done.
The cruelty of genius that so often doesn’t come in a flash.
Adam Clayton has travelled the greatest distance, from the clichéd rock music corpse he could have been to the no-cliché-at-all life force that he has become.
Bono
The time it takes to stop time. To squeeze the eternal out of the instant. The time it takes to stretch time.
Now, time has vanished, and everyone with it. I’m standing in the middle of this great arena at the end of a circular stage, and all I’m thinking about is the start and the end of this band called U2. Us four.
There’s a phrase we’ve used touring these songs of innocence and experience: “Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience.”
What have I found here at the far end of experience? Gratitude.
In my case to be alive. One year, 11 months and five days since I was in the operating room in Mount Sinai hospital.
You’re never more alive than when you nearly weren’t. Now you see things with a new clarity.
For example, I now know that this band is not a collection of songs.
It’s more like a single song, an unfinished song.
It's why we keep returning
It’s why we keep returning to rehearsal room, to studio, to stage, to try to finish this song, to complete U2.
Perhaps ever since we started this band, we have been trying to finish it, to complete it. This song that has become our life. To be released from it. This must be it. As good as it gets. Are we complete? Are we done? I am grateful.
I hear the words I have offered our fans most nights of our life onstage, but now I’m speaking to my brothers, these fellow travellers who had no idea when we first met what kind of road we’d be taking.
Thank you for giving me a great life. Thank you for letting me be in your band.
Thank you for letting me harass you and hector you, push you and pull you. Inspire and disappoint you.
Tears are streaking down my clown face. They are not tears of joy.
I find myself apologizing for using a little too much force in the pursuit of lift-off.
I tell The Edge that the three of us owe so much of our present to him – to the hours and days, the months and years, of him staying in his bedroom and getting the music done.
Bono
In the gathering of their best selves, I might not have always been at my best, but if this is the end, so be it.
At the peak of our accomplishment I wonder if we have run out of road, run out of reasons to share the road together.
We hear rumours of bands who barely speak
Why am I thinking this? Are we still an unfinished song? What if the song is complete? It is not an unreasonable question.
Plus, there is a cost to this on everyone’s nervous system. And it gets more expensive the older you become, the longer you’re together.
For a lot of people, certainly a lot of performers, there is a degree of bulls**t required just to get out of bed in the morning and get dressed.
Facing the day is hard enough without having to face yourself. Or worse still, face those three other selves who can see right through your bullst.
If the person you are telling yourself you are doesn’t ring true with the person your band knows you to be, you are most likely “on one.”
The snake or lizard is allowed the metamorphosis, but these beloved brothers are walking around and over the skin you’ve shed. They may be delighted you’ve shed your origin story, but they know what it is.
Why do bands stay together?
And if you can’t live with that, maybe it’s time to look for the door.
Why do bands stay together? We hear rumours of bands who barely speak any longer, whose most intimate meeting is on stage or in the accountant’s office. Are the financial rewards really worth that sinking feeling?
We understand a band is a family business, that it’s putting food on a lot of tables, that sometimes this means certain behaviours are given a wide berth.
And also that a family business may be the greatest of endeavours because a family is the place where you are free from self- consciousness, where you can be yourself in all your different colours and moods.
Family is where you can be fearless. Maybe, at its best, it’s a place where “perfect love drives out all fear”.
So why am I looking around at my friends on this stage thinking these thoughts? It’s not as if we haven’t thought about it before.
We break up all the time, after tours or albums where we have had to stretch a little too far.
We’ve never been critical of each other in public, but it’s no criticism to say we’ve sometimes run out of love. It happens. The well of friendship can run dry in a family, a marriage, a community, a band.
Bono
The best albums are often the hardest to complete. The best songs are often the most costly because four creative people are fighting for them.
Fighting in a family can leave scar tissue, but sometimes it’s when you stop fighting that you stop functioning.
The writer Jon Pareles once asked us if it was real respect for each other that had us so decorous in our relationships, or if it was prison etiquette — the fear of a knife fight with someone else in close confinement.
Next question, please.
I’ve tried to be honest in these pages while respecting the perspective of these three people I love and work with.
We’ve never been critical of each other in public, but it’s no criticism to say we’ve sometimes run out of love. It happens. The well of friendship can run dry in a family, a marriage, a community, a band.
A good strategy for me is to continually go back to the source. To drop my bucket in the well in hope of a refill.
Why am I always talking about the scriptures? Because they sustained me in the most difficult years in the band and they remain a plumb line to gauge how crooked the wall of my ego has become.
To getting the measure of myself.
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This is where I find the inspiration to carry on. The exhortation that makes this struggle with the self workable. The wisdom that makes it doable.
I return to a spiritual master like the apostle Paul, way back in the first century of the modern era. I go to someone who overcame himself.