ACCORDING TO THE whiteboard propped on an easel in U2’s rehearsal studio, they have a pretty full docket leading up to and immediately following Horizon’s March release, starting with a Grammy performance in two weeks. Slightly worrying is the fact that the band does not know how to play the new, intricate songs live just yet. I had asked Clayton if it might be possible to peek in on some practice, and he politely demurred, which is why I’m not entirely sure how it’s come to pass that 24 hours later, I’m watching them blaze through the rousing “Magnificent.” (Bono calls this “French-disco-variety U2.”) One theory: I’d told Bono that my wife and SPIN’s photo director, both very pregnant, were flying in from New York, and he seemed oddly touched—I get the sense they’re invited and I’m the plus-one. As the band plays in lockstep and sundry techs mind the progress, Bono runs through the song with his overcoat on, looking over at us mischievously during the line “From the womb, my first cry / It was a joyful noise.” The song burns to its finale, and he leads us down a spiral staircase to the garage.
A quick spin through town, then Bono ditches his Maserati outside the entrance to the Shel-bourne Hotel like a man who knows he isn’t gonna get towed—rock star parking. He is eager to have a pint and tell us things to do in Ireland—a kind gesture to be sure, but I worry he’ll be hassled in public. “Nah,” he says. “People here are so fucking bored of me.” When we walk into the posh bar, conversation all around hushes but doesn’t halt. Necks crane, then return to their cocktails.
It’s tempting to wonder why he’s spending his much-coveted time scribbling travel and restaurant suggestions in a notebook, blessing a total stranger’s uterus, then taking the entire visiting SPIN retinue out for dinner. Does he just need
LARRY MULLEN JR.
to always be the consummate host, if not for an audience of 80,000, then for a party of six? Now I’m doing it: Is Bono being authentic?
I’m in O’Donaghue’s, an impossibly bustling pub with no regard for Dublin’s fire codes, pinned to the bar by a large man named Kevin. “Fookin’ Bono,” he sputters. “Everyone says he likes the young girls. Probably just Irish jealousy.”
THE FIRST THING you may notice about No Line on the Horizon is that it all sounds a bit rude—the
TURN YOUR HEAD AND COIF At the Bijou Cafe in Philadelphia on December 15, 1980, during their lamentable Loverboy phase
title track announces itself with a cymbal crash, swirling synth, and off-kilter minor-key guitars and martial drums, assertive and pleasantly unnerving. The next might be the opening line: “I know a girl who’s like the sea / I watch her changing every day for me.” It’s a romantic thought, as well as a fair hint of what it might take to live with Bono for 26 years, as his wife, Ali, has. Perhaps even more remarkable than U2’s longevity as a band is that half the members—Mullen is the other—are still with the girls they dated in high school, leavening the megalomania with some serious domesticity. (Stars: They’re just like us!) It would be difficult to argue that the success of one achievement is not directly attributable to the other.
“Brian Eno would tell you the best thing about U2 is the sociological phenomenon,” says Bono, “which you need to understand if you want to understand the musical phenomenon. My friends who are doctors or public servants leave their house at 7: 30 in the morning and get home at 7: 30 at night. But when I’m home, I’m home, and when I’m traveling, everyone runs away and joins the circus, too. We bring a tutor on U2 tours; my bed is big enough that it fits my entire family—I wake up with three chicks and two young boys. It’s glorious, and people would die for it. We have this thing in our relationships and in our music, and it sounds vomit-inducing, that allows us to throw a very different kind of punch. U2 have built an entire universe on this.”
If it all sounds too glorious to be true, some might argue there’s a reason. Though U2’s long history is remarkable for its dearth of gossip and scandal, there was a picture that popped up last summer of Bono on a beach in St. Tropez with his friend Simon Carmody and a pair of bikini-clad teenagers. “It’s great,” he says. “They cropped out the married folks and all the other people who were with us. The actual photo is on our fridge. You know, I’ve written about seduction, I’ve written about infidelity. But I’m not a country artist.”
Adam Clayton is a man apart from his band in many respects and has been since day one. In the early days, while Bono, Edge, and Mullen struggled to reconcile their devout Christianity with the inherently heathen nature of a music career, Clayton suffered no such hand-wring-ing. (“We found ways to catch up later,” Edge says.) When the band reached their late-’80s/ early-’90s apex, Clayton was the only one to veer down the drugs-and-supermodels path, gracing the tabloids on Naomi Campbell’s arm. And as his bandmates have settled into occasional, mannered indulgence, he’s been sober for more than a decade. But the more substantial difference is that he remains the only single and childless member of U2, and he accepts his outsider role with equal parts humor and melancholy.
“It does always seem I’m on the opposite side of the road trying to catch a bus going in the other direction,” he says, smiling. “But it’s just my own journey, and what I appreciate now is how my differences have always been respected and appreciated and accommodated. It takes a lot of tolerance to put up with someone as destruc-
Scott Weiner/retna
50 april 2009 / Spin.coM doeS not Make your aSS look fat
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