Bono by Michka Assayas Read Free Book Online Page A

your father was too hard on you?
    They all felt that my father was too hard on me: everyone agreed on that. I don’t know if he was hard enough. [laughs] Because I do think peopleshould be hard on themselves, don’t you think? We’re in a climate of self-love, really. We’re in a climate of self-love and self-loathing.
    I think you’re right. It’s the two sides of the same coin. People are obsessed with themselves: everything comes out of themselves and returns to themselves. I guess that’s the dead end of narcissism.
    A degree of narcissism is necessary, I suppose, to look in the pool to see your reflection. And if you’re gonna write, that’s the excuse of writers for being selfish bastards. What about you? I mean, you don’t seem narcissistic or self-obsessed.
    Sometimes not enough!
    But you write. Why do you write?
    Well, because I’m unable to express things in another way. I often believe that the words that come out of my mouth are not the ones I should be using. I can’t let things loose unless I’m really sure about them.
    It’s maybe good.
    Yes, it’s good, but sometimes it’s an excuse . . .
    Oh yeah.
    . . . for not putting yourself on the job.
    That’s true. That’s often an excuse. You have to dare to fail. I think that’s the big one: fear of failure. I’ve never had fear of failure. Isn’t that mad?
    That’s the maddest thing, but at the same time I think that’s the secret. Because you’ve never been afraid of making a fool of yourself, you’venever been afraid of looking ridiculous. You’ve never doubted that you would make it. I was reading through this book that your friend Niall Stokes wrote, Into the Heart: The Stories Behind Every U2 Song, and he quoted this song that I had no remembrance of, I must confess, that went like: A picture in gray, Dorian Gray. *
    Oh yeah, that’s fantastic!
    I felt like a star . . .
    I felt the world would go far if they listened to what I said. I mean, it’s ironic, and it’s got some wit, but it’s the thought that you have something to say.
    I wanted you to succeed, because it was a sort of bet I’d made, but I never thought you’d make it this big. I thought you’d remain a cult favorite, like these eighties bands that you used to read about in the NME who were so proud to have street credibility.
    I never had much interest in that. The sound of getting out of a ghetto is very different to the sound of getting into one. [laughs] It’s a very different sound, whether that ghetto is an intellectual one, or the place where you grew up.
    But look, Bono, you came from Dublin, which was the most provincial of places. You had the English language, sure, but nobody had made it from Dublin.
    Philip Lynott from Thin Lizzy. The only black man in Ireland . . . and he joins a rock band! [laughs] That’s great.
    He was a big figure in the seventies, that’s true. But was he the only model you had?
    Bob Geldof was an inspiration. He was from Dublin.
    True, you had the Boomtown Rats. They were big. So was it because of these two figures that you thought it was possible?
    You’re right in the sense that they didn’t live in Dublin, they moved. Both Phil Lynott and Bob Geldof moved to London and, in Bob’s case, colonized it. And I learnt a lot from Bob. I learnt a lot of my lip from Bob; I had a sense that the impossible was possible from him. Oddly enough, I didn’t learn about social activism from him. In fact we used to argue about it. He used to tell me that pop and rock ’n’ roll should never stray from sex and fun. Leave revolution to politicians! Right up until he had his epiphany, it was like: “It’s only rock ’n’ roll and I like it.” No, we had to find our own way. It’s true, in the end we stayed in Dublin, and it was us against the world. We