Bono by Michka Assayas Read Free Book Online Page B

weren’t gonna be part of any scene.
    I had this vision of you as innocents, which you obviously weren’t. Young and coming from an innocent place and bringing your candor to a cynical place, and winning over the cynicism. Maybe it was a romantic French idea, that the beauty is to make an elegant gesture and then disappear. [Bono laughs] But what I underestimated was your hunger.
    Yeah, hungry in a way that couldn’t be fed: that’s the thing. You know, I remember Adam saying to me somewhere around Rattle and Hum : “Look, we’re here now; we don’t have to try so hard,” and Ali and I were asking the same thing, actually: “Can we relax?” And I said: “Well, we can relax, but we’re about to become irrelevant any second. To be relevant is a lot harder than to be successful.” If you’re judging where we are by the fact that we can afford to buy this house, it’s a dangerous measure. I judge where weare by how close am I to the melody I’m hearing in my head, and how close are we to what we can do as a band to realizing our potential. That’s a different thing. I was unhappy . . . because I felt we were far from where we could be. We’re getting closer now. We always had the grasp, it was just the reach was the problem. It’s like a boxer with about six inches missing off his right hook, that’s what it felt like in U2 most of the time. Just occasionally, just because we were quick, our inner force would knock one of our goals out, but normally, the reach was less than the grasp.
    Of course in the eighties, you thought that bands like Echo and the Bunnymen or the Teardrop Explodes were more fashionable, that the British press would praise them more than U2. Was there a time when you felt those bands were now behind you? Was it because of America?
    These are great groups you’re talking about, but they had the conflict of being celebrated in their countries of origin. We weren’t a British band. We accepted the U.K.—they never fully accepted us. Because Irish people are very different to English people, actually. I love the English reserve, I love the rigor, but I think we were just kind of bleeding all over them a bit too much, too emotional, and just too in-your-face. We were hot when they were cool. We had a phrase to describe some of the bands of the time—not the Bunnymen or the Teardrop Explodes—but the ones you’d see walking down the King’s Road in London, so looking the part with so little to say: “Everything but It.” We, on the other hand, had “Nothing but It.” And that was the difference. Some of the bands really could have been contenders, but the mood of the time and media didn’t encourage thoughts of world domination like the Beatles, Stones, or even the Sex Pistols. They weren’t allowed to own up to their ambition. It was like the cultural revolution, it was like Mao. The music press just wouldn’t let you put your head above the parapet. You know, you’d have a custard pie. I thought: “Fuck, I don’t mind. I’ll be the clown, throw the pie.” Because my definition of art started with: you put your hands in under your skin, you break your breastbone, you rip open your rib cage. If you really wanna write,that’s what you ought to do. Are you ready to do that? Or is rock ’n’ roll for you just a pair of shoes and a haircut, or a certain sour existentialism or a certain sweet decay? That was one of my first definitions of art. Blood. That comes from Irish literature, that comes from Oscar Wilde writing De Profundis, that comes from Brendan Behan walking on the stage while his own play is being put on in front of an audience, telling people to fuck off. In Ireland, that pain of opening your rib cage, it’s in us.
    That’s not just Irish, you know. There is this famous quote from Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who wrote Journey