NEWS LYRICS PHOTOS BAND FORUM CONNECT ABOUT HOME

"I did make some changes to the bed," Bono announces as he leads Larry Mullen and me on an impromptu tour of his newly purchased New York City apartment. "It had all these bits around the top" -- he gestures towards what obviously used to be a canopy -- "and it kind of looked like where Elvis used to sleep." He pauses a beat, as if a light suddenly switched on in his head. He turns, looks at us, smiles and says, "As opposed to where Elvis will be sleeping."

Bono's longstanding Elvis obsession aside, his new digs on Central Park West could not bear less of a resemblance to Graceland, the King's monument to kitsch in Memphis, Tennessee. For one thing, the word Spartan does not begin to describe the apartment's practically desolate décor. Each room contains only enough furniture to define itself -- a table and chairs in the dining room, a small coffee table in the living room, a bed in the bedroom -- and all of it left by the previous owner. "That table cost more than the whole rest of the apartment," Bono says dryly as we move through the dining room and into the kitchen. "Pretty Japanese," is Mullen's bemused summary of his lead singer's bare-to-the-bone lifestyle.

Bono, who with his wife and children still maintains his primary residence in Dublin, would scarcely be himself if he didn't have a full-blown theory to validate the way he's living now in his New York pied-a-terre. "So many rockers were destroyed by furniture removals, trying to choose a Chinese rug and deciding on the right taps for the bathroom," he explains, evidently only half joking. "Most rock and roll people come from very little and are nervous with their nouveau-riche status. They're anxious to buy just the right piece of art and the right carpet, so they spend all their time and money on that. And their next album's crap!

"You think of some artist who set fire to your imagination when you were a youngster," he continues, "and then you think, What the fuck happened? I guarantee you: It was not divorce. It was not drugs. It was buying furniture. Taste is the enemy of art!"

Not coincidentally, perhaps, Bono and U2 lately have been applying the same less-is-more approach to their music. The artwork for the band's new album is lying on Bono's coffee table, and the title sums up their sentiments perfectly: All That You Can't Leave Behind. It's all about paring down to essentials, building songs on the elements of a band's sound that are crucial to its identity. After the self-conscious excess of U2's 1997 album Pop, the garish confusion of the PopMart tour that followed, and the logic-defying interviews that accompanied both (Bono prattling on about "jewels amid the trash" or some such), this refocusing is much welcome.

"Has rock and roll bequeathed the charts to R&B and pop?" Bono asks, in discussing the ideas that informed the making of the new album. "Is rock music now afraid to bite the arse of the pop charts? It shouldn't be. And if it has lost some ground in the last years it's because it's forgotten the discipline of the 45 and the shock therapy that Nirvana brought to the pop charts, that the Sex Pistols had and the Stones and the Beatles. We're in a new era of progressive rock -- and we should be very afraid!

"So that was it -- a pretty simple brief for a U2 album. No polemic. Just 'Is that a good tune? No? Well, fuck off then with your big ideas.' "

"We just went into a room and played," Mullen explains, "which was really kind of odd, because we hadn't done it for a long time. If you weren't happy with something, the band could just replay it as opposed to having to get things programmed up. It was good fun to feel like a musician again! When we get into a room together, something really happens. I mean, if you set up the gear now, we could play all the songs on the record in this room.

"That's why U2 started. That's why I wanted to be in a band in the first place. I mean, technology makes me sound great. Give me a drum machine to play and I'll sound great. But there is another thing, and that's playing with the other guys. It was a good record, then, from the band point of view. We had all the chances to make things right; we have no excuses. And I haven't felt like that since our first record."

It is in the spirit of U2's new ethic of discipline that Bono makes a truly shocking announcement shortly after I arrive at the apartment. As I reenter the living room from the terrace, where I marveled at the spectacular view, from 16 stories up, of the Central Park Reservoir, Bono says a bit sheepishly, "I've stopped drinking." He clearly notices my surprise -- and in the interest of full disclosure, my disappointment. "Only for a few months," he hastens to add, then laughs nervously. "I want to get in shape -- but it's driving me mad! I want to go out and celebrate and tell everybody how proud I am of the new album. But sober, I'm much more modest!"

For me, the prospect of interviewing a sober Bono is, well, a bit sobering, if only by virtue of its strangeness. My 13 years of reporting on U2 is a merry -- if somewhat blurry -- memory soaked in rivers of red wine and whiskey. But Bono's plan is working, at least. Clad in a green T-shirt and black trousers, he looks fit and firm -- in impressive fighting shape. He's turned 40 this year and seems set to confront middle-age head on. As for Mullen, who is now 39, there simply is no question that a portrait of him is miserably decaying in an attic somewhere, like Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. In his black T-shirt and shiny black workout pants, Mullen looks no different from the way he did when I first met him in 1987.

"What else are you going to do in your late thirties," Bono asks rhetorically, as he continues to describe U2's no-nonsense approach to creating All That You Can't Leave Behind. "You're not going to be harder. It's hard to be funkier. You just better have some tunes, and something to say. You stop thinking about who's hip and you start thinking about 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' -- and the sick feeling you get in your stomach every time you hear it.

"You can dial up a groove and you can call down an atmosphere from any $100 Casio," he goes on, "but, for us, we've got to get to another level with the songs. The arrangements can get as fucked-up as the album in questions requires, and this one didn't require that. But that's where we're going now -- with the songs. They're the eternal things. That's what we're looking for -- the essentials."

Heralded by its luminous first single, "Beautiful Day," All That You Can't Leave Behind is a back-to-basics U2 album. But as with, for example, the music of the post-psychedelic Beatles, the album's simplicity is earned. It's a conscious aesthetic strategy, a choice, not a retreat from ambition. Songs like "Beautiful Day," "Walk On," "Stuck in a Moment" and "Kite" are elegantly constructed and ring with the spiritual yearning in U2's music that has spoken to so many millions of people over the past two decades. In a whirling, unsettled time, the album is an encouraging statement, a declaration in both its music and its message that some things remain true, whatever else might change. "What you don't have/You don't need it now," Bono sings at the end of "Beautiful Day," and it's a freeing idea: Let go, and live fully in the moment.

Still, at the end of "Kite," the album's most moving song, Bono describes himself as "The last of the rock stars/When hip-hop drove the big cars." At such moments, you realize that all the uplift and encouragement of the album are meant as much for the band as for its listeners. For all their bravado, U2 must be uncertain about their commercial prospects at this time in their career. "Who's to say where the wind will take you/Who's to say what it is will break you/I don't know which way the wind will blow," Bono sings on the soaring chorus of "Kite," and, coming from a singer and a band that have never made any bones about their lust for a huge audience, such a yielding to forces beyond their control is no small matter.

Bono and Larry settle in on the green leather banquet that provides seating at the sleek silver table in the breakfast nook of Bono's kitchen. They're sipping tea, and Bono has put out some orange slices. They occasionally pull cigarettes from Larry's pack of American Spirits, the smoke of choice for enlightened rock stars these past few years. Larry combs the cabinets and finds some oyster-shaped ashtrays. "I did not buy those things," Bono says emphatically.

In part, Bono and Larry are in New York, where Larry has for the past eight years also maintained an apartment, because bandmembers attended MTV's Video Music Awards show. Despite whatever questions they may harbor about their place in the pop firmament -- and despite their relatively advanced years -- U2 have no interest in ceding MTV to Britney and the boy bands. Bono and Larry served as presenters at the show, and Bono, at least, seemed fully in his element. On his way into Radio City Music Hall, he snuggled up to Jennifer Lopez and, backstage, he greeted actress Kate Hudson by crooning Macy Gray's "I Try."

It's all part of the plan. "We make pop music, we're in the pop business," Mullen says bluntly. "We want to be on the radio. We want to compete on that level, and we're not embarrassed about that. Pop music is what's happening, and we're competing for that space. There doesn't seem to be a lot of rock music right now. What would you call Korn and Limp Bizkit? What is that? I appreciate some of it, but I don't know what it is. It's not rock and roll."

"There's a visceral side to that music, which is something you could call rock," Bono counters. "It's that physical thing that Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin did -- like a boxing match on your ear. The scream that everybody holds inside is released in music like that. I'll tell you, if it gets the groove, if it gets hips, it's powerful. Without the hips, it's Cookie Monster.

He laughs, and continues, "There is, though, a huge difference in the end between pop and rock. It's something to do with pop telling you that everything is okay, and rock telling you it isn't. Rock music says you can change the world -- the world inside your head, the world inside the room, and even the world outside the room. Pop music says, 'Why bother? Everything's okay.'

"That's why I hope there are radio programmers out there who will take a chance with putting a rock band in a pop format. And that's why I like MTV. Everything is not in its ghetto there. MTV has a younger audience now, but I was 11 years old when John Lennon blew my mind. Music meant everything to me then. So I want us to be on MTV."

That will to battle for an audience is very reminiscent of the U2 of the early Eighties. when the band came rocketing out of Dublin. So much post-punk music from the U.K. at that time seemed anemic and vitiated, and so many of those bands viewed popularity in America with a smug contempt. U2, on the other hand, pursued it wholeheartedly. The band seemed intent on conquering America, one club show at a time. By the time Bono was climbing the scaffolding high above the stage at Live Aid in 1985 [@U2 note: actually, that moment occurred at the US Fest in 1983] -- electrifying a worldwide audience estimated at one billion -- the band was on its way to the superstardom it would enjoy well into the Nineties.

But that stature for the band is no longer guaranteed, if, in fact, it still exists at all. The conceptually muddled Pop album did not sell well by U2's multi-platinum standards, and by the end of the PopMart tour, the band was failing to fill the stadiums that had, for better or worse, become its accustomed live setting. U2 had never shown any instincts for moderation -- pushing further and getting bigger had always been the group's guiding principles. But the Pop album foundered on half-digested concepts drawn from dance-club culture, and the PopMart tour -- with its huge hydraulic lemon, gigantic vidi-walls, and gleaming golden arches -- may have set out to comment subversively on commerce and show business, but ultimately seemed only to be particularly depressing symptoms of the problem.

Audiences in general had already begun to grow more fickle, and the possibility loomed that even U2 fans -- the loyalest of the loyal -- might be losing interest. After nearly 20 years of mad ambition -- and extraordinary achievements -- it seemed like U2 had finally overreached.

"Pop hurt us here, in the U.S.," Bono admits. "It was difficult with the tour and the hoopla. I'm not sure all our fans knew or cared about Andy Warhol and what we were trying to do -- all our concepts, and pop as the death of God, and whatever. It was 'Phoooo! Let's hear the songs, Bono.' And the songs were special, but we didn't bring home every arrangement. People had to work at it a bit too much. And some of the sneakers-and-short-pants crowd didn't see the bright colors of what we were doing with PopMart as vivid. They saw it as lurid."

"We made some fundamental errors in our planning," adds Mullen. "We'd planned to go on the road before we finished the album, so we went straight out of the studio and onto the road. We were using a lot of technology, and we didn't have the time to get it together. It took us a while to figure it out. That didn't help."

"And there was the other thing of having that quiet little gig to start up with -- in Las Vegas," Bono says, laughing, about the PopMart tour's wildly publicized opening date. "I wasn't singing well. Everyone turned up, and they heard the sound of a balloon being burst. And I remember Los Angeles, a place where we had never played a bad show: It was the first time I could feel, 'They're eating popcorn out there.' It's weird being a performer -- you can sense stuff. Like, 'They're buying T-shirts during this song?' And yet, beneath all that pomp and color, there was humor and heart and soul, but it was not coming through.

"I think people were on irony patrol, and it wasn't at all ironic," Bono insists. "We'd come in through the crowd and come walking up to the stage, and 'Mofo' would kick off. The band stops, and the opening lines go, 'Looking for to save my, save my soul/Looking in the places where no flowers grow/Looking to fill that God-shaped hole/Mother, mother-sucking rock and roll.' I mean -- that's hardcore. Not at all effete or smart-ass. But it maybe looked smart-ass. So there you have it."

Yes, there you have it, indeed. And here you have the new U2 working hard to undo the damage that was done. The band will not be hitting the road until the spring this time, and there are no plans for any stadium shows. "This time we want to go indoors," says Bono, "play for like four months and see if we want to go on from there. We're really going to rock the house. We're going in for lift-off, and our band in full flight is something to see."

"I'm so looking forward to playing indoors," says Mullen, "to be able to look at people and see the whites of their eyes."

Intriguingly, U2's move towards simplicity began during the PopMart tour, inspired by an unlikely figure. "It was a DJ that may have sent us down this road," Bono says. "When we weren't tight enough at the start of the last tour, we had to find time to rehearse. So we ended up at one point in the basement of a hotel in Washington, D.C. Howie B., whom we'd worked with on Pop was DJing on the tour, and also helping out front during the show with effects and mixing with our own sound guy. Howie was at the rehearsal, acting as a kind of producer.

"We couldn't get all the gear in," Bono goes on, "because it was all in the trucks on the road. So we just had a rented bass guitar, drums, a Vox AC30 and a PA at this rehearsal -- nothing else. Howie walks into the room as we're playing, a three-piece and a singer, and he just starts going, 'What's going on here? What is that sound that you're making?' And we just go, ahem, 'Howie, this is rock music.' And he's like, 'Wow, the sound of the drums and the bass is incredible.' So he started removing effects at the live shows, and by the end of the tour there were very few loops and treatments. He said, 'It's really odd. The more I'm taking out, the bigger the sound is getting.' And then he said, 'That's the kind of record you should be making next.' "

Talk about getting back to all that you can't leave behind -- or maybe, more appropriately, "Tonight a DJ Saved My Life." Whichever, U2 are back at full strength -- and we can sure use them.



© Revolver, 2000. All rights reserved.

Related Article:

• Dec 01, 2000 - U2's Edge and Adam Clayton Look Back on Two Decades of Hit Albums with Few -- If Any -- Regrets

@U2 Calendar

March 19 2010 11:00 PM - 01:30 AM - Unforgettable Fire Tribute Band Performance Celebrating St. Paddy's Day 3/22 - 5/10/2010 8th Annual "Build a Well for Bono's Birthday" Drive Begins The goal is $50,000. Full Calendar