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"[Larry]'s incredibly direct, incredibly black and white, but he's so professional and so honest. He's a one-take wonder." -- Edge |
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"[Larry]'s incredibly direct, incredibly black and white, but he's so professional and so honest. He's a one-take wonder." -- Edge |
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Rockin' in the Not So Free World (Part 1)Yen will I see you again?!!
NME,
December 16, 1989
Yen will I see you again?!!...In the first of an exclusive two part report on the band that more than any other has found a meaning for old-style rock 'n' roll fervour in the cool, calculating '80s, Gavin Martin went to Japan to witness the last night of U2's Love Comes to Town tour and observed the biggest band on the Globe tackle the inscrutable ethos of the East.
The time had come to say sayonara to Japan. Away from Dublin since September, Adam Clayton was feeling homesick and he retired early. Larry Mullen was brighter than I remembered him; he was talking about the thrill of playing with B.B. King every night and of meeting his teenage idol David Bowie in Australia. But Larry had hurt his hand onstage and disappeared early as well. The Edge, ever the gentleman, put in an appearance despite a bad cold but now he too had made his apologies and left. And so it was down to Bono, tumblers of Jack Daniel's and red wine at the ready, to do the talking. And he talked and he talked -- about following your dreams because that is where your heart lies. He'd been living through his dreams for the past few months now, surfing his jet lag and getting by on little sleep. He'd overdone it a bit of course, and in Australia he'd got sick and had to postpone a couple of shows. But the point was it had proved an amazingly productive time and he'd written enough new material to fill an LP and a couple of probably slightly messy books. We talked about the big changes going on around the world and he said it was an exciting time because people were realizing that neither capitalism nor communism worked. With this in mind we toasted Van Morrison as our favorite politician because for 25 years he'd lead a one-man campaign for recognition of a state that everybody lives in but no one acknowledges -- the nation state of dreams. And dreams were coming together now as people in Latin America, in Europe and in Africa began to dream new dreams. Dreams that might yet turn the world around. "It's better to be drunk on the Holy Spirit but sometimes Jack Daniel's is handier," he'd joked to a recent interviewer. Either way we were caught up in the spirit of now talking wildly, rashly, euphorically. We overstepped ourselves a little but then who was worried; you have to let rip sometime, right? So we sat near the end of the decade that began in the drudgery of post-punk doldrums and we cried, "who would have believed it?" Ten years later, ten years down the road from 2-Tone, the funny haircuts, the miserabilists, the postmodern ironists and the pop schemers, who would have thought that the dreamers would hold the balance? Who would have thought that with thousands moving on a new psychedelic groove thang or finding themselves moving in a new orbit of future funk, that in 1989 the most potent rock 'n' roll show on the planet would be one based on a rigorous assertion of those old unfashionable concepts "love" and "peace"? And he asked about England and what was going down there. I told him about the Manchester revival and he said he was a fan of the Stone Roses but was disappointed that many of his contemporaries had fallen by the wayside or failed to grow. It saddened him, he said, because he thought that if those groups were better then U2 would be better too. I told him there was some bemusement if not antipathy to U2 among the British rock press because they were able to be a more successful band in Britain by staying based in Dublin than many groups on the mainland. But I told him not to let it get them down, despite the history of imperial dominance, Irishmen had always had a place helping England rediscover itself. He talked about being onstage, how it sometimes seems like hours are passing by when things are going wrong. The band was playing better than ever now, he said, but sometimes he just wished they could go according to plan, that his monologues could be planned and paced as expertly as Brucie baby. Then he said the show would be much better. Yeah, but it wouldn't be as good, I thought. He talked about the people he admired and looked up to -- people like Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson -- those who had suffered the slings and arrows of adversity but come out on top. He said that his heroes all used to be dead people because it was easy, now he knew the virtue was in surviving. "I'll live to be 60 before I get myself together, then I'll be a bad motherf----er and everyone will have to watch out," he'd joked the previous evening. And we talked and talked and I got drunker and drunker. He told me how they'd been sitting down in Australia, him and David Bowie, and they'd been thinking about James Brown and decided there and then to write a letter and post it to him. Maybe someday they'd be able to write a song for him. And I thought how J.B. had pulled me through my youth and thought maybe I should be writing to him as well. And he talked about his sometime buddy Pete Townshend and said it made him sad to see his group going out on tour under the auspices of a leading beer manufacturer. And he talked some more about, about addictions to drugs, to fame (which he said was a drug more enticing even than heroin), to money and to women. And he talked about the faith that helped him walk the line. And then he'd said enough and I scrabbled up to bed to hear Van the Man singing about God shining his light, to sleep perchance to dream. And when I awoke again this is what I wrote... LAST YEAR U2 brought "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" -- a song of spiritual faith expressed through earthly doubt -- to church and recorded it with the Harlem choir the New Voices of Freedom for the Rattle and Humalbum. Tonight they bring the show back into a rock 'n' roll show but it has not left the church. Tonight the part of the New Voices of Freedom is played by the 20,000 people in the sports hall of Osaka Castle in the Kinki province of Japan. Beginning with the singer's confessional prayer and strummed guitar accompaniment, the song goes into audience response mode when Larry Mullen's drums sound the call to action. Adam Clayton's bass resonates and the shock waves set off the Edge's electric guitar hosanna. Then it's back to the singer to ride out the musical wave but Bono's part, as so often in a U2 performance, departs from the script. Caught up in the heat of the moment, seeing a chance for transcendence in the music, he cries, "lift me up now," and the Osaka audience finds that the song has been handed over to them. They sing the lines that turn the rabble-rousing certainty of many a stadium rock anthem on its head. The singer well knows the sentiments thus expressed and he's all aquiver. Like a soul lost in wonder he sways over the audience seeking solace and the fellowship in the choral rejoinder and bathing in the musical supplication of his colleagues. This is the last night of U2's three-night run at the Osaka venue and the last date on the Love Comes to Town tour of Japan and Australia which unites the greatest rock 'n' roll band of the '80s in a sturdy alliance with veteran bluesman B.B. King. It's only the second number of the show, albeit a completely different one to that on the set list drawn up half an hour earlier, but already it's obvious that tonight is going to be special. This was supposed to be an end of tour party with the road crew invading the stage, the backdrop projectionist getting a chance to go public with his fish fetish and the singer unloading his helter skelter philosophies of social concern, Christian mysticisms and emotional outbursts with even less reserve than usual. And indeed, all those things do happen, but as always with U2 it's the unexpected, the departure from the schedule that produces the magic. They play the already established highlights from the previous shows -- among them the studio compositions from Rattle and Hum, which are being played for the first time on this tour. There's the beautifully measured humility of "Love Rescue Me," with co-writer Bob Dylan's vocal part brought up by the honeyed rasp of B.B. King, the grand poetry and temptingly exotic imagery of "All I Want Is You" and the aforementioned gospel-transformed "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." But there's also a composition they've never played before which, again to everyone's surprise, Bono decides to unveil towards the close of the set. It is called "Slow Dancing" and though he composed it for country legend Willie Nelson, it beautifully matches the style and substance of such compositions as "She's a Mystery to Me" (the song he and the Edge wrote for the late Roy Orbison) and "Hallelujah Here She Comes," the superior B-side of the "Desire" single. But the most memorable part of the show is the way in which the battle against the stiff orderliness that is part and parcel of going to a concert in Japan is brought to a conclusion. There'd been a guy in the front row who'd been causing the group some vexation all evening. Each time one of his fellow punters had moved towards the stage he'd been so horrified by the departure from honourable Japanese conventions that he'd attempted to reassert the privilege of his prime position by forcing the excited girls back. Bono had called him out a few times, once he stopped in mid song and the teenage street "hellion" in him came out: "Look, one more piece of shit out of you, pal..." but in the end such threats proved unnecessary. The group relaxed into the show and old stiff shirt was left floundering like a latter day King Canule vainly attempting to cling to the Old Ways. There was an open invitation for someone to play guitar during "People Get Ready" which brought a local expert out from the stalls and into the limelight. "You're not supposed to be better than me," said the singer as he bade farewell to the first night's invited extra. That guy was so good, so technically proficient that his wailing solo stopped the band in its tracks. Although he asked for his name off mic it was noticeable that Bono didn't try to introduce the local hero to the crowd. "I wasn't going to try and pronounce it," he told me later but it was also noticeable that on the second night there was no offering of instant fame for an aspiring guitarist in the crowd. Further stimulus is provided by the exuberant uplift of the encore "When Love Comes to Town" where, as usual, B.B. King and his brass section featuring the manic head-shaking of Boogaloo come on to give support, a Live Aid type interlude in which Bono brings someone out of the audience for a long, loving embrace during "Bad." The latter gesture is one of several times when I feel the critic departing and a lump coming into my throat. Call me a sentimental sucker but this is a band that can break through, can capture the moment. They did so when they came onstage in front of 100,000 people at Wembley Stadium in London on June 13, 1987, playing along with Ben E. King's "Stand By Me," the poignancy of which was impossible to escape in a country where Margaret Thatcher had only three days previously been returned to power with yet another landslide victory. They did it again when they played the last ever version of the rebel cry for peace, "Sunday Bloody Sunday," in America on the day of the Enniskillen bomb blast and it's clear from the way they work, changing songs as they go through the set, sometimes having an onstage argument about what would work best next that they are always attempting to seize the main chance. But they are well aware of the contradictions inherent in being the most soulful exponents of one of the most capital-based art forms in the world. Earlier Bono had declared, "this is a rock 'n' roll show. It's not a rock show, it's not a heavy metal show, it's a rock 'n' roll show and that means that you the audience are no different to any of us onstage." Someone, possibly the Edge -- that wily man of wisdom, father of three, wearer of gypsy headscarves, the guitar technician of the '80s -- had stopped him short in his tracks and Bono recoiled; chastened, he qualified his statement, "except that you all have made us all very rich, that's a big difference." But the music still offered treasures to anyone who wanted them and at the close of tonight's gig the "tidal wave" that B.B. King had predicted before the show was splashing onto the stage as the band played out with "40" from the War album. The "I will sing, sing the new song" chorus reverberated around the hall and then, just as the end appeared to be in sight, a funny thing happened. One by one in a by-now accepted part of the show the group leave the stage, singer first, then the guitarist and the bass player, who grins and waves to the audience. They leave Larry Mullen to play out the show. Larry is the youngest member of the band, often credited with holding them together when one or other member has decided they want to pack it all in. He tells me later that he doesn't know what he plays at this stage in the performance, he just thrashes away and whatever comes out, comes out. Tonight what comes out is the intro to "Bullet the Blue Sky." Now usually if Larry is alone onstage playing the opening of this epic fuselage it heralds the arrival of the other members to the stage. So, the show may be over but it sounds like this band is only beginning. THE NME had come to Osaka for the U2 shows, not for an interview. Bono was all talked out, fed up with being considered the spokesman not only for a generation but also a rock 'n' roll band which was always greater than the sum of its parts. Put him down in front of a microphone -- and it could be anywhere, in a hotel room, a bar or even onstage -- and chances are he'll say something he doesn't want carved in stone. In any case their promotional obligations were to local publications including a selection of the hundreds of Japanese pop magazines. Other spare time was spent in meetings with the various people who shared their spiritual and political allegiances. As an early champion and old acquaintance, however, I was welcomed into their circle, asked to respect obvious confidences and allowed to view the inner workings of U2 on the road at close quarters. The arrangement was not disagreeable -- they say enough in their music, in post-gig conversation and onstage raps to fill a feature -- and I was curious to see how the group around the band worked (not least because U2 have more beautiful women holding positions of power in their organization than any major rock 'n' roll outfit you can mention) besides all of which, I hate transcribing tapes. By the time we get to Osaka we've been traveling 21 hours by plane, train, bus and taxi. Along the way I've been given a souvenir by a Russian schoolboy returning from a two-week exchange scheme in London, met a continent hopper from Blightly on his way to visit the fleshpots of Bangkok and a free-falling Antipodean parachutist who told me that while on the New Zealand leg of their current tour, two U2 members laid a wreath at the burial place of Greg Carroll, the New Zealand roadie to whom The Joshua Tree album is dedicated. The trip downtown from Tokyo airport takes us through some of the most boring industrial settlements imaginable and at the train station we begin to discover Japan. That means discovering not just the people with their fastidious decorum and regimentation but also the fantastic expense of the dearest country in the world (£8 for sleeping tablets, £3 for a coffee) and the electronic gadgetry shop every five paces with more, increasingly redundant, products. It also means discovering the motivational soft drink machine outside the ticket office. Motivational soft drinks are one way in which Japan solves the dilemma of being the most Westernized economy in the world without embracing the decadence of drug abuse. You'll find these approved eye-openers, revitalizers and energy-givers on every street, along with -- now this is what I call civilization -- all night beer dispensers. Like so much else in Japanese life, however, the soft drinks aren't everything the pidgined English exclamations on the cans suggest. Indeed as the jet-lagged traveler stocks up with Pocari Sweat (active ingredient salt), Fibri Minti (active ingredient caffeine) and Mucous (active ingredient I wouldn't care to know) he soon realizes that the fad for these refreshers is as attractive to the locals as last month's Walkman or digi-planner. With the sinking feeling that I'd been hoodwinked as good and proper as the time I bought a square of blackened candle wax from a dealer in downtown Amsterdam, we boarded the train. There we find Whitney Houston, the Japanese sponsor's face of the month, picture-selling Walkmans in every carriage. Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Cats is playing just outside the city and Run DMC are passing through the country too. Rock 'n' roll bands, pop bands, rap groups -- they all love to play Japan. The shows start early giving them time to hit the town afterwards and concerts are organized with a military efficiency, planned to run as smoothly as everything else in a society which often appears to have had its soul replaced by a computer. As Whitney Houston, Lou Reed and Bananarama and nearly every other performer who's been in the country have found out, Japan offers ample opportunity for anyone wanting to make extra money through sponsorship. Along with performers like Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young, U2 have consistently turned down offers from manufacturers who want to present their shows. Recently they were offered five million dollars by a leading soft drinks company. When they turned it down the company then said they'd give the money to a charity of the band's choice. The group turned that down too, feeling that if there's an altruistic motive then why the need for the publicity, why not just give the money away quietly without any fuss? The answer is obvious, the publicity from the gesture would be worth a lot more than five million to the company and the end result would be to compromise the music, making it a vehicle for someone else's dreams, for someone else's schemes. Osaka, a Japanese trading port for centuries past, is not the futuristic hellhole we'd been led to expect. There's a bustling downtown bar, club and restaurant area teeming with business types. Innocents abroad once again, we find ourselves buying a meal which costs £100 and still leaves you feeling peckish enough to peruse the shelves of a nearby supermarket. There we pick up a pack of nibbles, a mixture that looks like dried tadpoles and nuts. Approaching the checkout desk I realize just in time that the packs of aluminum and charcoal tissues that I've picked up aren't for blowing your nose but are essential accoutrements for the young Japanese woman about town. Back in my hotel bedroom, an American with a Californian tan is giving a tourist guide to the Kinki region on one of five "information channels" on the TV. His stance is at best impartial, at worst cruel. There is a "so-called" area of Japanese beauty, a "supposedly excellent" restaurant and an "allegedly wonderful" festival -- nothing he mentions escapes the implicit scorn of this agent of American colonization. We don't go to see Hiroshima, an hour-and-a-half from Osaka, while we're in Japan. Willie Williams, who takes care of U2's light and slide show, had been there. He said the place was all rebuilt now but there was a field that had been left untouched where the bomb landed. To visit it was a strange, eerie experience that could make you feel ashamed to be human. But you don't have to go to Hiroshima or Nagasaki to experience the fall of that horrendous event. In Japan the effects are all around you. Right through its history Japan has been an adaptable nation and after the Second World War and the atomic bombing, the country bought into western society to such an extent that it is now on the brink of owning what they used to call the free world. But at what price? The dedication of the Japanese businessman who works all the hours God sends to the land of the rising yen meets its match in karoshi. Karoshi is the name doctors have given to a new disease which causes death from overwork. The roots of karoshi are embedded in the capitalist system with its decrease in personal communication and increase in specialization and competition. It leads to cases like that of Mister Wakamura. Recently featured in the Japan Times, Mister Wakamura lies in hospital unable to recognize any friends or family. The only words he can say are the name of his company. His symptoms are consistent with those of a stroke but there has been no cerebral hemorrhage -- the computer in his head got overloaded and just packed up. That may seem funny, but then the black farce of Japanese reality often betrays more comic possibilities than local jokes. Even here the servile, masochistic approach to western lore and fantasy is apparent. A joke, Japanese style: Astronomy follows the stars by calculation, astrology by the zodiac and Hollywood by reading the tabloids. And you think that's funny? No, neither do I. If someone told me about the girls in the elevator I might think they were funny and I guess at first they are. But after a while they seem like the saddest thing I've ever seen. These uniformed girls stand in the elevators if the hotels and department stores, they were and still are a fashionable fixture in certain antiquated establishments in Britain and America. But in the hyper-modern world of Japan's service industry, where technology is so advanced that the trains come into the station on time to the last micro second and bus stops light up and sound an alarm when the bus is half a mile away, they are relics, aged years before their time. Their function can only be to further the cloying obsequiousness of a country which prides itself on being top of all those league tables the capitalist world considers so important -- one of them being full employment. The sheer drudgery and futility of these women's jobs are as far from full employment as I could ever imagine. With delicate, robot-like gestures they indicate the way out of the lift and in a small airy voice announce the floor number and anything of special interest available there. Their faces, actions and voices are expressionless and if you look at them long enough you begin to think they may be half-dead. And of course no-one pays them any attention, they are just there as another reminder of the sad servility and meaningless ritual which keeps this country's emotion in check every minute of the day. U2 PREVIOUSLY played Japan exactly six years ago, at the end of November 1983, just after the release of Under a Blood Red Sky had established them as premier pomp rockers of the new Celtic fringe. Back then it was the heyday of instantaneous western experienced before, back here they tended to be something of a boy's band, and they found the phenomenon hard to handle. As with everything else they've found hard to handle before and since -- death ("I Will Follow"), faith ("Gloria"), the battle between the spirit and the flesh ("With or Without You") they put it into a song. But the song itself only referred to the event in passing. What it centered on and what it took its name from was The Unforgettable Fire, the title of an exhibition by survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I was thinking about this when they played the song during their second show in Osaka. That night the band had got off to an awkward start, charging and blustering their way through "I Will Follow," the music a dense black fog, the singer striking some of the most awkward poses in rock 'n' roll, straight out of a bastard Bowie mime class. He knew it too -- "It's been six years since we last played here. I hope it's been worth the wait. I mean, I hope it will be worth the wait." The version of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" that followed was a world away from the one they played the following night. Indeed, when Willie Williams put the house lights on and the group struggled to get to grips with the song, it occurred to me that as they near their 30s they may be coming to a stage where they too will begin to hand over the bonds entrusted to them through liaisons with Little Richard, Keith Richards, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan to name but a few. U2 are an Irish band. Though their guitarist and bassist have first generation links to Wales and England respectively, their singer is Irish through and through, he hasn't been able to find any other line of descent in his family. Like Kevin Rowland said, his national pride is a personal pride. Sometimes it's a source of frustration, even anger -- success in Japan and U2 were subject to the same frenzy and hysteria as such dear departeds as Culture Club, Wham! and Haircut 100. In his hotel room Bono sets his guitar aside and remembers their first brush with the estrogen principle. He asks me if I have ever heard a thousand teenage girls purr, unaware perhaps that my line of work does not often introduce me to such a dubious pleasure. The purring sound, a great gathering hum that got louder and louder as he and "Lally" Mullen sat in a tube train was what he remembers. Mullen, with his blond hair and archetypal pinup qualities, was the group's chief object of oriental affections. In a scene that must have been reminiscent of the Beatles' great escape out of the limo in A Hard Day's Night, the group fled from the throng by way of a side exit. During the rest of their stay they were constantly followed, girls hid in lifts, conspired to get into their hotel rooms. It was a type of adulation the group had never experienced before. NATIONALITY IS something the band come back to again and again. Sometimes they're forced to; all over the world tricolour-waving Irishmen and women appear at U2 shows. Japan was no exception and on the opening night in Osaka Bono had acknowledged their presence during the segue into Bob Marley's "Exodus": "All you Irish people here I hope you're here for the same reason that we're here -- because you want to be here." Tonight, when he calls out to find if there's any of his countrymen in the hall there is no reply. "Well," he offers lamely, "you can all be Irish for the night." It's old-fashioned blarney, Bono going showbiz, trying to find his feet but slipping on the lather of his blather. The answer to the failings must lie in the music, not in verbal flimflam. As so often happens with this tempestuous and still erratic outfit, they go from shambolic to sublime in the twinkling of an eye. Every light in the house is off for "MLK" -- a prayer in song for the great preacher and civil rights leader, Martin Luther King. With the Edge's synth invoking a Last Stand Flugelhorn, the singer is forced to go deep inside himself, to muster all the grace and solemnity his voice will allow. It's a pivotal point in the set, clearing the air of the haphazard scrabbling that went before and leaving the way clear for the frightening majesty of "The Unforgettable Fire." Beginning with the Edge's inimitable reverb, it comes on like a comet hurtling into view, the band mustering all their sleek, pounding resplendent glory. The singer comes alive and now he's sprinting from one wing to the other and he's singing about sex, about revolution, about the sad, scarred heart of Japan. He's singing about people fleeing from things they're scared of, young rock 'n' rollers afraid of their own lust, refugees fleeing the horror of a nuclear invasion or anyone trying to escape the sadness and turmoil of their own lives. And he sings about redemption -- "Walk on by, walk on through/walk 'til you run and don't look back" -- and he sounds like Jim Morrison snarling in the face of the apocalypse. He walks over to the lip of the stage and grasps a girl -- one of several hanging over the balcony -- and while the music builds and rages and slithers all around him, he stops and hugs her. A fleeting moment in the maelstrom, a blip in time. Then it's back to center stage and he's singing of inevitable destruction, of the terror of which Nagasaki was only a taster. "If the mountains should tumble and fall to the sea/No not a tear no not I." The abstract words spiral, the irresistible drive of the music ignites the audience. The urgency is a world away from the formality under which Japan hides its heart. U2 had come to Japan and for a short time it seemed like Japan had come to U2. The singer was drenched now, choking back the anger and the tears. He was thinking about death, about the impermanence of things, about how far his band had come and how little that meant in the course of the universe. Lives, loves, fears and anxieties -- they all flashed before him in a relentless and uncontrollable tumble. The music built -- in huge tumults, in furious waves, doing battle with the deafening silence -- and it would not stop. And we said Sayonara, but it did not mean goodbye. (Continued in Part 2)
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