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"We've never been cool; we're hot. Irish people are Italians who can't dress, Jamaicans who can't dance." -- Bono |
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"We've never been cool; we're hot. Irish people are Italians who can't dress, Jamaicans who can't dance." -- Bono |
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Rockin' in the Not So Free World (Part 3)
NME,
December 23, 1989
Bono Vox had gone onstage and, using the leather belt to slap out his message (a technique formerly used to somewhat dubious ends by Mick Jagger when performing the rape fantasy of "Midnight Rambler"), he admonished the killers, articulating the feelings of the shell-shocked band and crew. After that, "Sunday Bloody Sunday" (certainly never one of my favorite U2 songs) had fulfilled its purpose, it had nothing more to say.
But it wasn't possible to take time and explain this to the girl in the crowded elevator. So the singer just quipped, "Sorry, we're fresh out of bloody Sundays." But still she persisted and what began to annoy him, I think, was the way she called him Paul. That was what his mother called him. She died as he came into his teens and he found a new family of friends in the imaginary Lypton Village. "When people call me Paul on the streets it makes me nervous. They think they've got an insight to me and I don't like it," he once told an interviewer. But that was then, this is now. Now he just laughs and he looks the girl straight in the face, he does a mock Jack Nicholson, bringing his face closer to hers, fixing her dead on center and he addresses her calmly, humorously, with no hint of malice. "Listen, listen," he says, and she goes quiet and waits. "Paul is dead," he tells her. LATER I'M sharing a beer with Larry Mullen in the preposterously outlandish Elegance club. Neither of us goes to joints like this very often and it's rather fun to be voyeurs for a while, watching the old guys who look like they walked off the set of a '30s movie, watching the young girls squeezed into uncomfortable clothing and stilettos gyrate on the dance floor. Larry shares my love of country music, but he hasn't heard much in the way of new country for the past few months. He cites L.A. rapper Ice-T as someone whose music he likes, though I don't think Ice-T would know what to do if a regular skin thumper like Larry offered his services. I'm talking to Mullen about this and he's telling me that as far as dance music is concerned, the future all lies in machines. They have machines that could do everything now, machines that can be programmed to play behind the beat, machines that can be programmed to miss beats, machines that make drummers a relic. "These days, if you listen to a band like U2, a rock 'n' roll band, it's not for dancing," he tells me. I concur, pointing over the table to the frontman. At times he looks very awkward trying to dance onstage, I say. Larry tells me that some nights he sits behind his drum kit and he watches Bono and he wonders. He wonders how he gets through the show without falling over. THERE WERE many people who had come to see U2 in Japan, many of them passed my way and they influenced my story. As important as anyone else was the septuagenarian giant that Bono introduced to the crowd every night as the Godfather of the Blues. I visited B.B. King backstage, really just to thank him for his music. He told me that over the years he'd played with many young white rock 'n' rollers. Like U2, they'd been looking to the blues for guidance and inspiration. But he didn't have the same relationship with people like the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac. With U2 he had great times offstage as well as onstage. I wondered how B.B., who uses virtually no gimmicks or effects, related to the Edge, who has more pedals at his feet than the Tour de France. But the big man just smiled and shook his head, he told me they both just did their own thing. It was no problem, it wasn't about the way they made the sound. It was the music itself that mattered. However, the person I spent the most time with in Japan was photographer Derek Ridgers. Derek had come to see U2 with a cynical attitude and after the first night he told me that he couldn't understand why anyone would want to call them the greatest rock 'n' roll band in Dublin, let alone the world. But that had all changed by the last night. Sitting backstage, Derek, admittedly nursing a tumbler of gratis champagne, told Bono that the group had turned him around. He'd gone from being a cynic to being a fan over the course of three shows. The singer bent over, thanked him and kissed his cheeks. Now we were on the plane out of Tokyo on the way back to London via Moscow. We'd just been served our first meal of the journey, a not-so-fresh slab of cod in a standard white sauce. As I prodded the flesh I wondered aloud. Was it not possible that fish like this one, fish that you could buy in any chippy back in dear old Blighty, supplemented their diet with the debris flung from aircraft flying over their oceans? Considering some of the mush they serve up on flights it wasn't a very appetizing notion. Derek thought for a while and then he reassured me. "No, cod wouldn't do that. Not British cod anyway. You can trust in cod." © New Musical Express, 1989. All rights reserved.
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