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"There's myth and mystery, and they are two completely different things. Although it's part of being a big group, I don't particularly like myth, but to me mystery is everything." -- Edge, 1994 |
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"There's myth and mystery, and they are two completely different things. Although it's part of being a big group, I don't particularly like myth, but to me mystery is everything." -- Edge, 1994 |
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U2: A Bass Odyssey (Part 2)
Hot Press,
November 25, 1998
"It was a pretty bad moment," he recalls. "One of those mornings that you wish you'd never woken up. Again, a lot of very complex emotions. And, to some extent, it was about letting down the other guys in the band the audience but, in many ways, it was actually the effect it has on yourself, of letting yourself down or realising that you've crossed the line and saying that, as regards your own personal standards, it's not acceptable. And you have to examine what that's about. And I did examine what it was about and it was not a very nice conclusion that I came to."
What was the conclusion you came to? "Well, namely that for whatever reasons -- and I still don't know what those reasons are -- I am one of those characters that has an addictive personality. And it's an emotional problem as much as it is a physical problem and I had to start dealing with that. And that's the hard road, figuring out the psychology of it. The avoiding substances of any kind is hard but, okay, it's not that hard. It's facing the devil inside you, that's the tricky bit." You're completely clean now? "Um, yeah," he nods. "I am, apart from coffee." It's a bit of role reversal from the earlier days of the band. Now that they've finally started partying properly, you've stopped! "Yeah," he laughs. "There are members of the band who seem to be able to cope quite easily without sleep, with a large amount of alcohol inside them. And they seem to be find but I just wasn't one of those people." Perhaps more than any other band, U2 have always been artistic magpies, begging, borrowing and stealing from every area of popular culture. They've worked with all sorts -- artists, opera singers, composers, film-makers and authors. Last year, William Burroughs appeared in their video for "Last Night on Earth" just two months before his death. So how was Burroughs to work with? "He was fantastic!" Adam enthuses. "He was very, very with it in spite of his addictions. We'd actually met him before. We'd visited him in Kansas the last time we toured there he kind of hung out and brought his guns along. I don't know, I mean his early work was mindblowing but, in a way, he became a bit of an institution for something that had existed a long, long time ago. And America is like that, America holds onto those things, whereas I think with the British or Europeans in general, once you skip out of sight once a few years have gone by, you tend to get forgotten about. But Burroughs survived very, very well over the last 40 or 50 years as an American legend." Another Beat writer whom U2 have worked with in the past was Allen Ginsberg, who also died last year. The coincidence hasn't gone unnoticed by the band. "Well that was really quite an interesting thing because both Ginsberg and Burroughs were people that we'd become creatively involved with and then they were gone," he says. "I wouldn't like to be irreverent but it did feel like the minute that we did something together their number was up. Again, weird stuff. But that's the great thing about what we've been able to do. We're not in some rock 'n' roll ghetto. Being popular has allowed us to really just pull together these things that shouldn't be pulled together, or the rules say that they shouldn't be pulled together." In a sense, U2 have given as much to popular culture as they've taken from it. They've borrowed in the past, but they've also been borrowed, most particularly by writers. The central character in Salman Rushdie's forthcoming book is apparently based on Bono. Robert Cremmin's debut novel A Sort of Homecoming was partly based around the music of the band. And they also made a cameo in Brett Easton Ellis's controversial novel American Psycho. Has Adam read the book? "Em, I heard about it. That's the one with the U2 gig in it. That's pretty weird isn't it? (laughs). I mean, that's where you get into the Rolling Stones kind of territory, where you become a justification for a certain time or a certain period in somebody else's fantasy. I've come across references to U2 in a couple of books and a couple of movies and stuff, and it always gives me a bit of jolt because I get confused as to whether it's real or fantasy. "It's amazing. I mean, it really is amazing to reach that place because, I suppose, our reference point in the early days was kind of, 'how far have Horslips or Thin Lizzy or the Boomtown Rats got?' That was our reference point. As an Irish band -- which is very much our identity and our root -- we've gone beyond our wildest dreams. In a way we can't measure it too easily because we can only measure it in terms of what it feels like to live in Dublin. I mean, if you lived in New York or L.A. then maybe you'd again, it's always a little bit strange when we step out of Dublin and are reminded that U2 means as much everywhere else as it does in Dublin." Do you rush out to buy books or movies that refer to you or have you gone beyond that? "No, no I don't," he says, shaking his head. "Sometimes things are out that I'll read but generally I'm not obsessive about knowing everything about us that's going on out there. And in terms of vanity, I'm not that interested either." Does Adam Clayton have any other artistic aspirations or creative outlets outside of music? "There isn't really a lot of time," he says. "We work pretty much ten months of the year so when you get to a break -- and it's usually in the summer or winter, a little like school holidays -- all you wanna do is take some time out. Keeping the U2 thing going on requires quite a bit of work. I mean, there are things I would like to do but I'm beginning to accept that unless U2 for reason disappears in the smoke, I'm not gonna be able to do these things until my 60s. If I live that long." And when do you think U2 will end? "Well it feels very good at the moment because I feel we're on the threshold of defining something new, in as much as the '80s period was that energy that we talked about earlier -- that naivete and that energy. The '90s have been a period of stepping back from the earlier earnestness and, if you like, that veil of irony came into where we were at. I'm not quite sure what the next ten years is gonna be but I think it's gonna be pioneer territory for us. There's not many bands -- if any -- that have been in that position creatively, critically, financially. And we're gonna take that and we're gonna use it. And if rock & roll can have an expression in the populist culture that's what we want to do. "I mean, it would be very easy for U2 to hold onto its position, not challenge or threaten it and grow old gracefully with its audience intact," he continues. "We could make critics' record without necessarily trying to make No. 1 records, with lots of integrity or whatever. But we're actually just gonna try and pole-vault into the next century and be in people's faces for the next ten years at least." And on that note, the world's most famous bass player gathers his car keys and cigarettes, firmly shakes my hand and breezes out the door. Less than a minute later he's back. "I'm sorry," he smiles apologetically, reaching down to the table. "I almost forgot my spoon." © 1998 Hot Press. All rights reserved.
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