NEWS LYRICS PHOTOS BAND FORUM CONNECT ABOUT HOME

Bono leads the way through a maze that runs from Dublin's Clarence hotel -- owned by U2 -- to behind the bar of the Kitchen, the nightclub beneath it. "I love the fact that at the bottom of this posh hotel is this sewer of a nightclub," he says.

It is early March 2000. U2 have already been recording a new album for more than a year, and they are far from finished. Tonight Bono's going out, but his head is still full of manifestoes and overexcited abstractions: "I feel like it's always raining in our songs, that bittersweetness. I try to resist it, actually...What I like about pop music is its pure joy, and in the end it's harder to make ecstatic, electrifying music. It's the hardest thing in the world. We surrender too easily to the blues. We, if we're not careful, are bleeding all over the world. What's striking about our Eighties music is, it's ecstatic a lot of the time -- as gauche as we sometimes came across then." He tries to explain how he'd like their new album to be. "Joy!" he hollers. "Happiness means nothing -- happiness means getting rid of a headache. Joy is another thing altogether. It's the hardest thing to conjure. You can't conjure it -- it's more like a spring. But when it's music, that's the top of the pyramid."

He waves a drink in his hand, explaining how in the Nineties, U2 wandered away from joy -- "We got darker and darker, but the lights were all the brighter at our concerts" -- in an effort to communicate other things. "Joy in our group comes out of vowels, words with very few consonants, words that form when you're singing," he says. "So as a writer it can be frustrating."

And you're not going to be scared if short words with vowels on this record? "No," he raves. "I'm trying to be embarassable. I think that may be our job. I want to say these things that people are thinking and not saying. Things have got very constricted. I think it's the job of the singer: to fess up to the stuff. I want to make a record that does that, that's nonsense and makes sense, because that's the way we're all living. Red Bull, beats, talking about girls, the Death and Resurrection Show -- that's how we're living now. I want that feeling on the record. I think there are more colors available to us than before. Our music in the early Eighties, it might have been ecstatic, but it wasn't really sexy, was it? Now we're sexy and ecstatic." It has, he says, to do with the rhythm section, with the bass. "Now, literally, we're bringing up the rear."

Tonight there will be more drinks, and more talk of joy, but it is half a year before U2 finish their record. On its release, All That You Can't Leave Behind will be an instant success, the most welcoming record U2 have made in years, and many of its listeners may well imagine it is the joy-infused record Bono had intended. As long as they don't listen too carefully.

December 5, 2000. U2 are in New York, toward the end of seven weeks promoting their record around the world. On their travels they have been doing things they have resisted for most of their career -- playing on TV shows, for instance -- and tomorrow night they will play a club show at Irving Plaza. U2 never fell for the romance of small clubs -- they always wanted the stage and the audience to be bigger -- and since they graduated from them in the early Eighties they have never been back.

Tonight they must rehearse. Though they know they will play the four songs from the new record that they have rehearsed for TV appearances, they must decide what else. Bono addresses his fellow band members. "I have an idea," he says. "Two ideas, which I'd like to think about. A little controversial -- two cover versions. One is the Who, 'Won't Get Fooled Again,' and the other..." He begins to sing: "I remember lying, awake at night, and thinking just of you; but things don't last forever, and somehow, baby, they never really do."

It's a Ramones song, "I Remember You." Bono says that U2 played it at their first rehearsal, in 1978.

"Maybe no drums," Bono suggests.

"That sounds great," drummer Larry Mullen says, dryly. "I'll put the kettle on."

The idea of covering "Won't Get Fooled Again" was planted during a recent video shoot in Rio for the song "Walk On," when the Edge, who had a Marshall stack behind him and felt inspired to play what he considered "one of the great riffs," launched into about thirty seconds of the song -- "just a goof," he says -- and Larry joined in. When I arrive at Irving Plaza, U2 are on the small stage, not playing but listening to the Who's version of "Won't Get Fooled Again," through the monitors. The Edge fingers his guitar, checking the chords. After only two or three minutes he gestures for the Who to be switched off, and they launch straight into their own pared-down version. At the end, the Edge switches to the Rolling Stones' "Bitch." Bono looks unsure about this. "From a youth manifesto to a penis manifesto," he queries.

"How did the Who end it?" the Edge wonders.

"I don't know -- we didn't get that far on the album," Bono points out. "I just want to warn you, Lenny Kravitz will be out there, and he'll know all the chords."

For fun -- they won't be playing these tomorrow -- they also run through a hilarious glam-rock medley (incorporating Gary Glitter's "Rock & Roll Part I," David Essex's "Rock On" and Slade's "Gudbye T'Jane") and a messy version of Thin Lizzy's lightest moment, "Dancin' in the Moonlight." "It's a Pavlov thing," says Bono, stepping offstage. "When you're in this kind of venue, you go back to these things."

The title of All That You Can't Leave Behind is taken from "Walk On." When Bono presented it to the band, there was some resistance. "Everyone thought it was too long and not that memorable," he says. "Larry, his reaction was, 'That'll never fit on a T-shirt.' "

Slowly, they came round. As they have taken to explaining to people who ask about such things, it just seemed to fit as the title of a record in which U2 put aside any heavy-handed sheen of technology or irony or impish perversity and perform a collection of tuneful songs. When I first bring up the subject, I get some of the same answers.

"This is the stuff that in the end makes us what we are," says the Edge. "It's the stuff that you can't leave behind, the personality of the band, the way we interact with each other."

And yet -- though perhaps it is quite understandable that they haven't broadcast the information in sound bites -- it is also a far darker title than that, and a far darker record. If the title in general refers to those things that really matter, it is also specifically about death, and about valuing whatever accompanies you when you die. "Just the essential things," says Bono. "The stuff you can take with you: friendship, laughter. Wisdom, if you've found any." If there is one theme that suffuses the record, it is a sense of mortality, of how and what you treasure in a world where death awaits. If U2 meant to write a straightforward record full of uplifting songs, real life intervened.

"You know, the record we were trying to make was quite a bit more joyful and about a certain kind of love of live and vitality," says the Edge. "And that's in there, but there's also this other side, which sort of crept into the record almost without me noticing. And if the record was about breaking things back down to essentials, I suppose in the end mortality is the ultimate inescapable fact of life."

Bassist Adam Clayton recalls how they listened back to the album's provisional running order and decided they needed to add "Wild Honey," one of the more simple, up songs from the recording sessions. "We realized, 'This is our most joyful song,' " he says. "We've got to put that in to stop people jumping out of the window."

On a freezing day, U2 are at a photo shoot on the waterfront by some derelict warehouses, the Manhattan skyline behind them. In their trailer, the Edge and Bono arrive at the coffee machine at the same time and try to cooperate, with disastrous consequences. Coffee is spilled. "You can tell we're in a band together," the Edge mutters.

During a break, outside, Adam wanders over. He reminisces about his earliest exposure to rock music, overhearing the older boys at boarding school play their records. Elton John, for instance. "I remember being transformed, as a teenager, by the...Yellow Brick Road record," he says. "I started to take an interest in choosing my own underwear. I wouldn't let my mom buy it anymore." Another key album was Creedence Clearwater Revival's Cosmo's Factory. "I thought it was all about freedom, and blue jeans, and herbs, and Californian women," he says. He is quiet for a moment. "Cowboy boots as well," he adds. "A lot of cowboy boots."

They step back out of the cold, photos finished. "It's hard work, saving rock," says the Edge, deadpan. He seems slightly concerned that I'll think he's serious; the saving, or rebirth, of rock is a notion that is being connected with U2's name on a regular basis at the moment. But he does say, "I think this album is going to make a difference. Like any good album, it changes the temperature." We talk about Radiohead's Kid A. "It seems to me Radiohead ducked a certain expectation," says the Edge. "I love what they're doing, and I'm willing to forgive any of their indulgence in making this last record, because I'm into it. But it is a shame that they're not either able to or prepared to try and appeal to a wider audience. I'd love to see them at Number One in America in the singles charts." Later, Larry will talk about how both Radiohead and Pearl Jam seem to have sidestepped the big fight to be part of pop music. U2 would like their company. "We don't want to be the only band out there doing this kind of thing," he says. "I mean, there's a beautiful voice, Thom Yorke's voice," says Bono. "I just want to hear it on the radio. I want rock to chase pop down the road, but I understand that some people couldn't be bothered. I really do understand that."

Dublin, March 2000: "Do you have any kids?" Bono inquires.

I do not.

"Lucky you," he says, then swiftly tempers what he has said. "No, my kids are great." He chuckles. "But it is hard to be a figure of fun at work and at home." He talks on. "Girls are wily," he says. "My girls give me lingering kisses on the lips, and I thought it was because they loved me, and I found out they were checking if I was smoking."

We are in the studio. A fuzzed-up backing track plays.

"It's a tune called 'Elevation,' " Bono explains. "It's in its raw form. I think it's gonna go off for us." He stands up and grinds a little. "It's got a really spongy sound," he says. "We've found that when you're men, the slower tempos can be funky."

Adam Clayton sits down on the sofa next to me, raves a little about Macy Gray and reflects a little on how the record business has changed around them. It was easier when they started. "They were still working out the rules of hip then," he says. He muses on what might have happened to him if U2 hadn't. He might have become a photographer. "On the other hand," he says, "I might have ended up a long-distance lorry driver." I raise my eyebrows. "One of my first jobs was as a van driver, transporting pottery," he points out. "I only took it so we could use the van at weekends to move our gear." He was fired after six months, when he misjudged a corner on the way to a band meeting and turned the van over. "All I remember is waking up, upside down, dangling, and my glasses had come off. And I thought, 'Fuck, I've got to get to the meeting.' "

I ask him why he was so worried about that.

"It was very frowned upon to be working," he says quietly.

Bono mentions that earlier today they stumbled upon something they liked. "We had this song called 'Beautiful Day,' " he says. "A surf-punk song, and now it's a New Age hymn, and we've been chasing it around for a couple of days, and this morning we came up with something. Maybe it's on the record -- it wasn't last week..."

U2 begin their Irving Plaza show with their current hit, "Beautiful Day," a song about someone who has lost everything and is discovering how to rejoice in what he still has. It provoked some consternation in the U2 camp during recording, once the Edge added a guitar riff that sounded as though it could have been on U2's earliest records. "Everyone went, 'Oh, fuck, you can't do that,' " the Edge recalls. "In the end it came down to, is it really good or is it a rehash? If it's good and we're just chucking it out because it reminds us of U2, then that's actually not a very good reason to throw it out."

Still, Larry and Bono were fearful. In the studio, that guitar part became known as "The Classic Coke riff." "You know, when people wanted the old Coke back and the corporation caved in to the people?" Bono explains. "We knew the sucker punch that that guitar riff would be. We knew it would look like the corporation caving in."

They're all now glad they went ahead, and argue that, the guitar aside, "Beautiful Day" is new ground for them, but Bono is still a little riled by the notion that All That You Can't Leave Behind sees U2 somehow turning back the clock. He says he wishes that they'd put out a spaced-out Indo-Celtic trance tune called "Levitate" on the album: "It would have had people off the track of 'U2 return. U2 change gear on their tank.' It so annoys me, people saying we're going back to the roots. We never had any roots..." -- Bono joke alert -- "...this is our back to the roofs tour, because we're playing on roofs." (Before the album was launched they played on the roof of the Clarence hotel in Dublin, and then later on the balcony of the MTV building in New York for TRL.)

Tonight they are playing indoors, just the four of them in everyday clothes, a few spotlights. Halfway through the show, Bono does something that he says he has never done in the whole of U2's history: formally, one by one, introduce the band. It is something he has decided and prepared, backstage, though he has told none of the others. Adam is "a sage and the music conscience of U2"; Larry is "a man so handsome he will never be let sing in this group"; and the Edge is "a Zen Presbyterian who finds Catholicism just too much glam rock for him." Later I ask Bono how he himself might have been introduced, in the same spirit. He thinks awhile, then says: "I don't know who I am, mate. That's the reason I signed on for this...Isn't all art an attempt to identify yourself, really? At some level, I've made a career out of personality crisis."

Answering the door at his new New York apartment -- I have a ten o'clock breakfast appointment -- Bono makes only the feeblest attempt to convince me that I haven't woken him up. He leads me to the marvelous panorama from his balcony, Central Park spreading out below. "It's feng shui," he says, a little sheepishly. His wife, Ali, and his assistant have left the previous day; the apartment is still new to him and he doesn't know where anything is. We search the kitchen for coffee, and fail to find it. He opens the fridge and pulls out a bottle of champagne. "Breakfast!" he announces. Then he puts it back.

He decides to ask the doorman to get us something. "You look at the view," he suggests, "and I'll go down." He tries to think what to ask for. "What are those...?" He makes a twirling motion with his hand.

"Muffins?" I suggest.

"Not muffins. What are those round things? Circular. They eat them for breakfast."

We are both stumped. It must come to him in the elevator, because eventually some bagels arrive. He says he is still shattered from the show two nights earlier: "More than if we'd played Dodgers Stadium. Stepping back inside these songs -- you know the way these songs change meaning as they go -- they took me on a real ride. Maybe I felt twenty years of tiredness or something."

He unpacks our coffee. "Oh, this is great," he says. "We're in New York!" Coffee splats on the table. "There's a whole lot of dripping going on."

And then we get into it.

We are talking about the song "Walk On," the one that provides the album's title. It is dedicated to (and loosely refers to) the Burmese opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who stayed to oppose the totalitarian regime in Burma rather than be with her husband and son. Bono pauses for a long time, trying to work out how to explain something. "If you've ever had a fright in your life, someone close to you dies, or whatever," he begins, "things come into sharp focus and you just...suddenly some people become more important to you than others. Some ideas become more important to you than others. I think the Dalai Lama says, 'Begin with death, start from there, and you won't go far wrong.' " Bono chuckles. "I don't think he was just having a bad day. Christ says, I think, in the Sermon on the Mount, 'If you love your life too much, you've already lost it.' Which is an interesting one. As a younger man I remember I didn't understand what that meant, because I loved life. You're holding on so tight to it you're incapable of doing anything with it. It's about fear."

But, I put to him, the phrase "all that you can't leave behind" is talking about death, isn't it?

"Yeah." He tries to explain the reasons why he no longer feels the reckless immortality he assumed when he was twenty, and alludes to a recent private crisis he'd rather not specify. "It's hard for me to talk about in particular. I think I'd rather just say I had a bit of a fright, a shock of some kind, and leave it at that. But it wasn't really just people close to me being sick or Michael Hutchence dying..." Then he adds, "I think Michael Hutchence's death really threw me, and my father got sick, and it was just one of those years. Everything came into sharp focus for me. There's a lot of genuine love of life on that record."

Despite that spirit, I can't think of a record besides Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind more concerned with mortality…

"Right. And he had a fright."

But on this record, off the top of my head -- "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of," "Kite," "Walk On," "When I Look at the World," arguably "Beautiful Day" -- all are thinking about these things or reflecting on them. Is that fair?

"Yeah, it really is. I think it is fair. But the shock is, it's not morbid. Or, it's not even too melancholy, and we do melancholy very well. It's all that rain. Irish people do melancholy. But this feels to me fearless. Not 'like you when you were young and didn't know what you were up against' fearlessness. Because I had a lot of that. But it's like, it's somehow much braver to know you can be knocked down, and have been, and to want to get into that fight. I love that about the record. This might be one of those U2 records I even like."

In a broad stroke it's a "Well, let's look at what we value now that we know we could lose it all" record.

"I think that's it, put simple, you know. In a folksy sense, that's probably it. In every level. For instance, you're talking about big ideas like God and sex and death and family and all that stuff. Yeah, I want to talk about them. I'm not going to not talk about them now, you know. I don't know anyone who's not interested in the idea of religion, either whether they're opposed to it or for it. Yet no one talks about it. It's taboo. People will talk about penis rings easier at a dinner table these days than the idea of grace. It's like, 'Eurghhhhh. Don't go there.' " (Continued in Part 2)

@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