U2’s concern for their own increasing global success. Given the structures that had proliferated in the previous era, limping weakly into the economic gloom of 1980s Ireland, industry insiders recall that there simply was not the record-label expertise in Ireland to spread around another dozen young bands in the hopes of leading one or two of them to international stardom. It would have been unrealistic to think that Mother could establish a competent version of Apple Corps in Dublin with the people available in the city to staff it. Limiting Mother to the early stages of an act’s development recognised the daunting complexity of mentoring and promoting musicians beyond those stages.
But given U2’s growing global riches after 1987, when The Joshua Tree reached the top spot on album charts all over the world, Mother could eventually have afforded to import the professional capacity to set a more ambitious agenda, or indeed just to do the early-stages work more competently; indeed, according to Magill magazine in 1987, Mother was being run out of an office in the London headquarters of Island Records (where U2 had acquired a 10 per cent stake) anyway.50 Its staff never grew past a handful; its spending was a drip-drip of thousands at a time. What emerges from an overview of its history is what may seem like a surprising description for any enterprise involving Bono: ‘half-hearted’. Or perhaps, given that U2 were always generous with rhetorical support, with ‘love’, to up-and-coming bands, but failed to invest in them adequately, ‘half-assed’ is the more appropriate term: Mother didn’t put the staff in place to deliver the uplifting boost that the Irish music scene was hoping for. The result is that a list of the Irish acts that Mother signed and promoted will lead Irish readers to nod in vague recollection of a series of one-time next-big-things, and most readers outside Ireland to stare blankly: In Tua Nua, Engine Alley, Cactus World News, Hothouse Flowers … When the revamped Mother released an album by Dublin-based novelty punk band the Golden Horde in 1991 – a good three or four years after that band’s Ramones-with-pretensions joke had started to wear thin even with their core audience – it was all too clear that, in Ireland, Mother would be no more than an amusing plaything, at most, rather than a serious developer of new talent. By that time, as a knowledgable Irish journalist has recalled, ‘Bono, U2’s point man on Mother, [had] stepped aside, and [Larry] Mullen took over, resolving difficulties brought about by the singer’s reluctance to say no to people.’51 Mother stopped functioning completely by the mid 1990s, and the company was finally wound up a decade later.
Mother comes in for remarkably little discussion in either official or unofficial histories of U2. In one long interview, with Michka Assayas, Bono refers vaguely to how the band had invested in loss-making enterprises after profiting from the sale of Island Records in 1989: ‘Losing money was not a nice feeling, and you’ve got to be careful because nothing begins the love of money more than the loss of money. But on the positive side it made us take more charge and interest in our business. This was, I guess, very early nineties.’52
He doesn’t mention Mother explicitly in that context, nor does he do so in another long interview in which he discusses the mid-1980s scene that Mother was launched to promote. But, reading between the lines, it’s easy to hear him blaming the scene rather than Mother’s inadequacy for the failure of a ‘next U2’ to emerge from Ireland, at least in the form of one of Mother’s early acts, Hothouse Flowers:
We were starting to hang out with The Waterboys and Hothouse Flowers. There was a sense of an indigenous Irish music being blended with American folk music coming through. The Hothouse Flowers were … sexy, they spoke Irish and the singer sang blue-eyed soul … but, you know, Irish music tends to end up down the pub, which really diluted the potency of the new strains. The music got drunk, the clothes got bad and the hair got very, very long.53
U2 were of course doing more than ‘hang out’ with Hothouse Flowers: they were the directors of a company that had briefly taken charge of the band’s career – and indeed sent them aloft to a middling international record deal and career that never realised its promise, including a miserable spell opening for the Rolling Stones. Unspoken amid Bono’s puritanical disdain for the drunken longhairs is the plaintive question: How could we be expected to make stars of such people?
PEACE OF THE ACTION: NORTHERN INTERVENTION
In the decades after 1986, U2 didn’t involve themselves very deeply in the political life of Ireland. Bono’s 2002 endorsement of a Yes vote in a referendum on an EU treaty, for example, was not only a relatively rare intervention, but also comprised his typical and easily ignored mix of self-praise and establishment boilerplate: ‘I go to meetings with politicians in Europe, they always bring it up … I think to vote No is going to make Ireland look very selfish.’54 U2’s cultural contribution is, as we have seen, also open to some question. They played gigs in Ireland, certainly, but scarcely any more than a major rock act with a huge Irish following might be expected to do, and always stadium-sized shows in a couple of big cities, mostly Dublin. In fact, they became something of a symbol of not-being-in-Ireland, the band that provided solace and an apolitical, uncontroversial form of Irish nationality abroad for the generation of emigrants who had fled the country through the 1980s and into the 1990s, Self Aid notwithstanding.
When, in the late 1980s, songwriter Liam Reilly came to write ‘Flight of Earls’, a sentimental emigrant ballad for that generation – which Reilly saw part-accurately as more educated and mobile than previous emigrants – he naturally mentioned what everyone knew to be the generation’s preferred musical badge:
Because it’s not the work that scares us
We don’t mind an honest job
And we know things will get better once again
So a thousand times adieu
We’ve got Bono and U2
And all we’re missing is the Guinness and the rain
Reilly’s allusion was somewhat ironic, given its clear implication that the 1980s emigrants cared more for arena-rock than for folk-pop balladeers like himself. The song nonetheless joined the playlist in countless Irish bars in the US and elsewhere, and was a substantial hit in Ireland in a version by singer Paddy Reilly – reaching number one and still in the charts when U2’s ‘Desire’ overtook it en route to the top. Indeed, for all the awkwardness of its lyrics – yes he did rhyme ‘adieu’ with ‘U2’ – ‘Flight of Earls’ is more likely to get an Irish sing-along going than all but a handful of U2’s own songs, and even made something of a comeback among the new emigrants of the post-2008 era.
Bono was not a complete absentee superstar by any means. He lived in Ireland, and as an internationally recognised symbol of Brand Ireland, Bono could not resist getting involved when the Northern Irish peace process put Irish affairs in the global spotlight for the first sustained spell since the hunger-strikes. Since virtually all Irish-nationalist opinion, along with the British government and a substantial chunk of ‘moderate unionism’ in the North, was united in favour of the process and of the Good Friday Agreement that emerged from it; since elite figures in the American diaspora were on board, and Bill Clinton himself had shown strong, indeed disproportionately obsessive, devotion to resolving these Irish troubles; since there were no popular mobilisations in support of the agreement, North, South or among the Irish abroad (with their reputation for untrustworthy, uncompromising nationalism), and thus a dearth of images of enthusiasm; and since U2 had spent, by common consent, several years in the credibility doldrums with media-savvy political gestures in place of interesting musical ones (notably in Sarajevo – see Chapter 3) – for all these reasons and more, it was all too predictable that Bono would turn up for a photo opportunity at some allegedly crucial moment in the whole affair.
That moment came during the referendum campaign on the Good Friday Agreement. In May 1998, separate, simultaneous ballots were held in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland to approve the new institutional arrangements for governing Northern Ireland. The result was never in doubt – more than 90 per cent of voters in the South voted Yes, and the referendum was approved by 71 per cent of voters in the North, with the opposition coming mainly from diehard Protestant supporters of the union with Britain (‘unionists’) who