city – had previously found the band ‘gauche and formless’,20 and it’s easy to hear why. Yes, there is something interesting and different about Edge’s guitar-playing – and once he had added an echo-unit to his paraphernalia that playing would remain the band’s major sonic contribution to the rock canon over the coming decade or three. But to understand why this mediocre band was preparing to take on the world requires some understanding of what Bono contributed, other than banal lyrics and what was then still a fairly ordinary voice.
One thing was his stagecraft. He and his friend Gavin Friday (of arty band Virgin Prunes) had studied theatre techniques with a teacher, Conal Kearney, who had himself studied with the internationally famous mime artist Marcel Marceau; Irish actor and playwright Mannix Flynn, who would later go on to national fame with his robust explorations of his traumatic youth, also helped out. Bono was a ‘boy from the northside’ with a sophisticated, trained sense derived from leading practitioners of how to use his body and eyes to seduce an audience.21 Then there was his charm, a sort of face-to-face stagecraft. Bono was, by all accounts, friendly and un-aloof, his motor-mouth not suggestive of excessive calculation, despite Bill Graham’s conclusion that Bono and U2 ‘were always rather skilled at discovering people to discover them’.22 Hot Press fell into U2’s orbit, and has remained there permanently. Bono just happened to be especially good at making friends with, say, Ireland’s best music writer, Graham, and Ireland’s favourite rock DJ, Dave Fanning. Writing in 1985, Fanning, who would remain a favoured insider for decades, freely admitted that U2’s initial charm had little to do with music: it was ‘Bono’s histrionics which gave U2 an air of more substance than was suggested by the evidence of their overall performance’, he wrote. More than their records, their ‘late night rock show interviews’ on his own pirate-radio show meant that ‘insomniacs all over Dublin could quite clearly see U2’s unique passion, commitment and dedication to the idea of the potential of the song as something heartfelt and special, and the uplifting power of live performance’.23 In other words, Bono talked a great gig.
When the time came, he wove similar personal magic in London, New York and beyond. Bono ‘had the ability to persuade the interviewer that U2 were his own private discovery and that the journalist had been cast by the fates to play his own absolutely personalized role in U2’s crusade against the forces of darkness’, wrote Graham.24
Where the journalists and DJs went, other listeners followed. It’s a pop-critical cliché to say that vague lyrics like Bono’s invite you to project your own circumstances into the emotions they evoke. But in the case of U2, the invitation came embossed and with a charming, effusive personal greeting from the lyricist himself. How could anyone resist?
WAR: NEGOTIATING IRISH POLITICS
Bono and U2 were, however, stuck with their Irishness, and in the early 1980s, with violence raging in Northern Ireland and the republican hunger-strikes escalating both tension and international interest, it was not always easy to be vague about one’s views and commitments. While their near-contemporaries, Derry’s the Undertones, could skirt artfully around the Troubles of which they were indubitably children, the bombastic and moralising U2 found the crisis that they had, and had not, lived through to be a more difficult and almost unavoidable subject.
In truth, they were probably unambivalent about the Northern crisis, insofar as any people living on the island could be. In keeping with the by now established consensus of most of their class in the Republic, they probably believed the Provisional IRA to be thugs and murderers whose campaign of violence must somehow be stopped, though the worst excesses of British and, especially, loyalist-paramilitary violence evoked some distaste too. For the most part, at least in U2’s well-off and liberal circles, fundamental critiques of the Northern state established by the partition of the island in 1921 had faded, and those who attempted to raise them again were often derided as ‘sneaking regarders’ of republican violence, apologists for the IRA. This suite of views would pose little problem for U2’s entrée into culturally enlightened society in Britain, where only a few brave Irish immigrant groups and leftists were prepared to stand up, even amid occasional IRA bombs, for the right of Northern Irish nationalists to resist discrimination and state violence, and to insist that Britain withdraw its troops from Northern Ireland. But it would pose more of a problem in the US, where open adherence to ‘the cause’ was more widespread in and beyond Irish communities.
Thus, for example, U2’s plans to ride a float in the 1982 New York St Patrick’s Day parade were abandoned when they learned that dead IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands had been named as honorary grand marshal. The hunger-strikers – seeking political status in Northern prisons against a British government, led by Margaret Thatcher, that insisted on treating them as criminals – evoked great respect in the US and around the world. In Northern Ireland the respect was sufficient to see Sands elected as MP in Fermanagh and South Tyrone just weeks before he starved to death. In U2’s Dublin, however, Sands was beyond the pale, and even an association as remote as would have been represented by a then still obscure U2 on a float in that parade was more than they could bear.25
‘Of necessity, Irish rock has striven to escape into a non-sectarian space, even at the cost of being apolitical’, Bill Graham wrote with typical certainty in 1981. While this quest for safe spaces was understandable for those working in the midst of the conflict, the nature of the ‘necessity’ for a Southern-based band is never explained by the highly influential Graham. But the punishment for transgressing the rules that said music should be escapist, for engaging with the Troubles beyond bland condemnation or rocking through the heartache, is evident in the same article in which Graham makes that strange and prescriptive assertion. It’s a Hot Press interview with the great trad-rock fusion group Moving Hearts, in which Graham excoriates them for supporting the hunger-strike campaign and badgers them to clarify whether they support the IRA itself.26
The unstated assumption is that it was ‘apolitical’, just common sense, to oppose the IRA. Even if they had been inclined to do so, it would have been unwise in the Ireland of the 1980s and early 1990s for U2 to adopt anything other than this version of an apolitical stance – a studied pseudo-neutrality that was essentially an endorsement of the political status quo (or the status quo if only the thugs would stop all the killing). Certainly, the tightly enforced Dublin consensus went, there was no injustice in the North that was worth shedding blood over, and the reasons many Northern Catholics felt otherwise – from discrimination and segregation in jobs and housing to the historic splitting of the island of Ireland and the ongoing provocation of a British military presence – were largely ignored in favour of a generic deploring of violence. (The hypocrisy of this rhetorical pacifism was exposed every time its proponents refused to condemn various acts of violence by, say, the US or British government.)
The personification of this consensus was Garret FitzGerald, who served as taoiseach (prime minister) for most of the 1980s, heading coalitions between his own Fine Gael party and the Labour Party. Virtually every biography of Bono tells of his admiration for FitzGerald, who combined bristling contempt for Northern republicans (his response to a desperate delegation of hunger-strikers’ families was to ‘lay all the blame for the hunger strikers on the republican movement and to suggest an immediate unilateral end to their military campaign’27) with a determination to launch a ‘crusade’ to reduce the Catholic hierarchy’s influence over social legislation in the Republic. This was an alluring combination not merely for Bono but for a generation of Irish social liberals who saw the vaguely professorial Fitzgerald as someone who could lead the state away from the backwardness represented by Catholic nationalism.
But the hapless FitzGerald saw his crusade backfire in 1983 when anti-abortion activists successfully campaigned to have a ‘pro-life’ amendment added to the constitution, and again in 1986 when his attempt to introduce divorce was defeated. Bono and U2 were nowhere to be seen in either of these bitter referendum campaigns, though Bono had chanced an election photo-op with FitzGerald in 1982. In September 1983, just a few days after the disastrous abortion referendum, FitzGerald appointed the increasingly famous Bono as a member of a minor face-saving distraction called the ‘National Youth Policy Committee’, a new