plays such an important role in this small, talkative society is often far less kind. One persistent and false strand of local discourse – now of course searchable on the internet – has long suggested that Mother was deliberately established, and operated, to kill off the Irish competition, to ensure that, far from a ‘next U2’ emerging from a thriving scene, Irish acts who threatened U2’s hegemony would be signed up to Mother, then mismanaged into obscurity. This false theory is the writing-large of the false story of Paul McGuinness’s malevolent impersonating phone call to promote U2 from the band’s early days, and frankly it has just as little evidence to support it. It vastly overestimates the power of U2 to affect the behaviour of a whole range of international companies that would have been delighted to make stars of an Irish ‘next U2’, and it equally underestimates the extent to which plans and intentions can go awry and astray with just a little nudge from incompetence and complacency, and no help at all from conspiracy.
But how did Mother, and the associated distribution company Record Services, even manage to offer a plausible imitation of an enterprise established to kill off promising Irish acts? The answer is somewhat surprising, given how quickly and capably Paul McGuinness and U2 had professionalised the management of their own affairs in the early 1980s. The fact appears to be that, with Mother, U2 deliberately set their sights unusually low, then lacked the commitment and professional capacity to achieve even a modest set of notional targets. A label established in the mid 1980s to help young acts in Ireland ended up with its only really notable success being the Icelandic artist Björk in the early-to-mid 1990s. Indeed, Mother may be the only cause ever associated with Bono to have been allowed to fade quietly into obscurity.
One mark of Mother’s lack of ambition was its explicitly stated determination to limit its nurturing function to getting artists’ singles out on the label. Once an act was at the stage of releasing an album, the theory and practice went, it could and should move on to another label. This was a little strange given that U2 were already themselves recognised as the latest in the long line of quintessentially album-oriented rock groups, and the 1980s as an album-oriented era like no time before or since in the history of popular music.
Irish music-industry insiders don’t need especially complex explanations for Mother’s failure. U2 may have been helping to drag the business out of the showband era, dominated as it was by cowboy impresarios and their network of dance-halls around the country, with only a thin veneer of a recording industry slapped on to this live-music infrastructure. But the dragging was slow, and the priorities of those, like McGuinness, who were doing the dragging were understandably ruled mainly by 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
