war in his very own childhood home – he had, he said in a Washington speech in 2006, ‘a father who was Protestant and a mother who was Catholic in a country where the line between the two was, quite literally, often a battle line’6 – is part of the backdrop to his decades of posturing on that conflict. (Strangely enough, in that speech he reversed his parents’ actual religious affiliations.) In reality the Troubles took place almost in their entirety sixty-plus miles up the road in Northern Ireland; and when the conflict made rare, bloody intrusions into the Republic, it didn’t discriminate between Protestant, Catholic and ‘mixed’ victims.
The four boys in U2, meanwhile, were not very different from most of the people who would become their fans across Europe and North America: comfortably off, liberally raised, and drawn inexorably to the international language of rock ’n’ roll. Somewhat more unusually for teenagers at that time and in those circumstances, Bono and his mates were attracted by another global language: that of Christianity.
In many ways, their enthusiasm for Jesus was more outré and cutting-edge than their musical aesthetic. Under their first two names of Feedback and The Hype, the band that would become U2 played covers of songs by middle-of-the-road chart acts such as Peter Frampton, the Eagles and the Moody Blues well into 1977 – many months after the Sex Pistols had released ‘Anarchy in the UK’ and the older fellas in Dublin band the Boomtown Rats had headed off to join the punk scene in London. When young Bono wrote his first song, ‘What’s Going On?’, he apparently didn’t realise that Marvin Gaye had got to the title first. Only after the Clash came to town in October 1977 did the band begin to punk up their sound and their look, and finally their name.7
Paul Hewson grabbed his own stage-name not from any Christian commitment to doing good but from a prominent hearing-aid shop in central Dublin that advertised ‘Bono Vox’ (good voice) devices. (The name is pronounced, as one of his detractors notes, to rhyme with ‘con-oh’ rather than ‘oh-no’.8) His youthful religious explorations began at an early age, when he befriended neighbour Derek Rowan (later to become ‘Guggi’, a successful painter), who belonged to an evangelical Protestant sect that had been founded in Dublin in the 1820s, the Plymouth Brethren.9 The intensification of his religious curiosity, at home and in school, has been attributed to the loss of his mother when he was fourteen; when Larry Mullen’s mother died a few years later, the two teenagers delved together into Bible study. Religious observance was high in Ireland, among both Protestants and Catholics; religious identity was important to a substantial portion of the population; but religious enthusiasm was and is seen as a distinctly odd phenomenon in the Republic. Back in the 1980s many Irish observers would wrinkle their noses in suspicion and tell you that U2 were ‘some kind of born-agains’ – the phrase suggesting an Americanised Protestant evangelicalism. Or, on the other hand, they would raise eyebrows and explain that U2 ‘had gone charismatic’ – a term which, unlike ‘born-again’, pointed to the possibility of a basically Catholic orientation, but one far removed from the quietly muttered rituals that dominated most Irish-Catholic practice.
Ireland is a country where you can still be half-seriously asked if you’re ‘a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist’, but most Irish people seem to have lost interest long ago in whether Bono and two of his bandmates (bassist Adam Clayton stayed out of the Bible scene) were or are Protestant Christians or Catholic Christians – though the interest in scripture points to the former. The prayer group they joined in 1978, and eventually left more than three years later when they came under pressure from fellow members to abandon rock ’n’ roll and its trappings, was called Shalom; but, despite the name, Shalom’s members were not Jewish Christians, and, just to add to the confusion, the organisation has been described as both ‘evangelical’ and ‘charismatic’, with ‘Pentecostal’ thrown in for good measure.10 Bono’s wedding in 1982 was conducted in the conventionally Protestant Church of Ireland – part of the Anglican communion – to which his wife Ali Stewart belonged, but with some of his friends’ Plymouth Brethren colouring thrown in.11
Whatever words you use to describe the band’s early Christianity, it doesn’t appear to have made much of a mark on the Dublin music scene. In February 1979 Bono told Hot Press writer Bill Graham about the religious commitments of his circle of friends in the earnest, creative, post-hippy imagined community they called Lypton Village, ‘One thing you should know about the Village: we’re all Christians.’ Graham, however, chose to leave that revelation out of his published interview with the band he was already growing to love, in order to protect their reputation.12 Oddly enough, U2 were apparently stalked for a few weeks in 1979 by a group of young toughs from Bono’s neighbourhood styling themselves the ‘Black Catholics’, who denounced U2 as ‘Protestant bastards’. But this seemingly had more to do with class than religion – ‘Protestant’ translated in this case as ‘posh and stuck-up’; and after a couple of tussles the harassment was ended by Bono marching down Cedarwood Road to confront the daddy of one of his persecutors.13 The Christians of U2 weren’t, in any case, persecuted for their religious beliefs; nor did they make much of proselytising them.
But even as U2 were embracing God they came face to face with Mammon, in the form of Paul McGuinness. Bono has described U2 as ‘a gang of four, but a corporation of five’,14 with the fifth and equal partner being the hard-headed capitalist who has managed the band from nearly their start. McGuinness, a decade older than the band, was and is a traditional Irish Catholic, which is to say a man without a shred of obvious, let alone ostentatious, Christianity. (He famously shot down the band when they were hesitating over a set of gigs, under pressure from Shalom comrades: ‘If God had something to say about this tour he should have raised his hand a little earlier.’15) From the time he took on management of the band after passionate encouragement from Graham of Hot Press, McGuinness served the purpose of deflecting and absorbing criticism: he could be a tough, obsessive bastard so they didn’t have to. He aroused far more resentment among other musicians than anything involving U2’s religion ever did. One false rumour doing the rounds in 1979 suggested that McGuinness made a phone call pretending to be a London A&R man in order to get U2 a gig opening for the popular English New Waver Joe Jackson, insisting that local rivals Rocky De Valera & the Gravediggers had to be dumped so he could see U2. (That change was never in fact made.) When Heat magazine printed the untrue rumour, McGuinness initiated a lawsuit that soon shut the magazine down.16 McGuinness was a man who was tough enough to attract conspiracy theories, and dealt firmly with adversity.
Commercial success didn’t immediately follow upon McGuinness’s manoeuvres, but his ambition and U2’s discipline meant that they left no stone unturned. Ireland was, unbeknown to itself, coming to the end of its era of the showbands, typically eight-piece sharp-suited groups who toured the highways and byways playing cover songs for dancing. These bands were still, in 1979, making more money than the small collection of post-punk groups like U2 that constituted an incestuous Dublin scene. The Boomtown Rats were big, but their profits seemed to underline the truism that London was where the action was. McGuinness eventually took his ‘Baby Band’17 to play in London, but built them up even to London journalists and industry scouts as Dublin’s quintessential live act. He got them signed to a small, non-exclusive deal with the CBS subsidiary in Ireland, and built their live following remorselessly, putting on a famous series of Saturday-afternoon shows in the half-derelict Dandelion Market next to St Stephen’s Green to cater for U2’s under-eighteen following, who couldn’t go to pub and club gigs. The shows at the ‘Dando’ would become the stuff of legend: few Dubliners of a certain age will admit to having not seen them there, though a few will tell you they were rotten. The climax of McGuinness’s efforts came when – as something of a last throw of the dice – he booked them to tour Ireland and to play the National Stadium on Dublin’s South Circular Road. ‘National Stadium’ is a grand name for a boxing venue that seated a couple of thousand people, but McGuinness put them there knowing full well that they couldn’t possibly fill it: top
