the declaration of importance and ambition of that winter was enough to seal a good deal at last with Bill Stewart – a British army intelligence officer turned ad-man turned music scout – on behalf of an international label, Island Records, which had made its fortune with Bob Marley but, according to Graham, was a bit at a loss when it came to the current state of rock.18
That was okay, because U2 didn’t sound like they had much of a clue either. Listen to the first U2 singles and you may find it hard to believe that this is a ‘great’ band working in the aftermath of, say, the Clash’s London Calling – released a few months before U2 signed with Island. Musical range, lyrical wit, political sensibility: U2 had none of the above. They were, it’s true, still young, five or six years younger than the youngest members of the Clash, but youth alone doesn’t fully explain just how callow they sound. It’s easy to conclude that this is an Eagles cover-band that picked up some pace from punk and some posturing from David Bowie but simply hadn’t listened to enough good, passionate music to understand how it might work technically and emotionally. Their devotion, meanwhile, to what authors Sean Campbell and Gerry Smyth have identified as the main animating discourse of Irish ‘beat’ music in its formative decades, ‘creative self-expression’ – the idea that one performed music in order to explore and reveal allegedly deep emotional truths – is all too earnestly apparent in these tracks.19 Bono was writing almost all of the lyrics, but from the start the four members of U2 shared the song-writing credits, and eventually the royalties, equally.
While many English bands in this period went chasing after black sounds, mainly reggae and ska, U2 were a whiter shade of pale. A series of ‘London spies’ – talent-spotters from the big 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).
