Dublin and other cities, parodying the Self Aid ‘Make It Work’ slogan by declaring: ‘Self Aid Makes It Worse’.
The left-wing posters would have been insulting enough to Bono’s vanity – campaigners had chosen a less than attractive mulleted photo, though Bono had finally abandoned that hairstyle – but worse was to come. On the Thursday before the weekend Self Aid gig, listings magazine In Dublin, normally reliable in its support of U2, appeared on the stands with Bono on the cover. ‘The Great Self Aid Farce’, the magazine declared, constituted ‘Rock Against the People’.43 Inside, several pieces denounced the concert and singled out U2 for odium for allowing themselves to be used in this way. The polemics were led by the great Derry Marxist and journalist Eamonn McCann (then still a fan, later to become Bono’s most trenchant Irish critic), along with the magazine’s editor, John Waters (later to become an increasingly conservative grouch, and who rarely had another bad word to say about Bono).
Anyone who hoped that Bono might take the opportunity of the Self Aid gig to answer his critics by underlining his genuine radicalism – and there were still some in Ireland who wanted to believe in that – was to be sorely disappointed. The most political speech he made for the occasion came in the middle of a vamping little version of Bob Dylan’s ‘Maggie’s Farm’: U2 were starting their ‘exploring the blues’ period, and were checking out how their elders and betters had done it, incorporating a bit of John Lennon’s ‘Cold Turkey’ in the mix. Because many young Irish people were emigrating to Margaret (‘Maggie’) Thatcher’s Britain, Bono reckoned it would be clever to present Dylan’s great, funny, devastating broadside about power relations as an earnest plea to be able to stay in Ireland rather than emigrate. In effect, ‘I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm, coz I’m gonna stay and work on Garret’s farm.’
The result was the effective emasculation of the cocky anger of Dylan’s song, whose protagonist runs through a list of people for whom he will no longer work, making it clearer and clearer that they probably include every conceivable species of boss. Dylan’s rejection of any chance to ‘sing while you slave’ wasn’t clear enough, however, to emerge intact in Bono’s telling, as he made clear in a rather pathetic spoken interlude over the pumping riff: ‘You see I like it just where I am. Tonight that’s Dublin city, Ireland. And I prefer to get a job in my own hometown, mister.’ The American twang in Bono’s accent had rarely stood out quite this strongly. The distinctly unDublin phrasing, including the faux-proletarian ‘mister’, pointed to the other major influence at play: Bruce Springsteen was still near the height of his popularity, and the previous summer had played a huge outdoor gig at Slane Castle in nearby County Meath; U2 had even done a (reportedly dismal) cover version of his song ‘My Hometown’ during a Dublin show in June 1985.
It was striking that Bono made his watery political declaration sound such a false and borrowed note. But he had more to say. In an extraordinary bout of self-pity, he turned part of the long and winding final section of ‘Bad’ into an apparent tribute to himself. Singing over the repeating guitar figure to the tune of Elton John’s terrible, maudlin song about Marilyn Monroe, ‘Candle in the Wind’, Bono achingly intoned: ‘You have the grace to hold yourself, while those around you crawl. They crawl out of the woodwork, on to pages of cheap Dublin magazines. I have the grace to hold myself. I refuse to crawl.’44
Refuse to crawl he might, but even today the effect of viewing this outburst via YouTube may make the viewer’s skin crawl. It was clear that the attack on ‘cheap Dublin magazines’ was aimed at McCann and Waters, but to whom on earth was he directing his refusal to crawl? Was he really just declaring himself satisfied with his display of courage in belittling his critics? And this grace – then as now among his favourite words – did it come direct from God? U2 biographer Eamon Dunphy, critical by the standards of Dublin journalists but still inclined to cut Bono slack on this incident, wrote that it showed that ‘Dublin still got to them’ – that their hometown’s mode of badmouthing had a knack for getting under their skin – but also that, ‘this being Dublin’, Bono and McCann had chatted and cleared up any ‘misunderstandings’ at a party after the gig.45 What could hardly be misunderstood was that this young man had a disproportionate sense of his own righteousness.
However, Bono’s strange and chilling onstage attack may have had some effect. It would be more than two decades, until the time when U2’s tax arrangements were revealed, before there was any comparable sustained criticism of Bono in the major Irish media. (Paul McGuinness was also capable of his own brand of chilling: when in 1991 a Dublin paper rounded up a few mildly mocking comments about Bono’s lyrics for ‘The Fly’, the band’s burly manager wrote a nasty letter to the bylined journalist, calling him ‘a creep’, and CCing the chief executive of the newspaper company.46)
The main exception to Irish press quiescence in the face of Bono’s power and glory was the small investigative and satirical magazine Phoenix. While Phoenix mostly kept a close eye on the band’s business interests in Ireland, it wasn’t above teasing Bono on other fronts. When, for example, in the year 2000 the magazine reported on the legal negotiations then ongoing between Bono and a local tabloid over paparazzi shots of the singer’s sunbathing buttocks, his lawyers threatened Phoenix with prosecution under the Offences Against the State Act – generally employed against serious crime and ‘subversion’ – for revealing ‘sub judice’ material, and said they had sought the intervention of the attorney-general over the matter. Phoenix responded by reproducing the lawyers’ letter under the unusually large headline: ‘L’ETAT C’EST MOI! KING BONO INVOKES OFFENCES AGAINST THE STATE ACT’ – and by continuing to produce story after story about ‘Bono’s bum deal’.47
It was also Phoenix magazine that reported on how Bono’s wife Ali described their relationship with journalists. Ali had been contacted by an old acquaintance named Dónal de Róiste, the brother of one of her closest charitable partners. De Róiste was still fighting to clear his name more than thirty years after being unjustly ‘retired’ from the Irish army under a cloud of suspicion of IRA connections. Ali refused to help, though in the nicest possible Christian way: ‘I wish I knew a journalist that one could entrust with this cause … but I’m sorry to say I don’t at present … the nature of our position unfortunately means that we stay as removed as possible from the press.’ She continued sympathetically: ‘I am sorry that you feel so wronged. I, like you, believe in fair play and justice … which I know you will receive in the next life …’48
Bono was rarely shy about where he felt U2 fit, in this life, into the history of rock ’n’ roll, the art form and the business. ‘I don’t mean to sound arrogant,’ he told Rolling Stone rather redundantly soon after their first album had appeared, ‘but at this stage, I do feel that we are meant to be one of the great groups. There’s a certain spark, a certain chemistry, that was special about the Stones, the Who and the Beatles, and I think it’s also special about U2.’49
So it is not surprising that U2 established a record label, in the mode of the Beatles’ Apple Corps, with the stated ambition of nurturing Irish talent, though it is perhaps surprising how quickly they got around to this task: they established Mother in August 1984, before they had even started playing arenas, let alone stadia, in the US (and almost exactly ten years after the death of Bono’s mother, Iris). The Beatles left the task till rather later in their development as the world’s biggest group – that is to say, when they were indisputably on the top of the world and were in a position to establish a sophisticated corporate apparatus in the heart of London, then probably the world’s pop capital – and still made a mess of it.
Perhaps the worst that can be said with certainty about U2’s label, Mother, is that it fits quite comfortably within a history of poorly performing record labels founded by artists themselves. That is not the worst
