The doppelganger effect

Suspended between the poles of youthful hubris and terminal dorkdom, most teenagers prone to any degree of self-absorption idealise their circle of friends in mythic terms on a par with the Left Bank intelligentsia or the Surrealists or the Beats. Or at the very least, the makings of the biggest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world.

In Neil McCormick’s case, any such grandiose notions would’ve had more substance than anyone could’ve imagined. As a student of the progressive Mount Temple school in the ’70s, his contemporaries were the nucleus of the U2/Lypton Village crew: Paul Hewson, Dave Evans, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen. McCormick was privy to U2’s earliest rehearsals and live shows, and watched their metamorphosis from clueless covers act to New Wave hopefuls to biggest rock band in the world with a mixture of pride and prejudice.
McCormick’s first book I Was Bono’s Doppelganger (due to be published in the US as Killing Bono) is an account of what it’s like to grow up in the shadow of one of the most famous people on the planet. It’s an easy read, but hardly a lightweight one.
By turns idealistic, disillusioned and unflinchingly honest, this memoir-cum-biography masquerades under chagrin, but its scope is much wider than that of trusted-valet-tells-all. In fact, for all the beautiful loser shtick, McCormick has led what would normally be considered an interesting and rewarding life. Yes, his ’80s were spent enduring countless near misses and humiliations waiting for the deal that never materialised (in fact, U2 themselves vetoed one of McCormick’s projects when he pitched it to their Mother label).
But once he switched to writing, his career seemed to acquire its own impetus. Having cut his teeth filing music reviews and then a fabulously scabrous film column for hotpress, McCormick moved to GQ and Arena before subsequently being offered a columnist’s post at the Daily Telegraph. He is currently on the A-list of pop pundits in the UK, and next in the pipeline is a U2-in-their-own-words long-form interview book. No small achievement – unless you compare it to U2 themselves, that is.
“Y’know, we had a school reunion a few years back, which I went along to,” he says, “and Bono didn’t go, and afterwards I did speak to him about that and he said if he’d gone, he’d just have made everybody feel bad because all the attention would’ve focused on him.’”
McCormick is doing press and taking lunch in the Shelbourne. Younger-looking than his 40-something years, trendily coiffed and attired, his accent migrates from Dublin to London to Edinburgh and back again. Far from the hangdog loser of his book’s opening passages, he comes across as by turns cocksure and self-deprecating.
“Y’know, part of the context of the book is dealing with envy,” he says, “and in some ways I exaggerate it, because I don’t know if I’m that envious. I wanted a stab at the same things but I’ve a huge respect for what U2 have achieved artistically. Having talked myself into doing it, I just didn’t want to be somebody who was on their coat tails; that would always have been the final defeat. But maybe I had to sort of accept that final defeat to get through the victory of having produced this book.
“I put a lot of thought into what the book was going to be; I wanted it to be an anti-heroic psychological journey. The book was really an excuse to talk about all my theories about god and music as well, so it’s not quite the book that it looks like on the jacket.”
Bono has said that U2 are unique in that while most rock ‘n’ roll bands have a surfeit of sycophants in their entourage, their inner circle has more than enough no-men to go around. McCormick is one such contrarian, over the years finding himself at odds with Bono’s religious, aesthetic and sometimes musical faiths.
“Something that I really wanted to get into the book is the idea of a black hole of abandonment that drives people on,” McCormick says. “Y’know, Bono’s an extraordinary character, and I’ve cast myself as his doppelganger, but would I want to be Bono? No, y’know, my parents loved me, supported me creatively. Even when I was a punk rocker my dad cut my hair, my mum took in my flares. But Bono’s mother died when he was young and left him bereft, his father never gave him approval and out of that came this incredible dynamo, this motherless child seeking love from the rest of the world.
“It’s a wonderful thing artistically, but you really wouldn’t want to be living in that headspace. But he’s well fed by stardom in the sense that he’s released from the mundane things in life and able to focus on other things. He’s got a big brain. He’s a multi-tasker, as anyone who’s sat in his car while he’s driving, talking, waving out the window and going through red lights will know!
“He is an incredible person, a flawed human being as everyone is, but he always seemed a bit special even when he was young, and I think 30 years in the eye of celebrity and having all those instincts fed has made him a literally larger than life person.”
Of course, the grand irony of the story is, having reconciled himself to the position of rock critic, McCormick resumed writing and playing songs for fun, with little expectation of ever making music his profession again. He recorded the self-financed Mortal Coil album under the banner The Ghost Who Walks – and then came the curveball.
Bono’s wife Ali, who’d taken to playing the record around the house, having no idea as to the identity of its author, recommended the song ‘Harm’s Way’ to Mel Gibson’s people when they rang up soliciting ideas for an album of songs “inspired by” The Passion Of The Christ. And so it came to pass that Neil McCormick, avowed sceptic, found himself rubbing elbows with his heroes on an album of spiritual anthems.
“It is an enormous irony on so many levels,” he laughs, “one being that right at the end of the saga of identifying myself as a loser, I finally won a little battle and ended up between Elvis Presley and Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. That was the company I always imagined I should be keeping, and there I was! It was a wonderful and strange vindication. The religious aspect of course, people say to me, ‘What do you think of the film?’ and I say I haven’t seen it, which is a terrible admission. The song was written about a friend of mine who was a heroin addict and was finding it very hard to stay on the straight and narrow.
“The beauty of songs is the interpretation; they resonate very personally. Mel Gibson heard it as a song that Mary might be singing to Jesus, as a parent-to-child song, and God bless him. I’ve had to be a little bit careful about how I respond, because clearly Mel thinks I’m at the forefront of that battle with him, and I think that if he had read my book I might not have had it in there.
“The thing is of course I do have great respect for the spiritual life, and I no longer believe I’m smarter than every guru who ever came along, but when people say God moves in mysterious ways, he can’t move in much more mysterious ways than putting me on that
album.”

I Was Bono’s Doppelganger is published by Penguin/Michael Joseph at €13.99.