The interview: Bill Carter

It’s been held that there are only seven original stories, most of them cogged from the Greek: basic templates that have provided endless variations from Homer to Hemingway. To this lineage we can add Bill Carter’s book Fools Rush In, a revisiting of the myth in which Orpheus descends into Hades to be with the soul of his beloved Eurydice.

Carter, sitting opposite me in the lunchtime hum of Dublin’s Morrison hotel, hasn’t heard this one, which only makes the classical allusions in his story all the more powerful for their lack of contrivance. As a fledgling 20-something film-maker, the Californian spent several seasons in the hell that was the siege of Sarajevo in the mid-90s, chasing the ghost of a girl through the sniper-strafed streets and bombed out buildings, witnessing the worst atrocities of the Bosnian conflict: rape, killing, maiming and starvation.
Sarajevo was the last stop in a grief-stricken global drift that started when Carter’s girlfriend Corrina died in a car accident a couple of years previously. Having vague aspirations towards making a documentary of the war in the Balkans, he hooked up with a bunch of merry pranksters called The Serious Road Trip, a non-affiliated team of clown-nosed multinational guerrilla philanthropists making food drops and bringing a dose of colour and comic relief in their convoy of garishly painted vehicles.
On hearing that U2 had been proselytising about the notion of a united Europe on their Zooropa tour, Carter resolved to blag his way backstage and secure an interview with Bono at the Verona date, with the intention of broadcasting the material over the starved and shell-pounded Sarajevo TV network. From that meeting came the notion of a series of satellite link-ups from the city, broadcast over the big screens at the U2 concerts, giving voice to individuals trying to survive circumstances that were nothing less than apocalyptic.
It was a risky artistic move for U2, and one for which they were roundly castigated in the mainstream and music press. The sight of war-ravaged survivors delivering their testimony in the middle of a rock ’n’ roll show made for an uneasy intrusion of atrocity upon entertainment. For the band’s detractors it was as if, having remade themselves as arch-ironists, U2 were again regressing to their old pulpit-thumping ways.
But theirs was merely an aesthetic gamble. For Carter, whose nerves were shot from constant shelling and sniper fire, and for whom the matter of food, water and sleep was rather more paramount than credibility, the risk was somewhat more immediate. But following that series of satellite link-ups, U2 offered to fund the editing of Carter’s documentary footage, which subsequently became the award winning short Miss Sarajevo. Since then, he has carved out a respectable reputation as a photographer and film-maker, working with artists such as Emmylou Harris, Giant Sand, Calexico and Grandaddy, and also as a journalist, filing stories for Spin and Gear.
Which brings us back to Fools Rush In, his powerful account of the time spent in Sarajevo, a journey out of grief and back to life in a war zone, culminating in U2’s Sarajevo concert in 1997. On the cover blurb, Bono calls it “Dante’s Inferno for the MTV generation”, which gives fair indication of the scale and potency of his story.

There’s no art to find the spleen’s construction in the face. In person, Bill Carter is smaller and slighter than one might expect, although at times one still gets flashes of a thousand-yard-stare and suspects that if a waiter dropped a plate he’d be under the table in a second.
Dublin is a psycho-geographic hot point for Bill Carter. In the summer of 93, U2 flew the malnourished, frayed and filthy American in for the Zooropa homecoming shows. Surreal was not the word. Carter, who 24 hours previously had been dodging bullets every time he crossed the street, found himself staying in a plush hotel and rubbing shoulders with supermodels in the backstage area.
Carter remembers being interviewed by Bill Graham for hotpress at the time (see panel), the only journalist who bothered to investigate the real story behind the Sarajevo link-ups.
“I think a lot of people thought I was hired by U2,” he says. “They thought they hired some guy, set up a link and made ’em look cool. I mean, really! And Bill Graham was the only one who came and talked to me.
“I think that a lot of the criticism came because a lot of times it’s a rock journalist that goes to a concert, and we were kinda doing this front page stuff, and I don’t know if sometimes the guy who went to the show is the guy who wants to talk about the front page. He wants to talk about rock ‘n’ roll. That was hard for them to mix.”
Plus there was the fact that people were still trying to get their heads around U2’s new clothes, and here they were mainlining satellite feed from a war zone.
“Which of course I didn’t give a shit about,” Carter smiles. “I remember I was at a party once in London, it was an MTV kinda thing, soon after, and in the corner was this English reporter speaking loudly about how it was total shite and he thought they were crap. He didn’t know who I was. And I walked up after a few drinks and said, ‘So what’s your main beef with it?’ and he told me it was too much of them on their high horse. And I said, ‘Okay, what’s wrong with doing it as opposed to not doing it. You’re pissed off that they did it. Why not be pissed off if someone doesn’t do anything. Give me the benefit of the doubt for Christ’s sake. I don’t work for them, I approached them.’ I just think that changes the motivation.”
Carter’s first meeting with Bono was at the Verona show. As he describes it in the book, U2 publicist Regine Moylett prepped him for the meeting, informing him that in all the years of working for the band she’d never known the singer to do an interview before a show, and that the singer was “in a strange place right now so he may be a bit out there.”
“My reaction was, ‘Are you out of your mind?’” Carter laughs. “‘I don’t know what he’s dealing with… okay, he’s going out there to play some music, but I’m a little out there right now.’ To be truthful, there was a moment there where I thought, ‘Okay they don’t really understand where I’m coming from.’ At that point I really didn’t care about the prep time that goes into someone going out to do a show, which I know is very intense but…”
It’s not like bullets coming in though your window.
“Exactly. So I didn’t really care. You wanna get ‘out there’, I can take you back with me!”
Civil wars are not just the most savage but also the most complex. In Sarajevo, citizens were being shelled by their former neighbours, with the bombs bearing Regard From… messages on their casing. Carter maintains that news coverage of the Balkans dressed up ‘ethnic cleansing’ as a holy war, but this was not a clear cut conflict between opposing forces; it was a three-way snarl between Serbs, Croats and Bosnians, a flux into whose nightmare men, women and children of all persuasions and denominations got sucked, with the city of Sarajevo the eye at the centre of this vortex.
Carter himself blundered into this with only the most rudimentary understanding of what was going on, but by the time he got to U2, he at least had the view from the ground, not CNN.
“The common person has only so much time per day to pay attention to local news, regional news, your wife’s news, whatever,” he says. “The editors know this, they categorise things in a way that you can digest them very quickly. Bosnia was labelled a religious war, which was insane, because there wasn’t anything about religion in that war, (it was about) the black market, drug deals, power, money. I think the mistake of the media was they grabbed onto the religious war (angle) ’cos it was easy to explain it that way. But that was not true.
“Nobody wants to assume, ‘Oh, the war’s a bunch of madness and black marketeering,’ because that doesn’t sound very good. And I think that when I started to be really attracted to the people there and started filming and doing the satellites, I was real interested in just bringing a face to it. If I’m going to interest you in something, the way not to do it is pummel you. So I approached it more like the artist, the storyteller, the dramatist: these are some people that are very real, very interesting lives, they’re funny, they’re sad. Then if you cared, if you’d seen this person, there’s plenty of information out there, you can get it.”
Because Carter and his Serious Road Trip comrades were a freelance unit, they could rely on little of the military back up afforded their UN-accredited brethren and the news networks.
“It was insane,” he says. “We could’ve disappeared and no-one would’ve known about it. Every time you crossed an area called no-man’s land, as you approached Sarajevo before you would go through the Serb checkpoint, you would check in with the UN protection forces, and normally if you were a recognised organisation they would give you a hi-tech radio that connects you to Canadian forces or warrior tanks or whatever, and if you got in trouble in no man’s land you could radio and they could come get you in a hard shell.
“We always went into that building for a radio and they never gave it to us. The French were the worst, absolutely the worst. One time they blocked the road with a tank, we’re in a soft shell, and the guy just sat there, and we’re like, ‘Get out of the fuckin’ way man! We’re gonna die out here and you’re not!’ We were there probably for 15 minutes. Tony, the Irishman, he spoke French, he got out of the car and was just screaming at the guy. And we’re like, ‘Well, Tony’s gonna die.’ Shots are being fired and the French guy won’t move. We were completely off the grid.
“It wasn’t until a couple of years into it, it was the British that started to really like us ’cos we were different and we had music and they’d come to some of our parties. We started to get personal favours from individual soldiers, but really, we were a bunch of clowns. Literally. Graeme (Bint, the Road Trip’s chief operative) did shit that was just unbelievable, blowing fire off the top of a double-decker bus once. Mostar was hammered and he’s on this bus, no shirt, balloons on the top, and there’s nobody in the streets, and suddenly it’s like the pied piper, all these kids start to come out into the streets. I think they just wanted the colour. And then they released the balloons and the kids just went mad, and it was better than any food you ever gave them.”

At this point lunch is served, and the conversation gears down from interrogative to informal, and Carter asks, “When you finished the book, what’s the thing that stays with you the most? I’m always curious.”
What Fools Rush In left this reader chewing over is how the aftermath of grief can hypersensitise an individual to the possibilities of joy; how art and comedy seem like luxury pursuits in a prosperous democracy but become evidence of freedom in wartime; how the blackest humour is the enemy of despair.
“I came from a place of grief into this war,” Carter considers, “I know in America, if someone dies, everyone around you gets very strange, they tend to leave you alone. They might send you a weird card, and then in a month they start to poke their head around again, and if they ever see you laugh, they go, ‘Oh, thank god you’re good!’ I found that very disturbing.”
Carter found that the best way to deal with his own loss was to submerge himself in the company of those whose daily suffering was almost beyond comprehension. An apposite quote from the book:
“Something I learned in Sarajevo was the role of comedy in the art of survival. Someone once said that ironic comedy is the public version of private tragedy. In Sarajevo the private tragedies were everyone’s public comedy. What one person was experiencing, everyone was experiencing. There was no time for grief or complex thoughts of why this was happening to them.”
All of which, with hindsight, suggest why Carter’s Sarajevo link-ups resonated with the various and nefarious spirits of Zoo TV, with their assertions that the only appropriate response to the horror of war is Guernica-style surrealism. Carter found the spirit of Sarajevan resistance underground, in basement discos and fashion shows where the models wore costumes made from UN relief packaging.
“In many ways, Sarajevo to me… the big mistake is when people think the book’s about just war, like reportage,” he maintains. “In that place, when I met the surrealist guy Shibe down in the disco, he was taking the piss out of me, and he found the present moment so relieving, not having to think about the future or the past.
“Art matters. Without it we become these empty shells just walking around. It’s amazing how much art was the focal point. It really brought people together, the reason people came out, the reason you risked your life. One time this guy had an art opening, a painter, and people were running in like they were running in from the rain. I remember thinking, ‘This well dressed couple literally just risked their life to come see some paintings of a friend of theirs. That’s amazing. They risked their life to the edge of that door.’
“And I found in Sarajevo, we all could laugh – or they could and I was joining in – because everybody knew that they had some serious tragedy going on, and no-one would say, ‘Why are you laughing?’ so it made it much freer for me to be in it, and I think that’s why they got on so well with each other.”
Was he in an altered state when he went there?
“Technically I think I was psychotic. Not dangerous, but outside of my own brain. Literally somewhere else. And in many ways Sarajevo got me to the ground. I came back, not by choice, but because I started caring about people, their life was mixed up in my life and I had to figure out how to help them, and it brought me back into the game.”
At one stage in the book, Carter describes the heightened sense of being alive when one is so close to death as a sort of drug rush. One night in the town of Fojnica, he and his friends found themselves billeted in a Muslim home, a prime target for the Croatian forces only kilometres away. Carter writes about sleeping with a French woman by the name of Valerie that night, “her on top, me on top, from behind, from the side. We rode each other as if our lives depended on how furious our passion was.”
“That still is just etched,” Carter says now. “We thought we were gonna die that night. If they came in that house we were dead. So that was a very intense three days we spent there, that night with the woman… you don’t forget that shit. The hyper-awareness of your life almost ending over and over again, it can drain you.”
But by the point Carter had established the satellite link-ups with U2, his fatigue and hunger was compounded by isolation. The other members of the Road Trip had grown suspicious of his fraternising with flash rock stars, and he was effectively divorced from his support system and relying heavily on the company of connections he’d made in the city.
“My mistake,” he says. “You know how that works. ‘Yeah, you think you’re the dog’s ass.’ I’ve often said that besides Corrina’s death that was the most tired I’ve ever been in my entire life, doing those satellites, because I didn’t know who to put on. I would hear a rumour of this interesting person over… there. Now I gotta run across the length of a city like Dublin, a couple of miles down this town and walk into this person… I mean the idea is ludicrous to a person living in a war, what I’m about to say to them: ‘You’re about to go on a satellite.’ I usually had three or four hours to try and explain what I wanted them to do that night, ’cos they had to trust me. ’Cos what if I was using them for sport, for entertainment, which is what the critics might have said. And the Bosnians were very keen of that. So you’re running, and you don’t eat a lot of food, and you don’t take showers, and then I didn’t really know U2 at that point, I only met them one night, I don’t really know how it’s being done out there.”
There were 13 satellite links in all. U2 pulled the plug when the media backlash approached meltdown and it became difficult for them to resume playing a rock ‘n’ roll show after the nightly broadcast from hell. The final straw was when Dada, a woman of Serbian and Croatian ancestry, finished her speech with the following:
“I am glad you are listening to wonderful music tonight. You should enjoy yourselves. But I want to ask you one question. What are you going to do?”
When Bono attempted to address that unanswerable question in front of Wembley Stadium, she resumed speaking.
“Excuse me, but I think nothing.”
What was Bill Carter’s reaction when they pulled the plug?
“My first reaction was I was pissed ’cos no one told me,” he says. “I felt embarrassed ’cos my Sarajevo friends were getting into it. They explained it to me when I got here, that they were taking a hammering in the press. What they didn’t say, and what I’m guessing, is they were emotionally exhausted by it, that they couldn’t keep doing it and keep performing music. That part is fair enough, but it wasn’t my concern at the time, I was involved in something else. But I understand it. It would’ve been nice to get a phone call and have a chat about it, but that wasn’t gonna happen ’cos they didn’t know how to get a hold of me, and their decisions are made every night when they’re about to go on stage.
“But by the time I finished those satellites I thought I was literally going to die of tiredness, if that’s possible. And the sad part for a lot of people in Principle and U2 is, I came here not too long after, and I was a pretty frazzled human being when I was in Dublin, bouncing off the walls and shit. Water, street lights, food, it was all mixed with pleasure and guilt.”
Pleasure and guilt were in abundance after the Zooropa Dublin show, when Carter found himself accompanied him to his hotel room by an unnamed supermodel, confessing that she’d fallen in love with him during the satellite broadcasts. By now, he was beyond exhaustion, and even vodka couldn’t revive him. When the young woman asked Carter if there was anything he wanted, he suggested a massage. She then removed his clothes and asked if he wanted anything else, “anything at all”.
And then he fell asleep.
Next morning when he awoke, Carter ran down to the front desk with no shirt on, asking the clerk if he’d seen a beautiful Indian woman anywhere.
“I will regret my life over that I fell asleep,” he says, the pain still etched in every line on his face. “But I was so tired! And then I woke up just very bummed that I’d missed some kind of offer from the gods. That was a disappointment.
“But I think it’s cool, there’s a multiple theme running through everything, the line between the gutter and the stars. The U2 part is very important to the story because really, I was just a dude who cheated my way in. But there’s something to that. There’s a bit of gamble. And I think that a really cool part of the story is, if you can get into the slipstream and get in the back door… nobody goes in the front door. If you go in the front door, you don’t belong.”

Fools Rush In is published by Doubleday