U2: The Book of Genesis

“It’s only rock’n’roll” must be the single most counter-productive cliché coined in the history of pop. Not to mention the most politically divisive. From its inception in the United States, out of the shadows of Hiroshima, rock’n’roll was an attitude more than anything else: a culturally-determined social construct fired by the texture, tensions and tendencies of its time.

When Little Richard gave rock its rallying call ‘awopbopaloobopalop-bamboom’ it was not simply some nonsense lyric that had dropped from the sky. Far from it, in fact. It was the joyful wail of a race of colonised people who had suddenly found expression through the newly-formed medium of rock’n’roll. Even more specifically, the phrase “Tutti frutti, ah rooty” was the coded sexual sigh of a black gay male who wasn’t quite yet ready to lay on the American psyche the phrase “good booty”, as in “good ass.” This is the only way to fathom the true meaning of Tutti Frutti. Any other interpretation is little more than a superficial lie.

Likewise, when Elvis wailed “Well, that’s all right, Mama” the real energy at the root of that vocal explosion was derived from the fact that this long-oppressed product of a “white trash” background had finally been granted a space in which to fly – and, in doing so, to deny all the forces that had conspired to keep his spirit earthbound.

These dimensions to the story of rock were probably first highlighted in the public realm at least a quarter of a century ago, in books like George Melly’s Revolt Into Style and a little later in Griel Marcus’ Mystery Train. Equally, here in Ireland, music has been analysed within this cultural context for at least the last decade, largely through the pages of Hot Press, and, by extension in newspapers like The Sunday Tribune and The Irish Times. Nonetheless, ex-Hot Press writer John Waters seems to have sharply divided public opinion in terms of the overarching cultural analysis which informs his new book Race of Angels: Ireland and the Genesis of U2.

Taking his lead from Franz Fanon’s book on the colonialist condition, Black Skin, White Masks, Waters basically argues that U2 are the personification of the post-colonial psyche in Ireland, particularly as ruptured by the famine roughly 150 years ago. Other commentators have, of course, long since suggested that Irish artists such as James Joyce wrote out of this desire to relocate the spirit, and reconnect with the soul, of a people torn apart by centuries of colonisation by England and Rome. Indeed, one could suggest that a sense of spiritual dislocation is the defining feature of all Irish art, and all forms of cultural expressions in this country, past and present.

That said, one wonders has John Waters picked, in U2, a suitable vehicle for his theory? Are they really post-colonial Ireland in microcosm? Or could it be that, as with BP Fallon turning U2 into his “backing band” for his recent book, Faraway So Close, Waters now has turned U2 into his own musical alterego – or rather his ego altered and split into four by the need to repair the rupture in his own psyche?

Kinda gives a new twist to the phrase “cultural reappropriation” doesn’t it? But, hey, it’s only rock’n’roll, right?

Joe Jackson: On The Late, Late Show you said “I felt tussles in myself and saw shadows of that in U2”. So is this book basically an externalisation of your own neurosis, maybe misapplied to both Ireland and to U2?

John Waters: (laughs). That’s a good question and one I have to continually ask myself. ‘Neurosis’ is a good word, in the sense that one could say that all the things I write reflect my own neurosis. That’s my tool kit, my palette and I, myself, have to be the judge of the extent to which that is relevant to the broader question of society. But what I have in common with U2 – particularly Bono – and with Sinead O’Connor is that, to a certain extent, we all have internalised the public condition in different ways. That isn’t to say you are making you own neurosis public, but that you are using your own emotional baggage as a means of getting to the meaning of the public trauma. And as somebody who writes from an almost entirely subjective perspective and distrusts objectivity, empiricism and received notions, that is the only way I would want to see the world.

So is this book more about you than it is about U2?

The book is my seeking validations for my own views from far more than U2, whether that is Franz Fanon, Mike Cooley, Ivor Browne or from reading Liam Greenslade’s research into the effects of colonialism on the Irish psyche, in terms of mental illness and schizophrenia, manic depression, alcoholism. That is the core condition I address in the book. And I hear echoes of all that in U2’s music but do not see these questions being addressed in the cultural and political arena at large, as they should be.

Isn’t there still the possibility that your own emotional baggage discolours your perspective and that, indeed, neither Sinead O’Connor nor U2 are representative of the Irish family in microcosm?

There is, yes. But studies of even so-called “normal” families have shown that neurosis, psychosis will manifest itself in that families’ weakest member and that this is how, for example, schizophrenia is passed on generation to generation. So there is a recurring racial pattern there, bubbling under the surface of even what we would regard as the norm. And, after reading this book Bono did say to me ‘you know what you’re really saying here that they’re all fucked and we’re the norm!’ – meaning that we have, at least, identified our neurosis and admit it’s part of our psyche. But, on the other hand I, myself, am not bitter and I did have a relatively happy childhood, apart from the fact that my father was quite eccentric. That’s something I addressed in Jiving at the Crossroads and something that informs this book to a degree.

But again you’re talking there about issues that relate to a specific family rather than to the people as a whole.

I definitely agree with Fanon’s suggestion that the family is a miniature of the nation. And despite also being part of that generation, born from 1950-1965, who were assured we had it all and needn’t worry about things like emigration as previous generations had, I really did finally sense within myself a grief I couldn’t name and which couldn’t be directly related to my own family. Therefore, I can only conclude that it is one of the characteristics of the post-colonial condition, my emotional baggage in a racial sense. Particularly as it relates to the death of one and a half million of our people, mass emigration and the total annihilation of entire areas of this country during the famine – which was only 150 years ago. And these things are not talked about. There was, in my lifetime, a discussion about imperialism and nationalism but this is a different discussion because it is a victimology. I’m not talking about what the Brits did to us. I’m talking about what we did to ourselves when they left.

But couldn’t you be accused of perpetuating these patterns of what you call “victimology” by insisting we journey back 150 years to reconcile ourselves with that part of our past. Surely that will just leave us as enslaved as we once were, to Britain and Rome?

If we can be honest about what happened to us at that point in our history, rather than live in a state of denial, then we will be liberated by that, not further enslaved. But by not fully reconciling ourselves with the past we do still remain its victims. It’s no coincidence that this country is as incapable of functioning adequately in the world as we are. We’re haemorrhaging our population around the world, we have the highest rate of unemployment in the EC, horrendous drug problems, an escalating crime problem and we’re destroying our landscape and giving it away to the multi-nationalist sector. All these things are not simply the consequence of bad luck.

Some would argue simply that they are mostly the result of national, European and global socio-economic factors over the last fifty years.

No. To me they are simply things that are replicating the colonial condition. When one coloniser left we insisted on finding another – the EC and the multi-nationalist sector – and all because we need to be able to say ‘there’s nothing we can do’. We just lie there and think of Ireland. Obviously we can’t disengage from the EC in the morning but our relationship with it should be based on strength – in terms of our sovereignty, our sense of ourselves, our independence – and not in this craven dependency, and gratitude for being bought off. They give us money so they can poison us. It was the same after the famine. The nature of our being colonised by Rome changed. Before the famine Irish Catholicism had been much lighter, more joyful but following the famine the dark, brooding, melancholic model of Catholicism took over and we needed to play the role of supplicant to Rome. England was the problem to begin with, but then the Catholic Church became a carrier for the virus of colonialism and that continues to this day. That, to me, is another aspect of the colonialist condition we need to shake off.

In Ian McDonald’s new book, Revolution In The Head, he suggests that the phenomenal popularity of rock groups like The Beatles relates to the “spiritual crisis” set in motion when “God” was shafted by science during the age of the Enlightenment. Bono, in your book, elaborates on this, saying “never in the history of human civilisation has there been a people who did not believe in the idea of God, spirit of God. This is the thing.” To most commentators the post-modern condition is defined more by this need to deal with the ‘God is dead’ dilemma rather than more localised problems like the famine and colonialism.

I absolutely agree with all that. And I’m not saying our history starts with the famine or that this is as far back as we need to go to achieve a sense of true reconciliation. Not at all. But I am saying that, for Irish people, the famine is the mountain, the barrier in the path leading back to those other forms of reconciliation. We’ve got to deal with the famine first before we can go any further. And we have been held back from addressing larger questions – such as the “death” of God – because we are still caught up in the colonialist condition. And part of that condition is, as I say, allowing ourselves to remain enslaved by what other races have long since seen as out-moded and ancient concepts of God and Church – as in Catholicism.

And yet, Bono’s suggestion, in that quote, and as articulated through Zooropa, is that the real sense of liberation comes from living “with these uncertainties.” Likewise, you identify that the buried theme of modern Irish art is accepting “home” as a journey rather than a fixed destination. That, surely, reflects our ability to be liberated by our history, to turn negative experiences into positive energy.

We are liberated by our history in that sense but many Irish people seem to have a problem with this concept of identity as a fluid rather than fixture. But I do definitely believe that identity is a fluid, like a river. And the journey is not so much one of moving towards a point where you can fix this notion, as it is towards accepting this flux, which is, I think what Bono means, in relation to Zooropa.

On the other hand, U2 could be seen as far from accurate barometers of the post-religious condition in that at least three of them do still believe in God. And believe that at their centre sits God rather than any existential black hole.

That’s true but in the book I argue that it always was the presence of one non-believer which stopped U2 from becoming Cliff Richard’s backing group! And it is, I believe, this religious tension in the group, more than anything else, which defines their music. Bono, in particular, believes in something and he knows what it is. At that level his faith is extraordinarily powerful, though it’s not the faith I have. Because of my own personal experience of religion I can’t say ‘I believe in God or Jesus Christ the Son of God’. Bono can say that. Yet what defines his worldview is the different and ever-evolving ways he perceives his faith. So it’s not at all simply a case of Bono or U2 producing what could be called Christian music, in the strict sense. It is more a reflection of the post-modern condition, as manifested in the fact that, ultimately they do produce music that is suffused with spiritual yearning.

Despite all you’ve just said, a lot of rock fans will simply remember Bono’s admittance that he originally got into rock when he looked at some young woman he fancied and realised “with this music I can unbuckle her belt” and say “that’s more like it! That’s the truth about rock’n’roll.”

It is a truth and why not? Let’s have that too! But although Bono’s sexual needs at that stage were, and may still be, met by rock’n’roll it’s important to point out that there is a world of difference between, say, U2’s music, in this sense, and Bon Jovi. Most rock music is boringly phallocentric, whereas U2’s music is not. They are sexually driven people. That is especially explicit in Achtung Baby! And Bono did say to me “Van Morrison started out writing songs about love and ended up writing about God, we did the opposite.” That’s the journey from Boy to Achtung Baby! and it seems to me that journey was only possible because there were three born-again Christians in the group, and one non-believer. It was only possible to make Achtung Baby! because Adam had remained outside the spiritual thing and drew them back to the nightclub and the ‘real’ meaning of rock’n’roll, in the old sense.

In Actung Baby! U2 go even further, in that they also sexualise God, by using lines with double meanings such as “on your knees, boy” which can relate to both praying and to giving head.

The meaning I took from the line you quote is that in the era of political correctness in the early 80s it was possible to talk about sex in rock’n’roll but not about God – whereas now you can’t sing explicitly about sex, but you can about God. In that sense Bono is right about Van’s music, though the journey from God to sex is probably more of a mirror of our times.

But when Bono sings a song of sexual longing, such as She Moves In Mysterious Ways he surely also takes things further by turning God into a woman and, as such, making sex a positive, life-enhancing force, which is the negation of Catholicism to a great degree.

I definitely get from those songs on Achtung Baby! the sense that Bono is singing to God as a woman, and as a lover – both. And, it is on these intrinsic levels that U2 push what basically are revolutionary thoughts into the realm of popular culture. You listen and say ‘why not? Why shouldn’t God be a woman?’ That’s how rock’n’roll has liberated consciousness this century, in ways that most politicians can’t even begin to understand. This is the level at which culture works to effect changes in sensibility, values, perceptions. And one could even suggest that it also has helped change the very nature of this century in relation to somewhere like Czechoslovakia, where the music of the Velvet Underground helped pave a path to the revolution, in 1989. Political commentators will laugh at that notion but Vaclav Havel himself has admitted that it happens to be true. And music does change the way we perceive the world, and ourselves

Earlier you suggested that one of the defining journeys made this century is the movement from the sacred to the profane. Rock’n’roll has been a huge influence in terms of that journey. But Bono now seems to believe we must make the journey towards reconciling the two.

That is the way forward, I believe. We killed God, in a sense, and rock’n’roll seemed to be the most eloquent celebration of God’s demise. But now U2 have come along and said “maybe not.” Maybe, as Bono says, God isn’t dead. Maybe Nietzsche is. They took that possibility into their music and, to me, this is the most exciting thing in our generation. Not just in terms of rock music, but culture in general.

That said, one missing area of exploration in your book and in every analysis of U2 is the link between their music and drugs, which also is a defining factor this century. In your book you run a parallel between Zooropa and the Beatles album Sgt Pepper, which was largely a product of LSD use. However, whenever U2’s current “fragmentation of consciousness” is described it is rationalised as a post-Gulf War perspective. Will we have to wait a quarter century to find out that Zooropa might also have been shaped by drug-consciousness? And if you don’t address that question in your book aren’t you telling only half the story?

You’ll have to ask the band themselves about this! But the point is that I don’t claim that my book tells the whole story about U2. And I don’t know about their activities in this area. Though I know they loosened up in the ’80s and began to take a pint or two. Yet to go any further into this area would be a violation of privacy and that is something I wouldn’t want to do. But if there was any basis to that analysis of Zooropa I would see it as a reflection of the fact that we live in a drugs culture. I don’t use drugs and I don’t believe in drugs. I also don’t believe that drugs heighten consciousness. On the contrary, whether it is in the ghettos of America or inner city areas of Dublin, I think drugs are used more as a form of social control, to immobilise people politically. Rock’n’roll has always perpetuated the myth that they are a necessary part of the journey, to “raise consciousness” or get back to God, à la Timothy Leary, or whatever. I don’t buy that. And, in relation to the Beatles, there is the argument that Lennon’s use of drugs did, eventually, damage his music.

Another argument is that Lennon’s use of LSD led him to say ‘to hell with what the audience wants, everything I do is art’. Mightn’t U2 also end up alienating mass audiences with work such as Zooropa which is, in essence, Lennon’s Tomorrow Never Knows by another name?

I’m not sure that will happen to U2. And, having seen U2 perform abroad I do believe they have managed to hold onto that mass audience in the broadest possible sense. Yet, working in the marketplace, part of the tightrope they must walk, is that they start out as a cult band, become mainstream and then must return to cult status, at some mega-level. And cult status obviously can involve relatively avant-garde work like Zooropa. But, definitely, a key question facing U2 now is how they can continue to make popular music which relates to its audience in a mainstream way yet which also is true to your own perspectives, as artists. And, more specifically, as artists who are forever growing and who may, indeed, at some point, leave that mass audience behind.

Nevertheless, to run a parallel between U2 and Joyce couldn’t one compare Zooropa to Finnegan’s Wake and suggest that if U2 continue much further down that road of musical experimentation they will lose the mass audience and then become of far less use as social signifiers?

Then they’d simply be social signifiers of a different form. And Lennon did do that, in an almost perverse way. And when he tried to come back, from things like Revolution No 9 to Double Fantasy he couldn’t do it. And, at the end, Mark Chapman was almost the most extreme form of critical reviewer rejecting Lennon’s attempt to duck back into the mainstream. So there’s no doubt this is one of the most critical questions facing U2. And my book is, very much about the future and how, here in Ireland, we are coming into what could be the most exciting time in our history. And the question about U2 is to what extent are they of the future? Bono raises this question in what I think is the most extraordinarily revealing thing he said. After all those achievements and all that self-belief he admits he is afraid of the future because U2 could, finally be seen as “the horse with the long neck.”

Which is?

He explains it by saying there is a story about a horse and about a giraffe and that somewhere in between, for a fleeting moment, there was a horse with a long neck. But it disappeared and the giraffe took over. He’s afraid U2 are that horse with the long neck. That they are neither the horse nor the giraffe and something will come along later and make sense because U2 existed, but which will reveal itself to be the real thing. That’s an extraordinary admission. And that profound confidence in U2, which comes across in their music, when set against this core lack of confidence is, to me, the duality that defines the post-colonialist condition.

Surely you, and this book, could indeed turn U2 into the “horse with the long neck”! How, in God’s name can they now go back into the studio knowing they are carrying the weight of post-famine, post-colonial, post-religious neurosis on their shoulders! How can poor Bono, in particular, function as a writer under the weight of all this cultural theory?

They couldn’t! And he can’t! And if I was them I’d just walk away from it and forget everything I’ve written in this book! All of this is too much for anyone to take on board on a conscious level. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have addressed these issues in a book.

So at the end of it all are we simply to accept that Bono really is Jesus Christ reborn and that time will reveal you to have been John the Baptist?

No. Actually. I’d see it more that Bono is John the Baptist and I’m God! But, seriously, what I say near the end of the book is that “we are all angels now, rootless, restless, horizontal, homeless and free” and that’s more my belief. But then angels, to me, are not the opposite of devils. Their purpose is not to remove evil, it is simply to keep a pull on the rope. In that sense angels are just the resistance to devils. Therefore the last chapter in my book is ‘Laughable Angels’ which sums up my belief that the function of the laughter of angels is to drown out the laughter of devils. That, too, is what music is all about. And one of my main conclusions in the book, as I say, is that from out of the din there may arise from time to time a song that can lift the heart. That, to me, is what U2’s music always did for me. And on the last page of Race of Angels I do sum it up by saying ‘the sound of a guitar makes your body move in a different way. It has in it the laughter of angels, the spit of the devil, the ripple of Fionn Glas, the voice of the Goddess Echo, a little mystery, and the merest promise of the future’. That is U2, to me.

Where Angels Fears To Tread

Whilst their present state of mind has never been so clearly documented, Bill Graham suggests that John Waters' new book fails to address the contrast between U2's spiritual independence and the iron rule Catholic education has exerted on Irish life since the Famine.

Race Of Angels is a book destined to stir argument. Or is that two books, three, four or more? It’s illuminating and infuriating, sometimes highly perceptive on the relationship between U2 and their proud but uneasy host nation, other times sky-high on the philosophical improbabilities of it all and wont to weave speculations that are heedless of the facts.

To the good then. John Waters’ book works best when U2 are in the foreground or he’s writing out of his own experience. The band granted him extensive interviews so his book’s full of meaty quotes that give the best sense that I’ve read of their frame of mind as Zoo TV evolved into Zooropa. And if there are readers who’d prefer to unreel Bono off his kite, Waters’ extensive quotes give a fine sense of the U2 singer’s mercurial curiosity. Likewise Waters’ tales of his own youth in Roscommon are accurate witness about how skewed Irish rural popular culture was through the ’Seventies.

So there’s chapters here that should be indispensable in any anthology about U2 – ‘The Children Of Limbo’ about the members of Lypton Village living on the faultlines between Finglas, Ballymun and Glasnevin; and ‘The Absent Presence’ about how the Irish media and establishment struggles to cope with the band’s artistic achievements. But as the book moves to its conclusions, you begin to suspect he’s manhandling U2 to suit his own agenda. His Ireland and U2’s don’t fit as neatly as he pretends.

One personal example. It’s 1984, The Unforgettable Fire tour and I’m flying back with the band from Rotterdam to London. We land at Heathrow and queue at passport control. One man joins another line and sails through. The Edge has a British passport!

Of course, one doesn’t need to be ultra-nationalist; the incident can be dismissed as immaterial. For all I know, U2’s guitarist may have since applied for Irish citizenship but that cameo says much about the band’s creative anomalies and how they resist generalisation.

Still, links have to be made and John Waters is sufficiently brave to be the boy on the burning bridge: Ireland and U2 – discuss. But is the problem that band and country never had a simple relationship since U2 come from the margins not the monoculture of Seventies Ireland?

We tend to forget that Irish rock is the creation of evolutionary freaks, voices outside the mainstream - and that includes those who were black, gay and Irish-speaking. Add in Van Morrison’s family leanings towards the Jehovah’s Witnesses or even Bob Geldof’s Belgian background. And it’s blazingly obvious that women like Sinéad O’Connor and Mary Coughlan were also at odds with Irish verities. As far as I can discern, only Rory Gallagher hails from what could be termed a ‘normal’ Irish background. Even the Anglo-Argentinian Chris De Burgh, serenading student nurses in their Rathmines bed-sits, joins the gallery of interlopers. Irish rock is not a story of insiders.

Of course that doesn’t invalidate a book like Race Of Angels. Outsiders can see contours that those who take a society’s codes for granted don’t. And U2 deserve a big book. John Waters is implicitly and correctly arguing that we diminish ourselves as much as U2 when we let the media reduce them to gossip-fodder.

Ever since he began writing for Hot Press, one of John Waters’ strengths is that he’s a marvellously intuitive interviewer. For instance, he gleans invaluable new material about Bono’s family. But when the theorist drowns out the listener, he doesn’t track down all the clues in the quotes he’s gleaned from the band members. Most plausibly, he wants to present U2 as one of the most spectacular responses to a fractured Irish psyche. But the funny thing is that it’s his Ireland – not his U2 – that he gets most wrong.

Take the book’s title, which he’s borrowed from the radical anti-colonialist Algerian writer, Franz Fanon. Following him, Waters argues that Ireland “is a colonised society, the conditions resembling those in a colonised black society, but in a more complex and all-but-invisible way.”

And yes, the argument can definitely be advanced. Independent Ireland has always had a neurotic relationship with the mass media of our more populous and powerful neighbour. There was a post-independence crisis of popular culture and our sense of ourselves was – and is – further threatened by the multinational recording and film industries. For too long, we preferred defiantly insecure anti-British negations to positive statements of Irish identity.

Certainly the Famine was a traumatising experience; and it is right to castigate the wasteful insularity of this State ’til the ’Sixties. But when John Waters attacks our post-colonial rulers, he concentrates on our relationship with Britain. In the book though not his later interview with Joe Jackson, Rome rule goes unmentioned. Yet again, Cardinal Cullen is the ghost in the Irish Murder Machine who escapes undetected.

So while he’s good on the artistic consequences of U2’s religious beliefs, he doesn’t completely fill in its background in a style of Protestant evangelism that even lapsed Catholics are still blinkered about. It’s easy to dismiss U2’s Shalom phase as a diversion but I disagree; I believe it was entirely logical.

Go back to 1978 and you’ll understand that it was probably the most productive area of spiritual exploration to be found. Catholic authoritarianism had become blatant while Eastern cults had become discredited with the hippies. Nor could politics be expected to appeal to U2 as members of the generation after the Sixties; the slaughter in the North had seen to that.

And yet the beliefs of Bono, Edge and Larry didn’t take a reactionary turn. In 1978, they played benefits for the pro-contraception campaign, hardly the action of obscurantist moralists. The contrast with Bob Geldof. I’ve laboured before, but it’s still useful. Like many Irish Catholics, his education forced him to flay and lay waste his spirituality before he could find his own identity. U2’s very special originality is that they never had these problems. The spirit has never embarrassed them.

But I’m not convinced that Race Of Angels really understands the contrast between U2’s spiritual independence and the iron rule of much Catholic education. Granted, he writes about another healthier pre-Famine Irish tradition, the bardic schools of Daniel Corkery’s Hidden Ireland but he tends to circle round Irish Catholicism.

So while there’s much robustly populist stuff about the filthy modern tide of multinational capitalism destroying local and national character, Waters lets Rome off lightly. Given a choice between criticising our democratically elected politicians or our imposed spiritual rulers, Waters invariably lambastes the former. This supposed anti-colonialist seems quite incapable of considering the possibility that Sinéad O’Connor might just have a point in her view that Rome is the second if shadowed colonial master of Ireland’s spirit. Irish Catholicism’s own peculiarly austere suspicion and fear of the spirit is never really examined.

Here observe the contrast between Gavin Friday and Bono. Both rejected standard definitions of Irish masculinity but whereas Gavin began by playing gender-bending games of ironic defiance, Bono refused to be the standard dour, undemonstrative aspiritual Irish male, the Catholic role model of the uncomplaining provider who consigned more intense matters of the spirit to women. Education and religious background surely played a part.

And this could have led to another theme since U2 are hardly alone in their religious concerns. Add in O’Connor, Morrison, Liam O’Maonlaí and even The Waterboys. What does that tell us about the crisis in Irish beliefs since the Seventies?

Besides, there are other dogs that don’t get to bark. In a book about Irish identity, women, sex and the North somehow also slide out of view. I don’t want to overburden U2 since they’ve never claimed to be Ireland’s most infallible prophets but surely connections can be made between them and the generational wars of the Eighties.

To some extent, he strives to make U2 citizens of his own Castlerea and in one passage from the chapter, ‘Remember The Future’, when he quotes Seamus Heaney, he’s right on the button regarding the peculiar Irish parodies in Lypton Village’s arcane language and rituals.

But he can rather overdo the thesis that Ireland is a Third World country, a complaint which only partially fits the early U2 and Lypton Village experience. Where does this place the young ex-pat Adam Clayton, growing up in Zambia where his father was a pilot for the national airline? Or Paul McGuinness, whose father served as an RAF officer? Or Island and Chris Blackwell, the Old Harrovian mentor of both Bob Marley and U2?

So Race Of Angels continues on its twin tracks. A most observant chapter, ‘The Hazel Rod’ on Edge and the band’s creative dynamic precedes to where Waters winds up for his grand conclusion. Cit