U2: We'd Forgotten He Was Human

BONO
Bono has just come from a meeting with the US President when he heard…

I was in a very portentous circumstance (when the news came through). I just walked out of a meeting with President Obama, just got into the car and Catriona, my PA, told me – and that was that, really. From a really great meeting where everything seemed so possible in the outside world, to just this very different reality where all the possibilities of Gerry have slipped away from us.
He’s the nation’s weather vane and he’ll be so missed, for that very talent he has of just getting it perfectly right, just judging the mood; and that’s our great loss, I think.
We’d forgotten he was human, that’s for sure. He was a different kind of superhero. You have breakfast with him, don’t you? It doesn’t get more intimate. When you wake up in the morning he’s there, just filling your head full of things, silly and profound. That was the great thing about him. Why he was so beloved by Irish people was that he had both: he was a very serious intellect and a great analyst of the country’s affairs and then he had a potty mouth and was just a mad, silly man.
When we’d go out on the road, whatever tours we’d be doing, he’d always come out with us at some point: he’d talk somebody in the hierarchy of RTE into letting him cover the opening or whatever it was. He was a very important fan and critic at times (good at telling us): ‘This song’s better than that’. He had this incredible gift of being able to criticize; or he’d be able to talk you down from a position without hurting your feelings and I guess he did that to people every day, who called in (to the show). That’s the strange thing. People never thought of him as rude: he could say anything he wanted to them and he did that with us.
Dave Fanning must just be distraught. I always just think of the two of them coming out on the road: they were a bit of a double act there for a while, and so our thoughts really go out to Dave Fanning and, of course, to Morah and all the kids – and to the country. I don’t know how the country can fill this hole that’s left in it (now that he’s gone). When I say he was ‘the weather vane’ he really did tell you what was going on in the country, you really sensed the mood of the nation. He hated whingers: he managed to sound-off or let people sound off, but he never surrendered to the melancholy.
There’s so many memories. We had a great time with him playing back No Line On The Horizon. We asked him out to Temple Hill and we were all there and we were in celebratory mood – we’d finished this thing and we were playing it to him and he was bouncing off the walls! That’s how I’ll remember him. Just that energy in the room. He’s like a light in any room, it’s just brighter when he’s in it. A brighter mind – and an optimist when you really need one.
I can’t believe it. Ali just couldn’t speak when I spoke to her and I think a lot of people feel like that. You immediately think differently about your friends and family in a moment like this. It’s not possible that this could have happened – but it turns out he was human after all.
(A final goodbye?) It’s a line from the Koran: ‘He is close to God who makes his friends laugh’. I think he was a very, very blessed man. I’ve absolute faith that I will see him again and he’s going to be quite the bolshy man – God’ll have a few questions to answer! Goodbye Gerry for the moment and thank you very much for being the leader of our country for those three hours in the morning. They’ll just never be the same without you. Goodbye.

EDGE
Edge heard the newes from the U2 manager, Paul McGuinness – also a good friend of Gerry

I was at home, you know – I was actually on the internet, as we all are these days, in the morning, just going through emails and I got one from Paul McGuinness breaking the news and, really, I couldn’t compute at all. It was just such a shock. I’m sure everyone was in the same situation.
The deep irony for me is that, at moments like this, it’s always Gerry that has the smart thing, the right thing to say. You always turn his show on, to hear his take on what’s just happened, because he’s always gonna have the best read on the way the Irish people feel about it.
We lived with him every day and it’s hard sometimes to remember, when somebody’s so present in your life, that they’re human – this brings it home so forcefully.
On the music front, he’d always want to talk about the songs and he did so with great insight but with the enthusiasm of a fan. That was the great thing about Gerry: he never lost the pure excitement and joy of music, no matter how many years he’d been doing this professionally. It wasn’t anything other than fun to him.
One particular good memory (for me) was watching the St. Patrick’s Day parade from a room in the Gresham Hotel and hanging out with Morah and the kids and Gerry and just how funny he was.
He was a very funny man: very witty, very bright and also with a deep knowledge of politics and every aspect of Irish life so he’d always have a funny thing to say and his wit was great. He was a very irreverent man in his way of dealing with serious topics, which was the right attitude to have. Those are the things I remember.
(A final goodbye?) Gerry, we’ll miss you pal, big time, and we have faith that we’ll get to see you again some day. You shone bright and you made a lot of people laugh – and there’s nothing else any of us could hope for, than to be remembered in
that way.