Closer to the Edge

In common with its occasional occupants, U2’s famous Hanover Quay studio on Dublin’s Docklands is still standing tall and sturdy in the midst of a whole lot of rock & rubble. As the nineties segued into the noughties, most of the buildings surrounding the innocuous-looking, warehouse-like structure were demolished to make way for an as-yet-unfinished public promenade, but as Sam, the highly affable studio manager, explains, “The corporation seem to have slowed up the project a bit, so it should be here for another couple of years yet.”

If cracking new single ‘Electrical Storm’ is anything to go on (and, of course, it is) then it’s probably safe to say that the same is true of U2. Barring death, divorce or disaster, Bono, Larry, Adam and Edge will undoubtedly be with us for another couple of years yet. Midway through their third decade together, and coming off the back of the enormous twin successes of their acclaimed All That You Can’t Leave Behind album and the subsequent Elevation tour, the band have never seemed so tight, potent, real and relevant. As the vast majority of their contemporaries fall by the wayside, fade into obscurity or survive by unashamedly rehashing their tired old formulas, U2 are one of the few acts who’ve been around since the 70’s who’re still risk-taking, still experimenting with sonic possibilities and pushing the rock & roll envelope out. No wonder they’ve just been put on a stamp!

Inside, through the heavy metal door and past the security cameras, Hanover Quay is bright, spacious and if not quite alive with activity, not quite dead either. The band haven’t arrived yet but have telephonically communicated that they’re on their way (with the exception of Bono, who’s lying low somewhere, recuperating from his latest trans-Atlantic jaunt).

Downstairs in the Green Room, Donal Scannel and Sebastian Clayton are busily setting up the equipment for an interview with Sebastian’s older - and slightly better known - sibling, to be broadcast on the band’s website U2.com. One floor above them, in a big, airy room with a full-sized paddle boat on the wall (presumably there in case Flood comes around), Sam offers your reporter culinary delights from a well-stocked buffet, while veteran band aide Principle Management’s Sheila Roche chats and reminisces about the last ten years of U2. In a nutshell, she says, it’s been madness - but memorable madness.

Certainly the last ten years represent a fairly wild and turbulent period in the group’s history - a decade that saw them maturing, but never mellowing. Their forthcoming The Best & The B-Sides of 1990 - 2000 showcase the hits and highs of a hugely experimental body of work crafted and grafted against all sorts of difficult deadlines and unforeseen odds - creative differences, sozzled bass players, dearly departed friends and massive malfunctioning mechanical lemons amongst them.

But no need to elaborate further, because the man millions know simply as The Edge has just walked up the stairs, politely apologising for the lateness of his arrival. Slim, trim and healthier-looking than your average rock guitarist, he looks great for a 41-year-old - so great, in fact, that he can somehow get away with dressing like a 14-year-old without looking ridiculous. Today, his trademark skullcap is a knitted black affair, his top is as white, bright and expensive as his gleaming teeth, and his widely flared denims are held together at the seams with enough safety pins to spark a full-scale airport security alert. Pretty nifty for a father of four.

Once comfortably seated in an adjoining room, we swiftly get down to business. A consummate professional, who takes the whole interview business more seriously than most, he listens to each question intently and measures his responses very carefully. His sentences come slowly, and in fits and starts . . . so that you’re never quite sure if he’s finished talking . . . or if there’s an addendum . . . and then another little observation at the end.

All told, he’s a highly articulate interviewee . . . but an absolute bitch to transcribe.

OLAF TYARANSEN: The band made a massive artistic leap from 1987’s The Joshua Tree to 1991’s Achtung Baby. How would you define the difference between 80’s U2 and 90’s U2?

THE EDGE: I think we made a play for artistic freedom at the beginning of the 90’s, partly out of a sense that we needed to move on and try something very different, and also out of a sense of just wanting to change the way the band were perceived. It got a bit stifling at the end of the 80’s because of the massive success of The Joshua Tree, and also I suppose our music at that point was so against the grain - you know, that was the period of ‘Material Girl’ and Reagan and Thatcher politics. And we were kind of coming in, sounding incredibly earnest in having a political conscience, and I think at the end of that tour we felt that we’d been robbed of any kind of . . . balance . . . to the way people perceived us.

So Achtung Baby, the first album of the 90’s, was a definite play to redress the balance and show other sides of what we were about as artists and, you know, just people really. So hence the interest in new lyric approaches, introducing some irony, writing from the third person, things that we hadn’t done before. And, from a musical point of view, still wanting to communicate in the way that we always do to a mass audience, but bringing into our sound a lot more extreme influences, a lot of industrial music, a lot of dance music - aesthetics that wouldn’t have been part of what we’d done in the 80’s.

You also began utilising a lot of studio technology . . .

We’d always seen the studio as a creative tool but I think in the 90’s’ work we pushed that a stage further. I suppose the sound of some of our early records is a band playing very simple ideas but making great use out of simple things. When it came to the 90’s’ work, we were being more experimental and we got more interested in the abuse of technology - seeing what happens when you push something to the point where it’s almost about to break. There’s a certain texture to the sound, particularly of Achtung Baby, which is very much about technology on the verge of breakdown.

It was about relationships on the verge of breakdown as well, wasn’t it? By all accounts, the band’s early sessions in Berlin’s Hansa Studios were fairly strained.

Yeah. Well, I think anytime you make a radical change to what you’ve been doing, it’s a case of everyone having to reassess, so there was a period at the beginning of the 90’s where there was so much up for grabs and everyone had to find their feet again in a new milieu. And that took a while.

Larry thought he was being phased out of the band at one point, didn’t he?

(Laughs) I think we all guard our corner of what it is to be in U2 quite jealously, and I think Larry might have felt a little threatened when we started using drum machines. But we never had it in our mind to go out on the road, or indeed into the studio, and not use Larry. It’s just as a songwriting tool, sometimes it gets inspiring to start a piece from some completely different point of view. And so loops on drum machines and a lot of the dance forms were great springboards for us as songwriters. But those periods of friction were I guess the kind of thing that might split up bands that had less of a sense of being a band. And it’s one of the things that makes what we do special - the fact that we are a real band, that there is a lot of commitment and loyalty and a deep friendship there. So it would take a hell of a lot to really threaten those relationships and that commitment to U2 - for all of us. So in that sense it might have been a bad period, but it didn’t last very long.

The band’s internal relationships weren’t the only ones under strain. You were in the process of getting divorced and Guggi’s long-term relationship had also just ended. How did you feel about Bono lyrically expressing what he imagined to be going on in your head?

Well . . .(pauses). I suppose there’s a certain kind of bleeding of ideas and, em . . . (long pause). I suppose there’s an emotional connection between the members of the band. So it felt like, although I recognised something that I was going through in a song, it just felt like he was writing in a general sense about what was happening amongst our group of friends.

You were all turning thirty around then, weren’t you?

Yeah. There was a lot of stuff going on (smiles wryly). Some not-so-great stuff, and a lot of great stuff. I suppose Bono was just picking up what was in the air and it came through in the lyrics. But, in a lot of cases, the music is the thing that inspires the lyric and the themes.

He writes a lot of his lyrics on the mic, doesn’t he?

Yeah. Often the lyric is the last thing. In fact, most of the time it’s the last thing. So we’ll end up with Bono trying to figure out what the music is saying and, I guess, therefore, since my end of it is the music, a lot of what I was going through was going into the music.

Tracks like ‘Love Is Blindness’?

Actually, that was one that Bono did write the lyric for first. It started out just on piano. But things like ‘Ultraviolet’, ‘You’re So Cruel’, songs like that. The sort of feeling was very strong. And with our material, we start out with a sense of a piece of music and where it might go, and we chip away and try different versions of it until it starts to become the best example of that, in terms of its arrangement. So it takes on a certain crystal form. And at that point then you get into the lyric phase - and you finish up the songs. So there’s a long process where the music is worked on.

But in Ireland it’s funny how lyrics are the . . . (pauses). I suppose because Ireland is a literary place, lyrics are what people pick up on. I think it’s the only country in the world, particularly related to Hot Press, where the music isn’t associated with the songwriting. In Hot Press, songwriting is always a Bono reference, not a U2 reference, which I find interesting.

Does that piss you off?

Well, it used to surprise me somewhat. At this point I just take it as one of the idiosyncrasies of this country. In some ways Ireland is very highly developed on a literary perspective, but I suppose very underdeveloped in a musical or visual way. It’s a unique perspective in Ireland, I think.

Speaking of visual perspectives, tell me how the idea for the ZOO TV tour came about.

I think it started with ‘The Fly’ video. Bono, given that he’s the focus, he’s the communicator when it comes to the shows, he’s standing in the middle of the stage putting over the lyrics and the songs - he suddenly found this other way to perform, through that video. That opened a certain door for him, and when we started putting the show together with our designer, Pete Williams, we got the idea of taking images, taking TV as an idea, and putting screens on stage. That started us down that road and, as a result of working with various different video artists, we ended up with ZOO TV.

You looked like you were having fun with it!

It was just an incredible playpen - especially for Bono. It was so inspiring a place to be. No-one had ever gone there in terms of live performance, so it was virgin territory and we were just having an absolute ball working with all these great people and pushing out the envelope of what rock & roll in a live context can be about. In some ways it was getting back to some of the very earliest shows that we’d done in McGonagles, where we were touching on more of a performance art mixed with rock & roll aspect of it. It was like coming back. And also I suppose some of the early [Virgin] Prunes’ shows that we had been part of. So those early ideas were finding a place in this new live idea.

Using television was certainly a very timely idea, given that the Gulf War was starting and TV news channels were suddenly required viewing.

Yeah. Once we’d figured out that it was going to be television, a lot of connections started to happen. It was a very dark time with the Gulf War. I think it was the period when cable TV - particularly CNN and Sky - started to have a major impact. Because it was like you were watching history unfolding live on TV. But what we were aware of was how editorialised that coverage was. It was having the opposite effect to what you might have imagined. Instead of it drawing people closer to the issues and making people more aware - and therefore more concerned - about what was actually happening, and more motivated, it was actually desensitising people to what was going on.

It became a form of entertainment. . .

Yeah, it was almost as if the news had become another entertainment form, and at the end of the news you just turned off and went back to your life. There seemed to be no sense that there was any need to respond in any way. And I think we’re seeing now that the net result of that is there’s a much greater appetite for ‘reality TV’, as they call it. I think that is completely as a result of this thirst people have developed for not fiction, but what’s actually happening, as a form of entertainment. And it smacks of the Roman Coliseum or whatever - people showing up to watch the latest tragedy unfolding. And I guess with the ZOO TV shows we were trying to draw some attention to what was going on.

How did the live link-ups with Sarajevo come about?

We first made contact with this guy Carter, who was an American. He’d gone to Sarajevo . . . (pauses). I think he’d had some traumatic experience, I think his girlfriend had dumped him or something had freaked him out. I dunno. Anyway, some people would go and get drunk, but he decided to go and move to Sarajevo. And he hung out there for a while - I think he’d studied film in college - and next thing he’s in the middle of hell. And he started to shoot some footage of what was going on and interviewing people. So he showed up in the early part of the outdoor tour, when we were playing in Italy, and he showed us some of his footage and was telling us what was going on in Sarajevo - about this underground music scene and how people, during the evening when the mortars were going off, would go underground to these death metal clubs, where they’d use the heaviest of music to drown out the noise. And he suggested that we might try and get there, that it would make a big difference. So we tried to smuggle ourselves onto a UN plane and go a week or so after he first contacted us, but in the end we couldn’t get permission. And we were in the middle of a tour and the insurance company were going crazy so we sort of gave up the idea, and basically said, ‘We’ll see you again, we’ll be back’.

Sarajevo was a pretty dangerous place to be heading. Is there a fearless aspect to the band?

I don’t think any more than anyone (shrugs). In some ways we’re very privileged because we do have a lot of back-up, and if we’re ever in a position where there’s real danger, we’re probably gonna be given some pretty good advice about how to handle ourselves. So it’s not like we’re like he was, walking completely blind into a situation. I don’t think we’re particularly courageous in that sense. We’re curious. I think that’s probably a stronger trait. We were very curious about what was going on and we wanted to see if there was anything that we could do that might have some impact, make some difference.

Basically we were up for being taken advantage of for the benefit of the people of Sarajevo, in whatever way that that might be good. So anyway, we couldn’t go to Sarajevo, but then this idea came up of utilising the ZOO TV broadcast equipment and actually beaming in interviews, which we could do live from Sarajevo and beam them into the shows in Europe. Which we did.

There was a fairly mixed reaction to that, wasn’t there?

Some would say it was so heavy and such a downer for the audience that it kind of ruined the shows. But although there were a couple of occasions where I think there was a major impact and you could feel the whole vibe disappearing, I think it’s probably the thing that the people who were at those shows will remember longer than anything else. Just that moment of seeing the un-editorialised view of what was going on. Just normal people explaining what was happening in Sarajevo, what their life was like. And it had a sort of power that no news report had. We really just gave up the stage for whatever length of time the interviews were - sometimes they were two minutes, sometimes ten minutes. And I’m sure there were people who didn’t want to watch, who didn’t wanna hear what was happening, who were just there for a quiet night out.

Or a loud night out!

Oh yeah, a loud night out - very loud! (laughs) But we just thought it was an opportunity to maybe try and get some attention back onto Sarajevo, because at that point it had completely dropped off the front pages of the newspapers - it was page 5 or 6, if you were lucky - but the siege was continuing and there were people being killed every day. So we just thought it was valid because, in the end, there’s always been a political aspect to the band and it’s part of what we do. And people coming to our shows might not have expected it but, if they knew what we were like as a band, they shouldn’t have been particularly surprised by it.

U2’s next record was 1993’s Zooropa, which was partly recorded while you were still on tour. But you were the main driving force behind it, weren’t you?

Because of my position as the kind of musical instigator, I spent a lot of time on my own going through a lot of tapes from previous albums, you know, some of the stuff we’d worked up while we were on the road and then some new ideas. So I got quite a lot of stuff together for what was supposed to be an EP, and I was playing everyone these things, laying it out - you know, ‘These are what we can start work on, what do you wanna work on?’ And we did I suppose a week or so, and then Bono came in one day and said, ‘Look, I know it might sound a bit mad but I think, with all the stuff you’ve got going here, we might have another album. What do you say we just push a bit further and a bit harder, bring in some producers - see what Brian’s [Eno} doing, see what Flood’s doing - and we’ll try and do a very quick record.’ And I just thought, well, there’s no downside to trying it, if it doesn’t happen we can still do an EP. But we really pushed very hard and got through a lot of ideas quickly.

But not quite quickly enough. . .

No. Unfortunately, we didn’t finish before the next leg of the tour started, so there was about a ten-day period at the end of the Zooropa sessions when we were flying back from concerts and doing mixes in Dublin. I’d be in the studio until 3 or 4 in the morning, and then going home, getting up the next day and getting on a plane at lunchtime, going off doing a show, coming back at 1am, staying up again till 4am. So it was pretty mind-numbing by the end. But it’s a record I really love, because it does have a certain spontaneity, a certain sense of ideas left in their raw form.

It’s probably one of U2’s least emotional records.

That’s true generally, but then there’s songs like ‘Stay’ and ‘The First Time’ that are incredibly resonant emotionally.

And there’s also ‘Numb’, which you sang . . .

Well, that’s the least emotional song (laughs).

Is that how you felt at the time? Numb?

I think it was definitely a comment on what we’ve just been talking about - the TV news as entertainment syndrome. Just that sense that you were getting bombarded with so much that you actually were finding yourself shutting down and unable to respond because there was so much imagery and information being thrown at you. So that was really where that lyric came from.

There was also a lot of U2 imagery and information flying around out there, particularly on that tour. As the band’s level of celebrity dramatically increased, did you ever feel that, like the song says, you were giving yourselves away?

At times when you’re on the road I think you probably feel that. You start to become so caught up in the shows, and you’re constantly travelling, you don’t really see your friends or your family, so you are in a sense cocooned. And that was in the middle of that tour so I suppose there is that side of it. But I think over the years we’ve figured out how to make sure that you don’t completely lose your connection with whatever your connection to reality happens to be. And I’m sure mine is very different to most people’s (laughs).

You’ve pretty much managed to keep your personal life out of the press - certainly a lot more than Adam and Bono. Is that a deliberate strategy?

It’s something you have to manage. I didn’t get into a rock & roll band to become a celebrity. I like the fact that I’m known for the music that we produce, because in the end that’s what I’m interested in. And in the end I think it’s the thing that we will be remembered for.

Do you enjoy any aspects of your celebrity?

I don’t particularly. I don’t particularly relish being in the press. I don’t particularly crave that sort of attention. Again, when it comes along because of the music or because of the shows or because of the albums, I like it because I think it reflects well on what we’re about as a band. But when it’s about you divorced from what you do, when it’s fame for being famous, I really can do without that. I know some people would talk about publicity - about getting a great piece of publicity - but I really don’t have any interest.

Tell me how U2’s next 90’s project - the Passengers’ album Original Soundtracks 1 - came about.

Well, we always start a project with an experiment. For example, before Achtung Baby, Bono and myself did the music for a stage production of A Clockwork Orange in London.

Actually, I was hoping that ‘Alex Descends Into Hell For A Bottle Of Milk’ would make the B-Sides of the ‘Best Of’.

Yeah, that track had something. But that work was done very quickly and really it wasn’t made as a record, because what we were doing was writing music that could be performed live. So there was never a record, as such, of that work.

Anthony Burgess [author of A Clockwork Orange] wasn’t overly impressed with it, was he?

No, he wasn’t, but I guess we weren’t 100% surprised by that. I think he saw himself as a great composer and a part-time writer (laughs).. But he also only ever really wrote one book that captured the imagination, even though he was extremely prolific. But anyway, the Passengers record was a project like that - an experimental project that we hatched the plan for with Eno. At first it was to be a soundtrack album, but as no appropriate film came up we just kept working and eventually decided to release the record as a pretend soundtrack. So all the sleeve-notes are related to non-existent movies. A lot of people really liked the record. Dance companies use it a lot, film documentary makers - it’s always been licensed to this use or that use. And it has one of my favourite U2 songs on it, which is ‘Miss Sarajevo’.

But isn’t that a Passengers’ song, rather than a proper U2 song?

Well, it’s on Passengers and it is credited as Passengers, but I suppose of the pieces it’s the one that Bono and myself probably put the most time into. And at the time both of us realised that it would be really important to have at least a couple of fully fledged songs on the record. So we put a lot of time into ‘Miss Sarajevo’ and ‘Your Blue Room’, just to complete the circle.

And then came the Pop album in ‘97, which didn’t get particularly great reviews. . .

We got some great reviews for that!

I know - I wrote one of them. But Adam has been quite disparaging about it in the past and Larry practically disowned it in Q magazine this month!

I like it. I think it could’ve been better. But maybe what you’ve gotta realise is that the things that would irritate us are things that a lot of people would never even notice. Things like the last few percent of the mixing. . .

You had to rush to get it finished in order to get out and tour it, didn’t you?

Yeah. We had to mix it in a real hurry and the last few weeks of that record were incredibly busy and full-on. It’s always like that with us, but there was a slight air of desperation that time because we knew that we just had to finish it and do it, because there was so much pressure on us to get over to start rehearsals for the tour. And Popmart was a major undertaking because it was outdoors from the get-go and it was a big production and all the rest. So unfortunately we felt a little bit cheated as we finished that record. We felt that we needed a few extra weeks, maybe even just to get a bit of objectivity and reconsider some of the mixes and make sure that they were the best ones, etc., etc. So that’s really what Larry was talking about. But I don’t think the songs themselves were gonna change that much. This is just the arrangements, the streamlining of the sound. So I have to say that I still stand over the record.

I notice that you’ve used new mixes of the two songs taken from Pop on the ‘Best Of’.

Yeah. We have a chance now with the new mixes on the ‘Best Of’ to revisit those songs and iron out those fine points that we didn’t get a chance to get to on the album itself. A lot of people are probably going to prefer the original mixes, but I think that this is closest to what we had intended at the time.

Gavin Friday once told me that the best way to approach Pop is to treat it almost like a vinyl double album - four very distinct sides of three songs each.

Yeah, it’s funny how songs can sometimes fall into those divisions. I mean, it’s not really the way we were thinking at the time but it often happens that there are movements within a record that you can spot afterwards. It starts to take on a sense of continuity that you hadn’t anticipated.

Why the decision to experiment with dance culture?

A certain amount of it was just reacting to the situation we were in, where Larry couldn’t play for a couple of months. He’d hurt his back and was told he couldn’t really play for a couple of months, so he was exercising and all of that. Anyway, we didn’t have Larry so we thought, well, let’s just start writing with loops and drum beats. I mean that’s how I generally start anyway. Dating back to the War album, you know, I always worked on my own with drum machines and four-track cassette machines and got something going.

The available technology has moved on quite a lot from 1983. . .

It has a bit, yeah (smiles). But, at this point, I suppose it was the first time we were using loops. And Howie B was coming in with stuff he’d prepared. And some of the best stuff that came out of those sessions were actually the live jams that we would set up, where I’d be on guitar, Howie would be on loops and Bono would be on voice. And Adam, I suppose, would be on bass sometimes as well. But there’s a kind of spontaneity which is incredible.

The thing is translating that into a U2 song. The songs took a lot of different turns. And at one point I remember during the mixing, we were getting our first few mixes back - a couple from Nellie Hooper, who was working in London, and we were working on our own in Dublin - and there was just something missing in the first rough mixes. And Flood at that point basically made it known that he really thought we were missing that band chemistry. That even though the conception of the record had been about dance aesthetics, in the end the unique thing that we had when we played together was one of the key ingredients of what made U2 what it is. And that was what was missing - whatever way we play when we’re playing together. So we did change two or three of the tunes, and we took out drum loops and got Larry playing. And we brought the record back from this position of being very trip-hop influenced, and brought it back to being closer to a U2 record. I think almost at that point we were setting ourselves up for All That You Can’t Leave Behind. Because by the end of the album we’d kind of taken the band as far in one direction as we could.

All That You Can’t Leave Behind was very obviously a back to basics album, bringing the band full circle. Which kind of begs the question, where to next for U2?

It’s very early days and I don’t know quite where it’s gonna go but, myself right now, I’m getting very excited about bands playing together in a room and what that sounds like. It sounds very fresh to me. So the albums I’m excited about are things like the Sonic Youth record or Mudhoney - things that are very visceral And dynamics and interaction of musicians is really a part of those records. You don’t really hear a lot in the way of production or manipulation of the sound. It is what it is. As pop music gets more and more produced, and hip-hop gets more and more sophisticated sonically, I think there’s a real power to a raw band sound. And I think people are reacting to it because it’s so different to everything else out there. That’s why I like it. It kind of reminds me of the feeling when we first formed. The band’s that we were listening to had that kind of life force, that vitality. And I think it’s time to revisit that.

What drives you to continue making music? I mean, you’ve been in U2 for more than half your life now and, at this stage, you’ve basically done and had it all - number one albums, sold-out world tours, loads of prestigious awards and accolades, more money then you could ever possibly spend . . .

I wish!!! (laughs).

Oh come on, Edge! You’re loaded!

Well, you know what? The great thing about that side of it is I don’t have to worry about it (grins).

Actually, I know this is a bit of a daft question, but do you have ‘The Edge’ as your name on your credit card?

I don’t - no (laughs).

Does Bono have ‘Bono’?

Em . . . I couldn’t swear to it. I dunno. But I am ‘David Evans’ to customs officials, policemen and sales assistants!!

A lot of rock & roll bands break-up when they become really successful because they all have fuck-you money, and so can easily afford to walk if the going gets tough. Given that none of you are short of a few bob, what do you think keeps U2 together?

I think bands break-up a lot of times because they get successful and they forget how hard it is to be great. And they start to think it’s easy - and that everything they do is great, because they’re great. And I just think that’s what it is. A certain kind of madness breaks out and they lose the plot. I think one thing about us as a band is we’re not afraid of criticism. And if something is really not great, we wanna hear! (laughs) We’re not interested in having our feelings spared by a producer or an engineer or somebody, if it’s really not there. We’d like to find out before the record’s in the shops.

Looking back, is there any U2 release you feel was a mistake? I’m thinking October . . .

I think we had something great going on the first album, Boy, and then we released a single called ‘Fire’, and, in retrospect, that was not the next step up. When we got to the October album - you know, we were on the road, it was very hard, it was the famous ‘difficult second record’ . . . But I think, looking back, there’s a strength to that album. It’s subtle, but there’s a real strength. And even though it probably wasn’t the album we went out to make, I still really rate it. So I don’t have any problems with that. But ‘Fire’ wasn’t . . . (pauses). I was disappointed at the time with it, that we didn’t get something stronger to follow-up on the Boy album.

That was recorded way back in the early 80’s. What do you think of the changes that have happened in Ireland since then?

I think some of them are really good and some of them are not so great. I think that there’s an element of materialism that’s come into Irish culture, which I don’t ever remember before. And that’s kind of a negative. But I think there’s a great vitality and a sense that anything’s possible, which is a new idea. Because in the 70’s and 80’s when we were starting out, it was a very different story and there was a very evident sense that if you were from Ireland then really - particularly in music - your best option was just buying a Transit van and buying a PA and just do the ballrooms. That’s the way to set yourself up. The idea of making records or going on the road abroad was just . . . (shakes head). It only happened to a few bands and all of those bands seemed to run out of resolve or confidence in themselves at a certain point.

Which bands are you thinking of?

I seem to remember so many American tours that Thin Lizzy had that were about to break - or Rory Gallagher the same. They always seemed to be on the verge of breaking. And I’m sure they were in some respects. But I always thought there was this sense, which was probably beaten into them as kids, that they should not expect to succeed, they should not expect to really go all the way. And that is definitely gone now and I really think that’s great because any of those bands - Lizzy and Rory Gallagher particularly, but a lot of other groups as well - could’ve really gone all the way and, for whatever reason, didn’t.

What do you make of Ireland’s recently discovered talent for manufactured pop?

Well, great pop is interesting and I’ve always liked it. And there is a lot of great pop, but there’s also a lot of really discardable pop and I just have no interest to be honest. I wouldn’t be bothered to get upset about it, because it’s always been around. There’s always been throwaway music. I don’t think this period is any different except that loads of it seems to be made in Ireland these days (laughs). But that’s OK. Occasionally, some great new stuff comes out. There’s a lot of great new bands and there’s a lot of great energy, and that’s nice to see.

I think at this point also, the U2 thing is much less of an impediment to young Irish groups. Because for years it seemed that every record company in the world was just looking for the next U2 - and signing anything that they thought sounded like it could become the next U2. It must have been very soul destroying for other groups who were on a different path. But I don’t think that’s where it’s at now. There’s so many other kinds of music being recognised.

Do you regret your own attempt to nurture that recognition yourselves with U2’s now-defunct Mother label?

I don’t regret it because I think it gave a lot of groups a chance that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. And at the same time I don’t think it would have been appropriate to have done it with a more commercial mentality because that wouldn’t have done what we wanted to do - which was to give something back, as it were, to the Irish music business.

The truth is that it’s very hard for labels to exist in Ireland because really you’ve gotta exist where the biggest market is and you’ve gotta have access to the greatest number of new artists. Because it’s only maybe one or two a year that really break big. So to really have a chance of being commercially successful you’ve gotta be in America and you’ve gotta be, I suppose to some extent, in Britain. So it’s really hard. Unless you’re running a shoestring kind of operation and concentrating on very established styles and markets, you’re always gonna be struggling. But we really wanted to do something in Ireland, giving Irish artists the chance and featuring new bands. So I wouldn’t change anything. And I’m not sure we ever thought, ‘Hey, this is gonna be a big label!’ I always think, in the back of our minds, we just saw it more like an opportunity to give something back to the Irish scene.

Have you encountered much home-grown begrudgery?

Early on, yes, there was a lot of begrudgery, but not at this point. I think people are maybe. . . suspicious, and if we get too distant you can sense people getting cynical about the group. I think contact is important to people feeling they have a part of what we’re about. So when we’re doing shows and, I suppose, doing interviews. . .(pauses). But sometimes when we’re away a lot, you come back and you start to see a certain cynicism about the band coming back again. It goes in cycles. You can almost take the temperature and get a feel for what people are thinking about the band at any given time. Around the time of the Slane concerts there was a huge amount of affection for the band . . . but I don’t know what it is right now (laughs).

You’ve got a second home in the south of France. How much of the year do you spend there?

Not as much as sometimes I’d like, because the kids are at school. It probably averages out about four weeks a year.

How’s your francais?

Not very good! (laughs).

You don’t seem to overly involve yourself in any of Bono’s extra-curricular activities. . .

We’ve always been involved with the political stuff. He’s taken on a lot of it over the last few years himself, because he’s had the opportunity to do it and he’s very good at it. If all of us were up to it, there’d never be any records or anything made (laughs). But we fully support him in it and, whilst I’m not necessarily up to speed on everything that he’s up to, we talk a lot about it and I know all the people that are part of the team. And from time to time we talk to them about ideas and brainstorm. So I don’t think of it as just something that Bono’s doing over here, that’s completely separate to U2. I just see it as Bono’s found this very effective way of tapping into the political world and he’s just doing what he can to maximise that impact. And I think the results are stunning!

He’s not doing it on his own, he has some great people working with him. And he’s also, to some extent, pushing an open door, because there are a lot of administrations around the world who really do agree with the principles of debt cancellation and see the need to do something about the AIDS epidemic in Africa. But what he’s provided for a lot of these administrations is a way of focusing their electorate on the issues and turning it into a celebrated cause, as opposed to one that’s just been looked at by civil servants and lesser members of the government. This is now something that people are talking about. And whenever you get attention put on an issue like this and people start talking about it, politicians feel more comfortable in doing things, because what they really ultimately wanna know is that their people are behind it. So I think it’s been great. And the figures involved are staggering. You’re talking billions of dollars. And if it ultimately goes through to the extent that Bono and his friends are trying to push for, it’s an incredible change. It makes Live Aid look like a drop in the ocean. It’s like so many hundreds of times bigger in terms of its impact.

We were talking about the Gulf War earlier. What do you think of what’s happening at the moment?

Well, I never felt that there would be a unilateral action from America without some kind of support from the UN. I hope that turns out to be the case because I think it would be really hard to justify America going off on their own without the support of the UN. I would find that difficult to support. I think if the UN are behind action, I suppose I’ll just have to feel that it’s justified. There’s definitely a threat there. It’s not a nice feeling to think that there’s the potential for nuclear weapons to fall into the wrong hands. But I suppose in the end I would prefer to see a solution being put forward that does not involve invading Iraq. Because there’s so many negatives, not simply for the innocent people of Iraq, but in terms of its impact on stability around the world. So if there’s another way, I think it would be definitely preferable.

Do you pay close attention to Irish politics?

I would not consider myself fully up to speed but I try and keep abreast of what’s going on. And the same in the North, I would try and keep on top of what’s happening.

U2 have had some involvement there, haven’t they?

Yeah. I’ve done a couple of things with the SDLP, who I would still see as being the real heroes of the North, in terms of what they’ve contributed and the stance that they’ve maintained since their inception through the most difficult of times. Catching bullets from both sides and whatever. They are very courageous people - John Hume, in particular. And right now they don’t seem to be reaping the benefits of it, that I believe they deserve politically. But they still have a huge part to play in the North and it would be nice to see them going from strength to strength.

Do you meet many politicians generally?

I’m sure more than most rock & roll guitar players. But not nearly as many as Bono (laughs).

I see from the gossip columns that you’ve been having some planning permission problems recently. You don’t know any politicians who could help?

No. So I was thinking of trying to arrange a special charity concert in aid of rock stars having planning permission problems! (laughs)

Does it annoy you when the Irish press gloats over things like that?

Not really. I know the score. They’re just trying to sell newspapers and we’re relatively easy targets for that kind of thing.

Have you ever been hurt by something that’s been written?

Personally, no. But on other people’s behalf, I have. But they’re in the past and I don’t really wanna drag them up again. It’s not terribly complicated. Newspapers have to sell copies, it’s a completely commercial decision. I suppose it’s a shame that the tabloid mentality which has ruled the roost in Britain for so many years is now so well-established in the Irish media. I think of it as somewhat of a loss of innocence in a sense. It does seem that Irish newspapers are far more savvy in that respect than they used to be. And again getting back to the ZOO TV idea of the news as entertainment, I suppose it has always had that element but it seems to be becoming more and more of that as time goes on.
Yourself, Larry and Bono were all members of the Shalom Christian prayer group in the early days of U2. Are you still religious?

I still have a spiritual life, but I’m not really a fan of religion per se. You know, what I believe is very much what I ended up coming to. It’s not a doctrine that is connected to any church or any religious group. It’s very much my own personal thing. But I have to say that I think there’s a lot of great people in churches - very highly motivated people. Bono’s run into a lot of them working in Africa and they’re incredible. It’s very hard to say anything bad about where they’re coming from or what they believe. So I guess in some ways, I’m open to all that stuff. It just doesn’t work for me.

Are you raising your kids as Catholics?

Em . . . technically yes, but again I’m not in favour of presenting something that I think is ultimately very personal in any kind of fundamental way. I think it’s really up to everyone, when they reach a certain age, to figure it out for themselves. You know, they are Catholic in terms of their upbringing or whatever, but really they’ll decide themselves what they wanna believe, when they get older.

What ages are they?

My eldest is 18 and my youngest is three.

Bono and Larry both have young kids as well. Will that make touring more difficult in the immediate future?

Well, it’s never been easy leaving your family, and it certainly doesn’t get any easier when you’ve got kids. You just try and balance it out. I think we’ll probably do fewer of the very long tours because that’s what really takes its toll. But I mean we are really a live band. That’s where we started out and that’s one of the main things people think about when they think of U2, is our concerts, so I can’t see us stopping or seriously cutting back. But we probably won’t have the tours going on for quite so long.
Are you going to tour to promote the ‘Best Of’?

No. We’ll wait until we’ve done another studio record and then we’ll decide what we wanna do. We really had a great time on the last tour.
Was that because Elevation was far less cluttered with onstage gadgetry and special effects than ZOO TV and Popmart?

I think it was the songs. There was a lot of strong material on the album and it felt really good to be playing brand new songs and classic songs - and realising that the new songs fit in and were easily as good as anything we’d ever done. So that was a very good feeling. Also realising that playing together as a band was as inspiring as it’s ever been. We’re still surprising each other and still have it when we play with each other. So that was another good feeling. And I suppose the album, because it was arranged and conceived in that form of the primary colours of rock & roll - guitar, bass, drums and a frontman - it just made it a more fun tour. It was more interactive. So a lot of reasons. It was good for us to strip it back again to simple, essential elements and see that it really hangs together. Because in the end it’s about songs really.

What’s been the highest point of U2’s career for you personally?

Well, I think the last tour was a particular high-point because, as I said, we were doing maybe our best tour, and maybe our best album, after being together for more than 20 years. And I think we’re probably at this point able to appreciate the successes - and the benefits of those successes - more than we were when they first came along.

How do you mean?

When you’re 23 and you’re having a big tour or a big hit record, it’s so overwhelming that you don’t have the capacity to really relish it. You’re just trying to figure out how to swim in the tide of success. But now it’s like we’re really appreciating this most recent success and what it is to be a band and what it is to play with people you respect and love and who inspire you. All the things that the fans have probably known for years but we were too busy to really appreciate. So this is definitely my favourite phase of the band’s history. And it’s a different thrill to what you get when you first have a number one album or when you first get on Top Of The Pops or your first number one in America or the first time you sell-out a stadium tour, but I think what’s really great about this phase is that it’s thrown the emphasis back on the music more and more. I’m really excited about where we can go with our music. I really think it’s a great phase, a great period for us.

You’ve never been so popular really, have you? Both commercially and critically . . .

Yeah, we’re hip now suddenly. We were the band who always seemed to be swimming against the tide. Suddenly we’re turning around. Coldplay are talking about how big an influence we are, and so many young groups coming through are talking about our early work. We couldn’t be more in the moment in terms of music generally. So it’s just great. I hope we don’t fuck-up (laughs).

Are any new Irish bands floating your boat at the moment?

At the Hot Press Awards there were a couple of bands that I thought were really exciting. You’ll have to help me with the names. I’ve just got a bad memory for names. I haven’t heard any of them on record. One of them reminded me of the early punk days - Undertones, Reflex, Stiff Little Fingers, that sort of vibe. Real raw stuff, real vitality.

I wasn’t actually there this year, but I think you’re probably talking about The Revs.

Yeah! They were one of the bands. There was another one that was even more interesting though. I think they’re from the south. I’m sure Niall would know. I can’t remember what they were called but they had a real vibe, a real charisma about them [The band in question was The Frames - OT]. I think Kila have got something on a traditional front. I haven’t seen them live but I hear that’s quite an experience. I’ve got a couple of their records though.

What are your feelings on Napster?

Obviously musicians need to get paid or else there’s no chance of making more records - particularly if there’s no record companies out there willing to release them. I don’t think it’s got to that, but I guess I’m concerned enough if rock & roll stops being a viable business. That would bother me. But I’ve a feeling there are a lot of positives to music interacting with the world of the Internet and computers, because actually I think people playing music on their computers is good for music. Computers are the biggest investment, so if people can find a way to enable computer owners to find music and enjoy it in a convenient manner, and still get paid, I think that’d be an incredible thing. And I think people are working on that. So far from seeing the Internet as a threat - and there are aspects of it that have to be watched - I think in the end it’s a much bigger opportunity than it is a threat.

Adam aside, U2 never really had a reputation as wild party animals or serious hellraisers. Do you enjoy partying?

I certainly do. Always have. But you know, we were so focused on the band and everything else that we were doing that the partying was something that we really only did the odd time. I guess there’s a side to that that I would see as a celebration - like some kind of carnival - and I don’t see anything wrong with it. But you’ve gotta bear in mind that if you’re doing it every night - or every weekend, even - then after a while you start to lose the reason why you’re doing it. And in the end, if you do too much of any drug - whether it’s alcohol or whatever - it will eventually end up taking the piss out of you, and you’ll end up a victim. So you want to be pretty smart about how you party and what you do - and what you don’t do.

Did U2 ever go through a phase of experimentation with mind-expanding drugs a la The Beatles?

Not really . . .

Tricky once told me a funny story about taking mushrooms with Bono in Jamaica. . .

Well, there’s one story about me doing mushrooms, which was in the Bill Flanagan book, which was about how I discovered all the secrets of the universe in Adam’s house one time. I was on my own and very, very much in the middle of a psychedelic experience. And I found my Walkman - a little like this thing (picks up Hot Press’s Sony) - and spent about four hours recording all the insights I was getting, all these amazing pearls of wisdom. So the following evening I remembered that I had done this, so I ran up to the room, put the tape in and hit the play button. And all I could hear was, ‘MUMPPHH, MUMPPHHH’ (makes muffled sound). I’d spent three hours talking to the battery compartment! All of that wisdom gone forever (laughs). It was a shame. As far as I can could remember, I’d figured out most of the important issues.

Which U2 record would’ve been most influenced by that kind of experimentation?

I don’t think our work has ever been influenced by that, because I think we realised almost at the very beginning of the band . . . (pauses). We’d been told that all bands are out of it on stage and so we tried that once in about 1977. And it was such an unmitigated disaster that we vowed at that point that we’d never do it again. I don’t know whether it’s true that some bands perform out of it, but certainly that night showed us that we were not gonna be one of those bands (laughs). It just wasn’t gonna work. So we’ve never recorded or played live while we were out of it.

Not even during the making of Pop?

No. You’re just gonna end up losing sharpness, losing objectivity. And far from being a release I think it would actually dull the mind. I know a lot of people do it - especially writers. William Gibson is famously a drinker and would do a lot of his work tanked - you know, sitting at the typewriter with a bottle of vodka. But I don’t think it would work for us.

U2 have collaborated with some interesting writers over the years - Salman Rushdie, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg . . .

Yeah, William Burroughs! It’s one of the great thrills of being in a band and having a certain profile, you get to hang out with people like that. And people in bands are the greatest liggers of all, in my experience.

Had you read much of his work before meeting him?

Yeah, I’d read Burroughs’ and I’d read Allen’s work. We actually did some work with Allen, and William was in our video for ‘Last Night On Earth’. That was a thrill. Working with Martin Scorcese was a thrill as well. The track ‘The Hands That Built America’ [from the new Scorcese movie Gangs Of New York] turned out well. It’s the William Orbit mix on the ‘Best Of’, which I think is a beautiful version, but we’ve done various different mixes for the movie itself. More orchestral versions, more in keeping with the period of the film. But he’s just such a great character with incredible energy and creative force.

If U2 ended tomorrow, what would you do? Work on soundtracks?

I don’t know. I’d probably continue working in rock & roll because, in the end, although I do quite enjoy working on soundtracks - and I can do it - it’s not as much fun. In the end it’s a director’s form - movies. And you’re trying to interpret what the director wants all the time. But rock & roll - contemporary music - is one of the most unique forms because, almost like being a visual artist like a painter, you can put something together and release it, and no-one else has to really end up having anything to do with it. If you’re working in movies or TV, somebody is going to have some say in what goes out there eventually. So I like the purity of rock & roll, in that sense.

Does it ever worry you looking at bands like the Rolling Stones, still touring forty years on, that U2 won’t know when to call it a day? When do you think you’ll call a halt?

Well, I think really when it’s no longer inspiring and no longer challenging. When it becomes too easy or people stop really giving a fuck about it. And I mean the band, you know? If it ever gets to that point . . . (pauses). But I can’t really see it getting to that point and us not realising ourselves and calling it a day.

But I think the Stones touring is great, because you can’t see the Beatles playing live any more, you can’t see Elvis, you can’t see so many of the great groups, but you can still see the Stones. So in that sense they’re in a unique position. It might not be the original line-up, but they’re still the Stones. I don’t see anything wrong with it. And they still might surprise everyone. If they really started to operate as a band, if they really decided to go for it, I’m sure they could still make a great record. I’d love to hear that personally.

Do you have any other form of artistic release? Do you paint or write poetry or whatever?

I find rock & roll takes up all my time. I used to paint and I used to take photographs. I haven’t for a good few years and maybe I’ll get back to it at some point. But this is what I love doing - making music. And not just any old music - U2 music.

You’re your own biggest fan!

(Laughs) Not even that, I just find it fascinating. It’s a never-ending challenge - to write the perfect song, to make the perfect album. We’re still determined to give it a go.