U2 Live & Dangerous - Lovetown Tour

“Bono had a lot of problems with his voice...”

I got to hear Rattle And Hum from a number of different angles before it came out. I met Edge at the traffic lights and he invited me back to his house for a listen; then I was in LA on holidays and went to the house they had in Hollywood – the same house that the Menendez brothers would kill their parents in later on. Larry was handling the merchandising, so the picture on the album cover was all over the floor.

I also went to the studio, Universal I think, where Phil Joanou – the director of the movie, Rattle And Hum – was putting the final touches to part of the soundtrack with Edge. Then the funniest one of all, I was in a car with Adam, and we were heading to some Vietnamese restaurant to meet Bono. Just down the road in LA can be 50 miles away, so we got to hear three sides of the album on a cassette. Adam was thrilled, as it was one of the first times he had heard it outside of the studio.

I have a thing about double albums. Even though almost all of them are 25% shit, I still like their sprawling nature. I really do love that album: things like ‘Hawkmoon 269’, ‘Heartland’, ‘Angel of Harlem’ and ‘When Love Comes To Town’ sound almost one-take sloppy, and I love that. It was a band gauchely going into the roots of the music they loved. Some people thought it was self-indulgent, but so what? I thought it was great.

There was a leg of the Lovetown Tour in Australia, if I’m remembering rightly, and Bono had a lot of problems with his voice, so shows got switched around. The last one was supposed to be in Dublin, but they had to finish in Rotterdam instead. I usually see them out on a tour, but I didn’t see that one except for the New Year’s Eve show in The Point, where I had a sort of MC role as well – which turned out to be both very funny and very embarrassing. I was trying to count down to the New Year on stage, but I was looking at the wrong clock, so it was “24, 15, 7...”.

This was live on the radio and the telly as well, so it was perfectly, hilariously un-together. As far as the show was concerned, I loved in particular the looseness of BB King’s brass section in the encore. The funny thing, is I didn’t see them with horns again until about four months ago in the Apollo Theatre, which was also brilliant.

As for the famous “We’re going away to dream it all up again” bit at the end of that gig, it never occurred to me that was anything other than Bono hyperbole. I didn’t think, “Oh my God, is he trying to tell us they’ve broken up!” In fairness, they’d had three or four years of total madness, so they wanted to take time off, which they did and mulled over where they wanted to go. Then things got frosty as bejaysus in Berlin, but that’s another story.