Killing Bono (10 page)

Despite fronting a band called Rocky De Valera and the Gravediggers (a name considered in some quarters to be a slanderous insult on the saintly patriot President Eamon De Valera, a cranky survivor of the 1916 rebellion), Rocky was not a punk. He favored old R'n'B standards, which he would deliver with maximum showmanship and minimum tunefulness. Although skeptical about any musical style developed post-1959, Rocky and Jack were amenable to the idea of encouraging local talent and lent us microphones for rehearsal and dispensed lots of free advice. “Forget this punk-rock power pop whatever ya wanna call it new-wave shite,” they'd say. “Stick with the classics. That's all Irish audiences wanna hear. You can't go wrong with good old-fashioned rock 'n' roll.”

The Gravediggers, who were quite successful on the Irish pub circuit, occasionally performed all-ages shows in the large hall at Howth Community Centre. Despite their skepticism about our oeuvre, the Modulators were invited to make their debut as a support act in September 1978.

It wasn't a huge surprise when Keith called to say he couldn't make it to the final rehearsal before the gig, since he hadn't made any of the other rehearsals either. But his prolonged absence was plainly becoming a serious issue, especially in the light of our forthcoming concert. “You've got to make the gig, Keith!” we said, our sense of desperation precluding us from the usual threats and abuse. “We're counting on you.”

“I'll be there, lads, I swear,” he assured us.

The morning of the gig, he duly called to say he couldn't make it.

I'll spare you the expletive-laden insults and increasingly pathetic entreaties that greeted this announcement. At least for once he had a good excuse. Indeed, he finally explained what had been going on the whole summer. Apparently he'd got into unspecified trouble with the local constabulary and had probationary restrictions that forbade him leaving his area. I am still not sure if this story was true, but it did contain a crucial ingredient for a middle-class new-wave group: street credibility. Our drummer had fought the law! And now the law was going to stop us playing a gig! Well, there was just no way we were going to let that happen. The man could not keep us down! Yeah! Fuck the pigs!

Once we got that out of our system, we called Larry Mullen.

“No problem, lads, I'll sit in for you,” announced U2's drummer. Larry, however, seemed to consider himself a pro helping out a bunch of amateurs (Us?!
Amateurs?!
Wherever did he get that idea?) and there were limits to how much effort he was prepared to make. “I don't want to come down and rehearse. I'll just see you at the gig. We'll busk it.”

Since we had never even rehearsed the set with Keith, this arrangement was perfectly acceptable to us.

“See you there,” said Larry. “It'll be nice to catch up with Frank.”

I put down the phone. Shit! We hadn't even told Frank he was no longer in the group, so it was hardly surprising that his friend didn't know. It was perhaps time to address this situation. I called Frank.

“Hey, Neil! Long time no hear! What's going on?”

“Uh, this and that, you know. I'm just calling to tell you we've got a gig tonight.”

“Hey, man, that's great! But, fuck, don't you think we should practice first?”

I took a deep breath. “The thing is…we have been practicing,” I admitted.

I felt like a heel. Groups cohere around intangibles like taste and ambition, often the most fragile points of contact, and are held together by a kind of unspoken code of loyalty. You put your trust and faith in each other, nurturing a sense of interdependence that can quite quickly create a gang mentality and, over time, a powerful sense of family. Groups, like U2, who get the line-up right early on exhibit an inner strength that allows them to face down whatever hardships life throws their way. It is called togetherness, I suppose. United they stand. Musicians who get into the habit of chopping and changing band lineups will rarely ever find that kind of familial coherence, perhaps because they always see the option of addressing a problem by change of personnel rather than drawing on their shared resources. I knew nothing of such things back in 1978 but I did know that we had treated Frank shabbily. At least he took the news well. “It would never have worked anyway,” he grunted. “You and your brother are such a pair of fuckin' pains in the bollocks to be around. You've always gotta have things your own way. I suppose you're playing that Beatles shite now? I pity the poor sods you get to do your bidding…” And plenty more in that vein.

“No hard feelings, eh, Frank?” I said, when I sensed he had run out of invective.

“Ah fuck you, ya bollocks!” said Frank.

Larry turned up at the community center about an hour before we were due on stage, with his motorcycle crash helmet under one arm and some drumsticks in a bag. Of course, the first thing he asked was, “Where's Frank?”

“He didn't tell you?” I said, feigning surprise. “Frank left the group. Said he wanted to do his own thing.”

Larry looked at me skeptically, perhaps unconvinced that his friend would have made such a move without relaying it to him. In those days, Larry was a boy to me, even though he was actually only seven months my junior. He had a brooding but quietly confident presence, with the emphasis on quiet. Larry seemed to occupy a silent space of his own while his lovely girlfriend, Ann Acheson, a skinny blonde who had been immensely popular in school, would do all the chatting and socializing. I thought of Larry as a solid character but not as particularly interesting. While most of us involved in music tended toward artiness and rebellion, Larry seemed to have a very straightforward, working-class approach to life. At sixteen he'd quit school to take a job as messenger boy, viewing employment as more practical than further study, and his attitude to music seemed equally workman-like. Adam wanted to be a star. Bono and the Edge were reaching for the stars. Larry just seemed to like hitting things. In retrospect, he may have been more grown up than most of the rest of us, and certainly more interesting than I gave him credit for. Larry never acted like he had anything to prove but instead adhered to a steady, internal course. He prized loyalty and integrity and other uncomplicated values. And he was always as good as his word. So, while he may have suspected us of double dealing, it never occurred to him break his end of our agreement. He stuck around to play drums.

And Larry could play. In the early days of U2, he was certainly the most accomplished musician in the group and his power-house style gave the Modulators' first gig a kick start. Without rehearsal, there was little room for subtlety and nuance but, frankly, there wasn't much of that kind of thing in our set anyway. It was four-to-the-floor, fast-and-furious, power-chord rock 'n' roll. Ivan would shout quick instructions, kick off with a solo four-bar intro to set the tempo, Larry would come battering in and we were up and running.

Well, I was running. And jumping. And high-kicking. And doing everything else I had ever seen a frontman do: racing about from one end of the large stage to the other, scissor-kicking, twisting the microphone stand, tossing the mic, standing on the monitors, leaping in the air, jumping down into the crowd to whirl about among the gaping onlookers. I felt no nerves about assuming the role of frontman. I felt like I belonged up on that stage. I felt in command. I can't vouch for my singing, which was probably weak and strained and frequently flat. Sometimes I may well have even been in the wrong key entirely. But at least I had some moves.

The audience in the community center appeared utterly divided by what they were witnessing. Some of the older crowd hung back skeptically, probably wondering what was the point of a band who couldn't even do a Led Zeppelin number. Some (especially the youngest members of the audience) went wild, pogoing about, yelling encouragement and generally behaving as they thought they ought to at a rock concert. And some, many of them teenagers our own age, were absolutely incensed, hurling abuse and insults. It may have been late 1978, but for many in Howth this was the first live exposure to a musical genre they had only dimly heard about—and what they had heard was not good. They seemed enraged at the very idea of our group. One local hard-lad, perhaps mimicking something he had read about punk rock but more likely just showing off to his friends, forced his way to the edge of the stage and spat, a huge gob of phlegm arcing through the air and attaching itself to John's bass guitar. John looked down in horror. The spittle was running down the neck. As the band ground to a halt he pulled his guitar off, holding it away from him as if afraid of infection. Then he stepped forward to the edge of the stage and suddenly swung the guitar at his assailant, banging him across his head. The guy staggered back, dazed and shocked, as John put his bass back on and indicated that we should carry on.

Rock 'n' roll!

I felt like a star leaving the stage. My head was spinning with the attention. People milled about, a swarm of human beings pushing and shoving, but there was something different about the way the crowd ebbed and flowed around me. I could tell I was the center of attention. Kids stepped up to have a closer look. Strangers patted me on the back. Friends congratulated me. Rocky De Valera shook my hand and muttered words of encouragement. And then it was as if the crowd parted and there, standing directly in front of me, was the last person I wanted to see. Frank. Oh fuck.

He stepped forward, a cheesy grin on his face.

“That was fuckin' ace, man,” he said and gave me a hug.

Could the night get any better? It could! I found myself talking to a girl called Mary, who wore a black beret that implied, to my teenage mind, a Gallic sense of erotic awareness. And here was the thing. I didn't have to chat her up. I didn't get all gawky and awkward or find myself trying to be hypersmart and cool. Mary led me into the corner of the community center and, while Rocky and his crew banged out their set, shoved her tongue down my throat. By the end of the evening we were rolling about on the dirty floor, my knee was pressed between her legs and my hand was inching down from her neck to her…What was that curved shape beneath my fingers? Oh, just her shoulder. I must have been kneading that shoulder for fifteen minutes. Never mind. The advance continued, down, down, to the promised land. And lo, two hours after coming off stage on my debut as a frontman, I got my first grope of female breast.

If I had any lingering doubts about my future, that was what finally did for me. After that there could be no going back.

H
aving been sent into paroxysms of delight by my first, fumbling palpation of a female breast (inside the shirt but outside the bra, if you must know, fellas), it was not long before I found myself growing strangely jaded by the sight of naked flesh. Girls would drop their clothes on command, bend over, bend backward, bend whichever way they were asked. Women of all shapes and sizes displayed their fleshy wares for my contemplation, from the athletically lithe to the grossly overweight. Sometimes I actually preferred the fat ladies: there was something about the undulating curves and folds that held my eye. Sometimes it was men who would shuck their pants to let my eyes feast on their members, flexing their muscles and adopting the required position. Gender was not an issue. Sometimes I enjoyed the experience. But often, contemplating the ever-changing array of nipples and buttocks and loins, my eye would drift to the clock and I would find myself wondering when I could get out of there and go home.

I had not turned overnight into a promiscuous lothario. In autumn 1978 I began attending art college, where the regular life-drawing lessons were proving disappointingly short of anticipated eroticism. My friends in Howth would pore over the drawings I brought home, apparently incredulous that I actually managed to stand in the same room as a naked woman without spontaneously combusting. But the truth was that I was finding the whole art-student experience lacking in something. I was impatient to get on with life. To get things moving. I was being encouraged by well-meaning tutors to find myself when what I wanted was for the world to find me.

I guess I made a peculiar art student. For one thing, all of my contemporaries were actually interested in art. I was interested in graphics. The foundation year divided between those who liked to paint flowers and landscapes and lovely things and those who would stick a matchbox to a blank canvas, then spend hours explaining what it meant. And then there was me. I argued vociferously with anyone who would listen that art should have a functional purpose, that art had to earn its living, that art should court popularity, that all great art had been made for money (wasn't Michelangelo commissioned to paint the ceiling of the Sistine chapel?) and that there was more great art now being produced in advertising agencies than there was in all the garrets of the world. My fellow students could all starve themselves in pursuit of masturbatory visions no one else cared about. I was interested only in art that made money.

I spotted an advertisement in
Hot Press
, for a graphic designer with an interest in music. That was me! I duly arranged an interview for the part-time post of assistant to the art director at the rock magazine, and dressed for the occasion in a leather jacket covered in badges (Mods, U2, Sex Pistols, Ramones, Jam), torn grandfather shirt held together with safety pins, a pair of self-dyed luminous-green straights and some red suede winkle-pickers. This, I was sure, was a look my fellow rock aficionados would appreciate. The offices were located on Mount Street (just a short walk from the National College of Art and Design), a wide Georgian boulevard popular with Dublin's prostitutes, one of whom opened her coat to flash her naked body at me just as I reached the door. If she wanted to make an impression, she should have picked on somebody who hadn't just spent all day staring at naked women. “No thanks,” I said politely.

“Whassamatter, punky boy?” slurred the big-breasted harpy. “Can't get it up?”

I ventured inside to be greeted by the sight of a goat in the hallway, idly munching on a stack of magazines. As we gazed at each other, my expression of incredulity being met by the goat's dumb curiosity (“Are those green trousers edible?” I imagined it to be speculating), a beautiful hippie woman came hurrying down the stairs. “There you are! Bad boy!” she said, in a soft, chiding voice, apparently addressing the goat, not me. She introduced herself as Colette Rooney,
Hot Press
secretary, as she led the goat and me upstairs, taking some pains to explain that the animal was not a permanent resident, she was just looking after it for a friend.

What kind of place was this? I had imagined magazines to resemble the newspaper offices of Hollywood movies: cutting-edge steel-and-glass constructions, crammed with desks, hacks banging away on typewriters, secretaries scurrying to coffee machines, men with rolled-up sleeves and visors shouting “Copy!”
Hot Press
occupied just four rooms on the upper two floors of a tatty house, with torn rock posters tacked to the walls, disorderly piles of magazines stacked along the stairs, albums and books perilously heaped in every corner and (in an L-shaped converted attic) a mismatched assortment of cheap desks arranged at odd angles, all overflowing with notebooks, opened envelopes, stacks of paper, black-and-white photos, torn record sleeves and random bits of stationery equipment. A handful of people were apparently responsible for this incredible mess. At one desk sat a man with long greasy hair and wild, jagged eyebrows, smoking furiously and slurping from a coffee mug while all the while grunting to himself and muttering random words aloud as he scribbled frantically on a jumbo notepad. “Provocation as parody…Ah…ah…ah…heavy-metal hooliganism…divergent streams…Uhm…”

“How's the copy coming, Bill?” inquired Colette. So this was the legendary Bill Graham! He looked up with an expression of glazed distraction, as if his mind was occupying quite another plane of reality. “I'll have another page for you any minute, Colette,” he finally announced, once he had identified the source of this interruption to his mental process.

“Sure, I've waited ten days, I can spare another couple of hours, Bill,” replied Colette, with warmth rather than sarcasm.

Then Bill focused his suddenly rather penetrating gaze on me. “Have you seen the Virgin Prunes?” he asked, firing the question like an interrogator ready to beat the truth out of his subject.

“Yeah,” I replied, cautiously.

“Ah!” said Bill, with almost childlike glee, a grin spreading from ear to ear. He proceeded to fire off what I could only vaguely grasp as some complex theory about the roots of the Prunes' art terrorism, punctuated with raised inflections where I surmised that I was expected to nod agreement, all delivered at such high speed that it verged on incomprehensible babble.

“Don't be disturbing Bill when he has to work,” snapped a small, sharp-featured, bespectacled woman wearing a neck brace. This was the production manager, Mairin Sheehey. I subsequently learned that the brace was the result of a car accident, although nobody was entirely certain if the whiplash Mairin claimed to be suffering was genuine. The generous compensation paid out by the insurance company, however, was currently all that was funding the impoverished magazine's payroll and so it was deemed best that Mairin never remove the brace lest insurance investigators might be lurking. Mairin's job was to keep everything ticking over, not easy in an underfunded organization staffed by rock 'n' roll hedonists, and her approach to management oscillated unpredictably between supplicatory good humor and parade-sergeant bursts of bad temper. It was commonly held that her bark was worse than her bite, but her bark was generally bad enough to discourage anyone testing the truth of that particular cliché.

“I…I…I didn't say anything to him,” I protested to Mairin, who scowled at me skeptically.

“Bands aren't allowed up here,” announced Mairin. “You can leave your flyers or whatever it is you've got downstairs.”

“The goat'll take care of them,” cracked a scrawny, mop-topped figure in his early twenties, to much laughter. This was Liam Mackey, another writer and subeditor.

“I'm not here about my band,” I protested. “I'm here about the job.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, you don't look old enough to trust with a paper round,” sighed Mairin, to more general amusement.

I was rescued by the appearance at the door of the adjoining room of a man with the longest hair I had ever seen, huge cascading waves of hair that reached to his waist. This was editor and publisher Niall Stokes. Surely, I thought, this hippie could not be responsible for keeping Ireland safe for rock 'n' roll? “Back to the grindstone now, Bill, we're all waiting on you,” he instructed his star writer, winking at me cheerfully as he ushered me into his inner sanctum.

I had brought along a portfolio full of cartoons, life drawings, some Modulators posters and a portrait of Johnny Rotten as a crucified Jesus, none of which, it became increasingly obvious, were remotely relevant to the job on offer. “Are you familiar with Letraset?” Niall wanted to know. “Do you know anything about copy-setting?” “Have you got any layout experience at all?” To each question I glumly replied in the negative. Niall did not seem unduly perturbed, however, and just quizzed me on my taste in music. I told him about the Modulators and raved about U2's recent performance supporting the Stranglers at the Top Hat Ballroom.

“What did you think of the Stranglers?” inquired Niall.

“They're just a bunch of old farts pretending to be punks,” I declared.

“How old are you, anyway?” laughed Niall.

“Seventeen!” I responded defiantly. “Old enough!”

So there you had it. I was young, inexperienced and full of shit. They gave me the job on the spot. Years later, I asked Niall why. “You were so obnoxious I thought you had to have something going on,” he replied. But crucially, he explained, I was a teenage punk and practically everyone else working for the magazine was a twenty-something remnant of the hippie era. He felt he needed an injection of new attitude if
Hot Press
was going to keep up with the times. So while I was hired to assist the art director, a sharp Canadian rocker called Karl Tsigdinos, I was encouraged from the outset to share my views on music, no matter how ill informed. “Horslips? Horseshit, more like!” I quipped about Ireland's leading folk-rock band. “All that diddly-aye crap sounds bad enough without having to hear it whacked out on an electric guitar.” “You're not thinking of putting Eric Clapton on the cover?” I grunted in horror. “Slowhand is right! He could fall asleep playing those solos and nobody'd notice. That's 'cause most of the audience would have already passed out by then.”

My coworkers would shut me up by putting on classic albums in the office and insisting I listen before I speak. I had a lot to learn but
Hot Press
was a great place in which to learn it, surrounded by some of the most articulate and knowledgeable music enthusiasts in the country. After one particular diatribe against Bob Dylan (“Why would I want to listen to an old hippie who sounds like a dog being dragged through barbed wire?”), Niall sent me home with a copy of
Highway 61 Revisited
and the reprimand that Dylan was a punk before punk had even been invented. I spent the night in my room playing “Ballad of a Thin Man” over and over, reveling in the way this strange hipster with the twisted tongue heaped passionate, surreal scorn on the straight world. My introduction to Dylan was a mind-expanding experience akin to my belated discovery of the Beatles, kicking off a lifetime's fascination.

In terms of the actual work, I was even further out of my depth. Before the modern era of computers and desktop publishing, magazine layout was a hands-on process, made even more complicated by
Hot Press
's lack of resources. Raw copy came in from journalists via the editor, often in the form of near-illegible handwritten tracts in ballpoint on bumper pads. We were then supposed to instruct the typesetter on the point size of the lettering and the dimensions she should set the copy to. As the reams of copy arrived, we would cut them up with rulers and scalpels and adhere them to pages of A3 tracing paper (placed over a grid) with a sticky substance known as cow gum. Headlines would be laboriously scratched out with Letraset. Graphic touches would be added by hand. We would calculate the dimensions of photographs and leave blank spaces while the original pictures were sent off with the pages to the printers to be transformed into print-ready coagulations of dots, known as bromides. Color overlays and specific instructions were added (in black) on a second sheet of tracing paper. It did not help that the printers, chosen on the basis that they were the cheapest in Ireland, were based hundreds of miles away in Kerry so there was no opportunity to examine pages and correct mistakes before the magazine went to press. All of this was new to me but I decided to bluff it. For the first few months I felt like I was walking a tightrope and that I could be blown off balance by the slightest gust. My progress was painfully slow but I covered up with chat, all the while trying to obscure (from Mairin in particular) how little I was actually getting done. I worked evenings and so, when everybody else left, I would volunteer to stay on, finish a few things off and lock up. Then, in the empty office, I would sit and labor alone for hours, ensuring I got my page rate up to an acceptable level. It was often so late by the time I finished that I would just sleep on the floor of the office, arising after a few hours' uncomfortable rest to walk down to art college and start my day there. When college finished, I wandered back to
Hot Press
to begin another evening session. The second time I did this, I prepared for the long haul by taking a packed breakfast into work with me. It did not occur to me that cereal and milk might disintegrate overnight. When I opened my Tupperware dish in the morning, I was so disappointed by the soggy mess inside that I tossed the whole lot out the window. That evening, I listened to much bemused chatter about how a solicitor whose offices were located below
Hot Press
's had been complaining that his third-floor window was plastered with soggy cornflakes. I didn't say a word.