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Bono interview from 1992

Exclusive Interview: Bono
Hit Parader Presents U2, June 01, 1992

"I will sing, sing a new songhow long to sing this song? How long to sing this song?" Those lyrics ring out loud and clear on the song "40," which not only closed U2's 1983 disc, War, but a whole era for the band, then only five years old.

Bono explains: "We'd been together since 1978," when they met through drummer Larry Mullen Jr.'s ad which hung on the bulletin board at Dublin's Mount Temple [Comprehensive] School, Ireland's equivalent to high school. "We had grown so much by that record (only their third, it followed 1980's Boy and 1981's October), that we felt a dire need to close the first volume and turn the page to the second."

But how could they ever dream what the sequel would hold. For the last 10 years U2 has been big, we're talking massive, we mean larger-than-life.

"Yeah, it's really quite wild when you sit back and mull it all over," Bono smirks from a Four Seasons Hotel sofa during a break on their current U.S. tour.

"So much has happened since that early period of this band. I try not to think about it all too much or dwell on it. Because if, and when you do, it is really quite overwhelming. It will suck you up like a giant magnet scoops a helpless, tiny paperclip."

Bono's intensity level is feverish as always, so he sucks in his cheeks in vivid motion, slurping to clearly illustrate this meaningful, yet momentarily vital parallelism.

It's cool-down time after a soundcheck at Boston Garden, and he's not in any mood for a serious interview, or for any interview at all, for that matter. So instead, he sits, he ponders, he studies and he draws conclusions. This is the "formula" (he hates that word) for U2 these days. Thus, given the phenomenon surrounding the band, their latest disc, Achtung Baby and their sellout Zoo TV tour, that formula is the equivalent of success in the 1992 music industry.

Lyrically, Bono has grown with each subsequent record. Initially he was the angry adolescent striking out at life. Then he crept forward with curious inquiry to life's inadequacies and their very existence. Then he literally looked around him and he didn't like what he saw. With violence raging in Northern Ireland, and bombings occurring around every bend, he was confronted by a world gone awry. He even let guitarist David "The Edge" Evans step out on "Seconds" from the War LP, while Edge often joked with the audience waving, "It takes a second to say goodbye, say goodbye, say goodbye!"

Edge was singing about instant death, with tongue firmly in cheek, while most of U2's adoring fans waved back without a trace of suspicion. The song has been displaced from the live set in recent years, but not with party anthems. More like blatant thought-provoking blasts, raging ahead both lyrically and perhaps even more so, musically. The Joshua Tree's "Bullet the Blue Sky" quickly comes to mind. With Bono looking like a lost soul barely escaping rapid rounds of fire all around him, he sings of the sky being lit up like a fireworks celebration when, in fact, it is deadly defamation which lies at the core of his rebel-rousing vocal on that particular track.

Fire seems to pop up in many U2 scenarios, and there is reason for that. Says Bono, "It is an evocative and truly amazing image. It can be so very destructive and cold in one sense, yet so securing and lending warmth, the next."

That statement is vintage Bono. Like himself and his band, there is contradiction clearly evident. U2 has always claimed that they were not political, yet they call and album War and, on their follow-up to that, sing two songs about Martin Luther King. And neither "Pride (In the Name of Love) nor the lamenting "MLK" were mere tributes. They were passionate pleas at hope -- for a nation, for the world.

Furthermore, U2 has long disclaimed any romanticism. Yet, experiencing them on stereo, or more convincingly, in a live setting, don't tell me that on "With Or Without You," "One" or virtually any track on the latest disc, that this band doesn't wear its heart on its sleeve.

The personal favorite song is the gut-wrenching "Until the End of the World," where Bono sings, "We ate the food/we drank the wine/everybody having a good time/but you, you were acting like it was the end of the world."

Does Bono draw his lyrics from within his own world's infrastructure?

"Sometimes, I guess," he thoughtfully says. "In the beginning, I most definitely did. Then I think around the time I was writing songs which made it onto the War album, I don't really think so. At that point we were a young cocky band that had the world by the balls in our mind, although not in many other people's minds."

He continues, "Then I think we went through an entirely different transition with The Unforgettable Fire. For one thing, we really began incorporating some very different sounds and textures. Edge really began toying with keyboards and that allowed us to create the moody atmosphere which is prevalent throughout that disc. Lyrically, I do still draw from within."