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BONO'S BEST OF 2001
RECORDS:
Craig Armstrong: As If To Nothing
This is his follow-up to The Space Between Us. It's not out till February but it's a really good album. Evan Dando sings a song called "Wake Up in New York," written before September 11th -- it's deep melancholia, but he sings like an angel on it.
Ryan Adams: Gold
Tracks like "La Cienega," "Wild Flowers" and "When the Stars Go Blue" are classics.
The Strokes
This has a sort of '79 feel to it. I think they could amount to something.
The White Stripes: White Blood Cells
They've got something going -- you can really feel it here.
Bob Dylan: Love and Theft
Kept me going through the year because it made me laugh. It's just a classic.
The Charlatans: Wonderland
I have to mention this because it's really great.
Peaches: "Rock Show"
A single, this was the biggest blast of the year.
BOOKS:
I've been reading a lot of treaties and economic textbooks, which is sad. But there were some good things that I got around to reading this year:
At the risk of sounding even more like God at Christmas I would have to recommend this translation of The New Testament and The Books of Wisdom by Eugene Peterson. And he's a poet as well as scholar. It's just incredible stuff.
The last novel I read was JP Leroy's The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things. I met JP -- he came to one of our shows and I spent time with him. It's black, very bleak.
When I was in Los Angeles I was reading a book by James Ellroy, of The Black Dahlia fame. It's an amazing story. He became a crime writer because his mother was murdered, and through writing fiction he got to know a lot of cops and detectives, and at one point he decided to try and investigate, through the people he knew in the police, his own mother's murder. It's called My Dark Places, and it's an unbelievable book. While it's about the search for the killers, it's also a search for himself.
Finally, it might sound a little bit pretentious, but one of the books I enjoyed most this year was actually published in 1992. It's Ted Hughes' book about Shakespeare, called Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. It's an extraordinary book.
MOVIES:
I never knew what year a movie was released in, but the two that spring to mind that I saw this year are:
Memento (Directed by Christopher Nolan)
Chopper (Directed by Andrew Dominic)
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ON THE BIRTH, IN JUNE 2001, OF JOHN
Niall Stokes: Can you tell me about the role of Chopper in the birth of John?
That was Ali's idea. I just got back from Chicago and everything was...she had a very cool aura about her as usual, not particularly bothered. The worry then started that I'd actually have to go back before the baby was born. So she suggested a scary movie and Chopper is a film made by a friend of ours. Ali doesn't like violent movies. In fact she often becomes violent at them. She bit me once during Scarface. She literally bit my shoulder and I had to leave! When we go to the movies together we don't always agree on what one. But she was up for it this time. So we put on Chopper and halfway through it she did disappear. And I went upstairs and I found her sitting on the bed with white warpaint on and I thought, "This is a bit much." But in fact she'd put a facepack on and I said, "Are you OK?" and she said, "No, it's started now," and I said, "Well, the movie worked then." And I said, "What do we do now?" and she said, "Look, it's going to be hours and hours, you should get some sleep." So I went to bed for an hour or so at about 2 in the morning. So at about four o'clock she woke me up, calm as usual, and said, "I think it's time to go." So I got out of bed and got everything organised and fired up the car and she came down and got in and we were driving along to the hospital, Mount Carmel, and she just quietly turned and said, "I think we should start breaking the lights now." Now Ali is very Protestant. She has a great respect for the law (laughs). So I put my foot on the pedal and 20 minutes after we arrived in the hospital she gave birth.
It's a fantastic moment, the first sight of a new kid, isn't it?
He looked like somebody familiar. He looked like a doorman I know in a London club! He immediately had a hard head, shaped like a bullet. He did look like a thug and that is why we called him John, as in "alright John"!
Did you fight over the name?
No, because John also has other connotations in the family. A man called Jack is a kind of hero of mine, and there's other people I know. And he's my favourite apostle as well. He was the one who was more poetic of that lot. He was a very interesting guy.
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ON THE DEATH OF GEORGE HARRISON -- AND THE LEGACY OF JOHN LENNON
Niall Stokes: George Harrison's death must have resonated in a particular way for you, given the circumstances and the illness.
Yeah, he didn't like U2 very much. We were great fans of his and I do think that he brought a dimension to the band that gave depth to the consummate pop writing that it couldn't have had without him. His taking on the taboo of religion also made an impression on me as a teenager. I used to think if rock 'n' roll means anything, it means liberation. It means freedom to express yourself sexually, politically, and of course, spiritually. But very few people do. And he was one of the first before Dylan, before Marvin Gaye and Marley. Although I hear he was very bad-tempered. Calling him the quiet Beatle -- I think it might have been more true to say he was the grumpy Beatle (laughs).
Well there was a few grumpy fuckers there. Lennon could certainly be grumpy.
I went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and Yoko has this exhibition on John's life as a writer and an artist. It's like an exhibition of a living artist. It's one of the best things you could ever see. And it has handwritten songs of his abandonment, his mother and all this stuff. But it was downstairs I got the real insight because in the Beatles exhibition, in amongst all the paraphernalia, I found two postcards from John to Julian -- they were open postcards, not in envelopes -- and one of them had John's phone number on it. And he'd written "Dear Julian, Sorry I haven't spoken to you in the last six months. If you need me, here's my address." And it turned everything around for me and I just realised I'm going to have to watch out for this. Here's a guy writing about his own abandonment two floors up -- and writing about his own psychotic reaction to childhood while he's repeating it on his own. I met Julian and I mentioned that to him and he just stared at me and said, "That's not a conversation you want to start with me if you're a Beatles fan."
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ME, BLAIR, PUTIN -- AND CHARLIE!
Bono: I do think that photograph was offensive and I think it's a fair cop to take it on the nose for it. I think I told you what happened. Blair was late for his meeting with Putin because myself and Geldof had him in a headlock and we just wouldn't let him go and eventually word came down from his aides and they said, "You can bring them along, I'd like to meet these people." So we went up with them and he walked up and put his arms around me and said in Russian, "Now it's time to start work on the Russian debt," and I laughed. Who wouldn't laugh?
I remember an amusing incident with Charles Haughey of the same order when we opened a rehearsal room in the City Centre. We built these rehearsal rooms for bands and Paul McGuinness asked Charlie would he open it. And a screaming match developed between the band and Paul because there was an election coming up, and we felt this would look too comfortable. So there was a Four Stooges moment where I said, "OK, whatever we do, if the Taoiseach arrives, the press will naturally look for a photograph of the two of us and we shouldn't have that on the eve of an election." I said, "Edge, you do it or Adam, you do it." So they all agreed and then, when we got to the City Centre, there were crowds and people around and anyway they pissed off to the bar for a drink and I was standing surrounded by people and I looked around and the great man had arrived and was walking with his hand outstretched. So I said, "There's no way out of this" and I shook his hand but I kept my face out.
I was as cross-looking as possible (laughs), just so it didn't look too matey! And he said, "I believe you've just had a little girl," and I went, "yes," and kind of nodded. And he cracked a few jokes and I wanted to laugh but I kept it together right up to the moment when he says, "Where are you off to?" and I said, "Australia." He said, "There's a fella out there I know, his name is Bob Hawke" -- he was Prime Minister there, and he's in the Guinness Book of Records for drinking the quickest yard of beer. And Charlie says, "If you bump into him, say hello." And I just nodded. And then he put his hand up to his mouth and leaned over and said, "Let me put it this way, he'd drink you under the fucking table." And I laughed. He's very funny and charming, Charlie. But there it was on the front page of the Irish Times the next day: Bono and Charlie -- mates.
So how far do you go? I'm not there to make judgements on people's political lives. I'm there representing various NGOs and a very large grassroots movement. And that's my primary concern -- to get their message across. Not how uncool or how inappropriate. But I know it annoyed people.
© Hot Press, 2001.
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