The Rolling Stone Interview

When the band was starting out, did you ever imagine that U2 would become this successful?
Well, I don't know if I ever really thought about it too hard. You know, this year's been a dangerous year for U2 in some ways. We're now a household name, like Skippy peanut butter or Bailey's Irish Cream, and I suppose that makes us public property in a way that we weren't before. And that's a bit weird, because we're getting so much mass-media attention. We've seen the beginning of the U2 myth, and that can become difficult. Like, for instance, Bono's personality is now so caricatured that I worry whether he'll be allowed to develop as a lyricist the way I know he can.

What's the greatest danger U2 faces?
Getting cold. Because there are too many distractions now. I spend most of my time trying to avoid distractions.

What kinds of distractions?
All sorts of things. Financial things. Once you have money, it has to be taken care of. As much as you try and forget about it and let someone else deal with it, there are times when it just has to be faced up to. I think it was Eno who said that possessions are a way of turning money into problems. And so I've tried to cut down on anything like that.
My lifestyle, and that of the rest of the band, is pretty straightforward. I don't want to get fat. I don't want to get lazy. Money can bring great freedom, because it means you can travel, you can go into the studio whenever you want. You can pretty much do whatever idea comes into your head. But a lot of groups have not survived financial success. So there's a potential problem.
I also think being taken too seriously is a problem. It seems that no matter what we do, people place this huge weight of importance on it. Importance out of the realm of music, whether it's political importance of something cultural or whatever. I think that can be bad.

I assume that's what you were talking about when you referred to "the U2 myth." In the past year you've suddenly become "the spokesmen for a generation."
(Laughs) Well, it gets tough, you know, running Amnesty International, organizing summits between superpowers. It gets pretty exhausting. I sometimes feel sorry for Bono, because he seems to get the worst of that. But we try and not let it affect us, because we'd probably be inclined to do something really stupid in order to prove that we're just like ninety percent of the musicians in other bands.

But ninety percent of the musicians in other bands don't wind up on the cover of Time. What was that like?
(Laughs) I was king for a week, I suppose. I don't know, it felt good. What I liked about it was not just that it was U2, but that music was there that week. That felt good. You know, it's nice for rock and roll to cause a stir from time to time.

You complain about being taken too seriously, but U2 certainly cultivated a more serious image than most bands. Everything from the songs to the interviews to Anton Corbijn's black-and-white photographs made it clear that this was a "serious" band.
I just never liked my smile. That was the problem (laughs). I mean, we just write songs. That's what we do. And the idea of being a leader is just so horrible. That's the last thing we ever wanted to be. But I love Anton's shots. They're kind of European. He gave us a sense of being European.
It's funny, but when you leave where you are, you get a perspective on it. When we first started touring Britain and Europe, we started seeing how Irish we were. Suddenly, Ireland became big in our songs. When we first toured America, we sensed our Europeanness. Now, with The Joshua Tree, I suppose we sensed the charm of America, the writers and the music.

How has your perception of America changed over the past seven years?
I like it a lot more. I didn't like it much when I first went there. We were really just passing through, and we didn't get the full picture. I left with only a superficial sense of what America was about, and that superficial level didn't interest me. During the second couple of tours, I purposely avoided things like the radio and TV because I thought they were bad. But the last couple of tours we've seen what I call the hidden side of America, the side that's not obvious if you're in town for one night.

What have you found there?
Well, for instance, music that never gets played on the radio, that never gets exposed to any extent--blues and country music. And American writers, like Raymond Carver, and some Indian writers. Also, the openness. American people are very open. In most big cities in Europe, people are aloof, very unfriendly. It's not an Irish thing, but you find it in London and Paris. I don't find that in America, and in that way it's more like Ireland.

What do you think of the state of America now, politically, culturally?"
Well, it scares me. It scares me a lot, this kind of "let's forget the Sixties" mentality, the new facism, the new conservatism. But America's always been the best and worst rolled into one, and it's going to be very interesting to see how it goes in the next couple of years.
I'm a little fearful, but it's as bad in Europe. It's as bad in England, as far as I can see. I think in years to come, people will look back at the Sixties as a very peculiar era. We think of it as the way people people should be. But if you think about the years that went before and the years that have come after, it's the Sixties that are weird, not the Seventies, not the Eighties.

Many of U2's songs, like Bullet the Blue Sky, convey less-than-favorable impressions of America and its policies. Yet, in concert, it sometimes seems that your fans just don't have a clue as to what your trying to say.
It would be great to think that people understood what we were talking about, but the fact is that probably about half of them do--or less. The rest pick some of it up, or none of it. i think we have a pretty good balance. Some people come to shows because we're a great rock and roll band. And some people come because they understand exactly where we're coming from and they agree.
But rock and roll to me is communication. I don't just mean communication of ideas, but communication of feelings. The bands I was into when I was younger were the ones you'd listen to and get a feeling about the person, whether it was John Lennon or Marvin Gaye or Patti Smith or Lou Reed. That's the most important thing in rock and roll. It's not necessarily that your idea is geat, but that it's your idea. That's why when we write songs, we don't sit down and say, "Let's write a song because this is an important issue now." We write a song because we feel we have something to say.
People always ask us if we think our songs can really change anything. And I always say that's not why we wrote the songs. We didn't write them so they would change the situation. I think it would be too much to expect that. But they might make people think for a second, in the same way that we stop and think.

It always seemed that U2 was determined to become a big group. When I interviewed Bono in 1980, he told me, "I do feel that we are meant to be one of the great groups," and he compared the band to The Beatles, The Stones, and The Who.
Well Adam (Clayton) and Bono used to say that a lot--and I used to believe them. We assumed it, in a weird way, and I don't know why. We assumed that we would achieve commercial success, and we never had any kind of problem going out and working for success, going for it. And therefore that really wasn't a big issue. What was more important was achieving musical success, and we're still trying to get that. I mean, we're getting closer with each record.

Though Bono writes the bulk of the bands lyrics, I understand that it was your idea to write a song about the strife in Northern Ireland, which turned out to be Sunday Bloody Sunday.
Yeah, Bono was away on holiday--I think it was his honeymoon. And I wrote the music and hit on a lyric idea and presented it to the guys when they got back.
Belfast is only about fifty miles up the road from Dublin, and I'd read about it in the newspapers and seen it on TV. But going there was a bit of an education. What was incredible was that the people of Belfast had the most incredible warmth and friendliness and sense of humor--and there was this thing going on that was just tearing the whole community apart.
And Sunday Bloody Sunday--I can't remember exactly what incident sparked it off, but I just remember sitting in this little house I had on the sea, just bashing out this music, and it just came down to me, that this should be about Northern Ireland. And I wrote down a few lines, and Bono instantly improved on them when he came back.

How often do you come up with ideas for lyrics?
Not that often. I might give Bono a title, like I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For. And that'll light a spark, and he'll write a song about it.

You and Bono seem like exact opposites--he's loud and outgoing, while you're quieter and more reserved.
Generally speaking, that's true. He's much more at home in the public eye. It's kink of hard for the rest of us. Larry (Mullen) and me, in particular, because we're not naturally gregarious.
As kids, Bono was the exact opposite of me. I was a very quiet kid in school. I think we shared a sense of humor, though, and when the band came together, it was kind of natural that we would get on.

What was your childhood like?
Being Protestant and being English--or Welsh, in fact--in what is ostensibly a Catholic country, it felt a bit strange at times. There were times when I really did feel like a bit of a freak, and I spent a few years where I was pretty quiet. I didn't go out an awful lot. Those are the years when I listened to the most music.

When was that?I suppose between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. That was when albums like Horses, by Patti Smith came out. There were some good records around that time--Lou Reed, Bowie, the first Talking Heads records. Nobody else was really listening to those records, but they really meant a lot to me. I always remember that when someone who's sort of fifteen or sixteen comes up to me and talks about our records. I remember how I felt about records at that age.

Have there ever been any periods when you've had second thoughts about U2 or being in a rock and roll band?
Yeah. I lost sight of what it was about for a period. I think when a band goes on the road, unless the band is very strong, things get a bit cloudy. And that happened with us. We had to figure out who we were musically and what we were doing and where we were going. And once we had that all together, then we were fine. But for awhile there, I really wasn't sure what we were up to and whether I wanted to be a part of it all.
It was kind of just after the October album, coming up to writing the War album. We'd come off the road, and the album had done reasonably well, we'd done an awful lot of hard work, and we kind of had to just take stock of what was going on. I thought that it was pretty healthy, actually, and I think that without that, I would be in serious trouble at this stage.

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