Musically try and reinvent what it is to be Irish, that is great for me. Because people listen to U2 and say, 'Well what you are doing is Irish, yet by the look of it, it's not.' It's a spirit.

"That was one of the things that to me exploded the idea of authentic­ity, which is, of course, the catchphrase of all these rock groups: 'This is real, because we are in control of it.' 'Disco sucks.' That's wrong. I started to see Kraftwerk as some sort of soul group. And all the ideas of authenticity, which we had played with in Rattle and Hum—'Let's write acoustic songs, let's try it like other people did, and let's be fans, and discover it.' We discovered wonderful things, learned wonderful things, wrote a few songs I ought to proud of. But that was like going down a road and then finding out, 'No.' "

Bono pauses to let the dowsing pole of my understanding touch the bottom of the deep pool of his insight. Before I can say, "Let's order," he's digging another well.

"Parallel to that," he says, "I realized that technology can facilitate freedom. In fact, what I think people don't understand about the music business is that people do not buy stereos to play their records; people buy records to play their stereos' Think about it from the consumers' point of view; the purchase of the hardware is much more expensive than the purchase of the software. If you are living in the real world, which I certainly was when I was sixteen, and you buy one of these motherfuckers, you want to buy the record that plays it well. That's why the Beatles again run parallel to technology. Sgt. Pepper was a stereo album. When the success of Sgt. Pepper is written about, that's just not mentioned. But this was hardware companies putting out this new device for listening to music, and here was a way you could show off the thing. This can be followed through to Pink Floyd, as it further developed, and on into CD and the success of Dire Straits."

I have to admit that Bono's onto something. In the early seventies teenagers went wild for stereo headphones, and bought albums that were mixed to swing back and forth, from right to left. Recently, new bands such as Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails have taken advantage of the wide dynamic range of CDs to make albums that jump from very soft to very loud in a way that vinyl records never could.

"And if you want to know why white people are listening to rap music," Bono says, "apart from the sort of white-guy-being-attracted-to-the-things-you're-afraid-of social thing, it's a lot to do with the

 [29]

hardware systems, the car systems, club systems. The bottom end has to be tight, so you can turn it up. Suddenly records that sounded great on a stereo or even on the radio—that FM rock sound—suddenly don't sound so great compared to these guys. You know, you put on a Public Enemy record, and it sounds like the end of the world!"

Bono first thought about this—and felt U2 was lacking—when he and Adam were hitchhiking in Tennessee during their Rattle and Hum pilgrimage to Graceland and Sun Studios. A kid picked them up and had on his car stereo an album by the pop-metal group Def Leppard, produced by South African soundmaster Mutt Lange. Bono was knocked out by how powerful the Def Leppard music—which had never meant anything to him before—sounded on a cranked-up, bot­tom-heavy car system. The driver got wildly goosed when he recognized his passengers, yanked off the Def Lep and stuck on a U2 tape. It didn't sound half as exciting.

"Def Leppard's 'Pour Some Sugar on Me,' to me is one of the first industrial records," Bono says, knowing that he's picking a fight. "I haven't fully realized the implications of that. I think we've got to make records that sonically make more use of the technology. That's some­thing we have yet to do."

"All that's great," I say, waving frantically for the waiter before Bono leaves port again, "but it doesn't do the band much good if half the guys don't want to go that way."

"Yeah, but great ideas are great persuaders," Bono says. "If you're arguing a lot, it's not a clear enough idea. A great idea is clear to everybody. And the problem with what happened in Achtung Baby was that the ideas, the concepts, were good, but the songs early on weren't good enough to convince everybody. The reward wasn't in sight. And Danny, of course, was pulling his hair out. Brian knew what we were doing and understood the great fun we could have deconstructing—" Bono catches himself and smiles. "It was hard not to use art terms. And art terms, just because they're art terms, annoy some people. It's a hard thing to talk to a guy who is trying to get a drum sound together about recommodification or this idea that you have to 'take this sound and turn it on its head like one of those Christmas bubbles and see what happens.'

It's like playing the set backwards! Let's play U2 backwards and see what happens. So it was a very hard time. I'd say if the songs had come quicker—but the reason the songs didn't come quicker is that people

[30]

had lost touch. All of us had lost touch. Osmosis is the unsung hero of all rock & roll. Osmosis is the way we all pick up everything. Music is another language and you become articulate in it. If you lose it by not living it, smartness can get you by to a degree, but not really. I think we were a little out of touch. I think that was part of the problem too. We got to Berlin and realized, 'Uh-oh. It's a few years now since Joshua Tree, and the rest of it has been fun; doing Rattle and Hum was a piece of piss. We hung out in Los Angeles, learned how to drink, playacted a bit, had a lot of cigarettes and songs and hung out with some interesting people. This had been a few years! We didn't know what it was like to be in the studio and to think and it stunned everybody. We weren't as great as we figured we were."

4. Tech & Trabants

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