Stop them getting near this little atomic cesspool on the English coast. Next time, I told McGuinness, let's do a phoner.

Four hours ago U2 were onstage in Manchester, playing another superb set in the series of superb sets that have marked this month-long European leg of the Zoo TV tour, a teaser amid the American shows for a longer European tour next year. Edge unleashed breathtaking Hendrix-like solos on "Bullet the Blue Sky" and "Love Is Blindness" that were beyond what I had imagined to be his ability. Lou Reed, who joined the band for "Satellite of Love," enthused backstage that Edge was now alone out in front of his guitar-playing peers. (He may never climb to the top limb of the tree of technique, but for creativity on his instrument, Edge is in the vanguard.) Also backstage was Peter Gabriel, who has been at recent U2 shows in New York and London, too, and who said that while acts such as Prince might leave him impressed, U2 truly touched his heart.

The TV screens that flash messages at the audience during U2's shows had new slogans last night: Fallout, Plutonium, Mutant, Radiation Sickness, Chernobyl. The concert had been planned as a rally to protest the expansion of the Sellafield nuclear plant, which dumps radioactive waste into the Irish Sea from adding to its grisly enterprise a second process­ing facility for the atomic by-products other countries don't want. Bad enough, Greenpeace and U2 say, that this plutonium mill sends radia­tion to the shores of Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales. Bad enough, Greenpeace say, that the leukemia rate around Sellafield is three times the national average. But now they wanted to add to it a collection point for deadly waste from all over the Earth? That was the last straw. So U2, along with Public Enemy, B.A.D. II, and Kraftwerk, agreed to play a concert for Greenpeace the night before a licensed protest rally was to be held outside Sellafield. When the nuclear facility found out that a whole lot of people might show up, they went to court and got an injunction against the protest, claiming it was a concert that could attract thousands of rock fans who might do damage to the properties of local residents. This specious argument convinced the British court. But then, Sellafield is owned by the British government.

Onstage in Manchester Bono told the crowd, "They've cancelled a peaceful demonstration on the grounds of public safety! These people are responsible for the deaths of innocent children, for God's sake. Public safety doesn't come anywhere near them!" Later he added, "Don't let

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them gag you! We only live 130 miles from Sellafield. So do you in Manchester. It's a lot farther to Number Ten Downing Street!"

When the concert ended, U2 climbed aboard this hired holiday bus and lit out into the night. The Sellafield injunction prohibited U2 from setting foot on any of the land anywhere near the nuclear facility. So U2 and Greenpeace hatched the plan of U2 coming in by water and pro­ceeding only as far onto the beach as the high tide line, reasoning that the injunction did not apply to the ocean. On the bus, Bono announced his intention to cross the literal line in the sand and step onto Sellafield soil, but the Greenpeace organizer insisted that any such deliberate provocation would be contempt of the injunction and could lead to the court seizing all of Greenpeace's assets. U2 should abide by the letter of the law. She went on to say that the sand we would be stepping on was irradiated sand, the water we would be wading in was irradiated water. Everybody swallowed hard but nobody chickened out,

"We heard tonight they're setting up roadblocks in a radius twenty miles around Sellafield," Edge said. "If we get stopped there may be some sort of showdown with the cops. I don't know. Right now we're guests on a Greenpeace action. We don't know what's going to happen.

"There's a fair amount of scientific evidence to suggest that pollution from Sellafield has had an effect on the health of people living on the east coast of Ireland. Impossible to prove, but connections can be made. We're members of Greenpeace, so when we heard about Sellafield 2 we got even more pissed off. The British Nuclear Fuels people have been effective at stopping the groundswell of concern and anxiety about it through huge TV campaigns presenting Sellafield as a safe, well-con­trolled, well-monitored, efficient, and benign installation. They will spend a few million pounds per annum on TV adverts extolling the virtues of Sellafield. They even opened a visitors' center! They've got some very slick PR people."

"The biggest advertising and publicity agency in England," Larry added. "They are also the publicity people for the government. Sellafield is owned by the government and therefore has all the protection that the government can afford it—i.e., MI6 and M15 (British intelligence). People from Greenpeace and any other organization that opposes what's hap­pening at places like Sellafield and elsewhere are on these lists. Then they have difficulty getting jobs because the lists go into computers and

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companies ring up and check out the names. It's all very underhanded and seedy. The whole thing is sick."

"There's no doubt that the Greenpeace office phones are tapped," Edge said. "You're not dealing with a private body here, you're dealing with the government. All the money British Nuclear Fuels spend is taxpayers' money, all the TV campaigns are paid for by the taxpayers, and as Larry said, they have access to all the information of covert agencies. You're not dealing with big business, you're dealing with the British government."

Larry went on: "After we did the Amnesty International tour and Live Aid and a lot of benefit concerts, Bono and I sat down and talked about how we were going to approach the future. We came to the conclusion that maybe the best thing to do was leave Amnesty—con­tinue to support them, obviously, but doing more concerts may be a mistake for now—and let's do something for Greenpeace. We've do­nated to them for a long time, we've done gigs with them, but we've never actually been involved in an action. When this came up it was an opportunity.

"It would be nice if we didn't have to do this kind of shit, 'cause it's nothing to do with rock & roll. Absolutely nothing to do with it. This is crazy, Live Aid was crazy. That we're traveling in a bus trying to get to Sellafield is an indictment of how our government and the British government is responding to environmental problems. The fact that Sting has to go out to the Amazon! There's a guy who goes out there and puts his ass on the line. Peter Gabriel is another. And people go, 'Aw fuck, another benefit.' I have great admiration for Peter Gabriel and Sting, for the amount of work they do, because they've been slagged from one end of the British press to the other."

Now, with Larry and Edge asleep, I step over Bono and find a seat next to Adam. Owing either to the champagne or the risky expedition, the bass player is in a reflective mood. "People get into rock & roll for all the right reasons and then end up getting out for all the wrong reasons," Adam says quietly. "They get into it out of nai'vete, and then when the nai'vete runs out they think, 'This isn't what I expected,' and they want to quit. I was just thinking how lucky I am to be in a band, to be one of four and not alone. No matter what happens, at least I always know that I have three friends." I ask Adam if I should turn on my tape recorder and he says no, no, let's just talk. So we do, and the member of

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