Bono, Row the Boat Ashore

The band establishes a beachhead/ bono hoisted high/ edge among the little people/ a deft segue from oral sex to w. b. yeats/ a dubious urchin/ transcending the clusterfuck

I feel like a wally in my Wellies," says Larry as he stomps around the Solo in the rubber boots ("Wellingtons") we have been or­dered to redon before wading in the atomic water. As U2 prepares to board their landing craft the Greenpeace organizer notices with a start that Bono has on his feet not Wellies but his own leather motorcycle boots. "You can't wear those!" she insists. "That water is radioactive! Whatever you wear into it has to be discarded afterward!" "It's okay," Bono says. "I won't get my feet wet." "You don't understand," she says. "Weighed down by the barrels, the rafts can't get all the way up to the shore. You're going to have to wade in!"

"Get my feet wet!" Bono sputters, adopting a spoiled, Spinal Tap accent. "Oh, no, no, no, this whole thing is off!" A quick search finds no spare rubber boots on the Solo. The weary Greenpeace leader says, "It's all right, Bono. I understand you can walk on water."

As we prepare to board the two landing rafts one of the Greenpeace organizers puts out her hand to stop me. This is as far as you go, she says. From here on it's only members of U2 and the camera crew. I tell her that if she thinks I came all this way to stay on the boat and wave she should pull into port and have her bottom scraped, but she is adamant. I sulk for a minute, and then it occurs to me that in these hooded suits we all look alike. So I go up to one of the film crew, tap him on the shoulder, and tell him he's got to go back and get a life jacket. As soon as he leaves I take his place in the raft, where the

[77]

Greenpeace commissar counts our heads and orders us to cast off. Away we go.

As U2's rubber raft skims the surf toward the nuclear shoreline, the tension that ran through all the preparations for this adventure has given way to a Monty Python mood. Still, as the camera boat runs alongside them, the bandmembers and McGuinness raise themselves into serious, even heroic poses. The main purpose of this expedition is to give the newspapers and TV an image that will focus attention, if only in the second paragraph, on how dangerous the Sellafield facility is. So as they approach the shore, U2 gets focused on that objective.

Nearing land, U2 can see Greenpeace activists in white radiation suits lined up like an army of ghosts along the line where public beach turns into injuncted no-man's-land. They can see reporters and camera­men. They can see bobbies with a photographer, taking pictures of U2 with a flash camera on a sunny day from a half mile inside the Sellafield land. Behind the plant gates are paddy wagons too. (Paddy wagon: an­other great token of contempt for the Irish.)

U2's raft gets as close as it can to the shore and then, before Bono can get his shoes wet, a huge Greenpeace member splashes into the brine, lifts the singer out of the raft, and carries him to the beach. Bono holds up his arms as he's hoisted, waving V signs at the reporters who rush toward him, clicking and snapping. Bono is deposited on the sand and he turns and stares nobly back toward the Solo, the journalists dancing around him like a maypole. Not one reporter pays any atten­tion to Edge and Adam, standing in the water struggling to hoist their barrel of poison sand. While cameras capture Bono from every angle, Edge and Adam grunt past unnoticed, lugging their radioactive burden.

At the high tide line U2 dumps their barrels and convenes a press conference. "I actually don't believe Sellafield 2 will go ahead," Bono tells the reporters. "Word is that at the highest levels people are very nervous about this. They just spent millions of pounds on it—nobody wants to admit it was a mistake, so they have to continue. It will be a great scandal later, when the real facts come out. That's all we can do— bring the facts out. We're a rock & roll band! It's kind of absurd we have to dress up like complete wankers to make this point."

After all the pictures have been taken and all the reporters' questions answered, McGuinness and U2 confer. The bus that brought them to the sea has managed to make its way down here. If they hike a mile or so

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Down the beach they can get on board and drive out, rather than returning to the Solo. That strikes everyone as fine. They walk away from the reactor, eventually coming to a town. Local children make saucer eyes as they see this phalanx of creatures in white body suits emerging from the shore.

Edge is the first one off the beach and a waiting broadcast journalist at a pay phone ropes the guitarist into a live radio interview. The local kids start poking each other and gasping, "It's the Edge!" One little boy calls out to his even littler friend, "Richie! You want to see Bono? That's him down there!" The smaller boy runs up and stares. He sees a figure in a hooded radiation suit. "That's Bono?"

The kids start lining up for autographs. U2 peels off their protective gear and deposits it in Greenpeace bags. Bono is told he should proba­bly throw away his motorcycle boots—even if they never touched the water, the sand at Sellafield is dangerous. He chucks them away. Then a local couple come up and start tearing into one of the Greenpeace activists. "Our child died from leukemia caused by that plant!" the husband says angrily. "You come here for a day and you go away! What do you know! We have to live with this all the time!" He storms off. His wife slaps the Greenpeace volunteer, then turns and follows her hus­band.

Back on the bus Bono leans his head on his wife's shoulder and waves to the children gathered around the coach. He adopts a broad American accent and brays, "Oh, look, dear. Aren't they a-dor-able. Oh, I'd just like to put them all in my suitcase and take them home!"

I kick the back of his seat. "Hey, quit making fun of Americans!" Bono turns around apologetically and explains that he's mimicking the U.S. tourists he met as a child at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. "I would charge them for tours of the cathedral," he says. "I made good money."

"Oh," I say, "you were an urchin."

"I was!" Bono says brightly, at which Ali bursts out laughing. She knows her husband never urched.

As the bus begins to pull out, Bono glances out the window—and sees that one of the juvenile U2 fans is proudly making off with his irradiated boots. "Oh, hell! Stop the bus!" The kid refuses to give up his souvenirs until all four members of U2 give him their autographs. As we head down the highway away from Sellafield we pass—facing

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The other way—a series of police roadblocks. There they are, all lined up and waiting to stop U2 or Greenpeace from approaching the plutonium mill. As we fly past the cops, Larry shouts out the window and waves.

During the long drive back to Manchester, Bono—who has become father to two children since U2 last toured—talks about readjusting to the rock star life. "Going out on the road is not difficult," he says. "The real problems start when you come home, readjustment. When you're on the road, everything is put second to the gig. You have minders who follow you out at night to make sure you come back and play the next concert. And when you come home, the dusterfuck mentality you bring back from the road can be very funny. Like the whole room-key thing. When you're on the road a room key is like your dog tag. It gets you home at night, it pays your bills. I've had situations where a month after a tour has ended I'll be in Dublin and I'll give some nightclub owner a key from the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago instead of cash, and he'll look at me like 'What the fuck is he on?' "

We begin talking about the selfishness most musicians, most artists, cultivate on the underside of their dedication to their art. "We're living a fairly decadent kind of selfish, art-oriented lifestyle," Bono says. "There's nothing to get in the way of you and your music when you're on the road. Real life doesn't raise its head."

I quote back at Bono his lines from "The Fly": "Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief, all kill their inspiration and sing about the grief."

"Yeah," Bono sighs. "I hope I'm not like that, but I suspect I might be. And I really hate that picture. The great thing is, under the guise of 'The Fly' I can admit to all this shit."

Bono lumbers up to the front of the bus, unwinds the tour guide microphone, and starts torturing us all with his imitation of a drunken Irish lounge singer. He mumbles inebriated dedications, sings awful songs, and dares anyone to come take the microphone away from him. It s too bad that much of the public thinks of Bono as a sourpuss. He's a card. The problem is that when people get as famous as U2, other people start treating them like gods or freaks. So they have to build a protective bubble in which they can be themselves. Inside the bubble they can be as they've always been, with no rock star baloney. But from outside the bubble they look strange and distorted.

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This bus ride back to Manchester from Sellafield has now lasted about three hours, and McGuinness has been promising us a breakfast stop the whole way. We pull off at a roadside tourist cafeteria and everyone pours out and starts lining up for sausage, ham, uncooked bacon, and all the other artery-hardening, cloven-hoofed delights of British cuisine. In the restaurant Bono tries to convince Edge to come outside and sit in the grass, but Edge grumbles that he's seen enough outdoors for one day.

When the bus trip resumes, Bono and I head to the backseat. As we approach Manchester I say, "Well, of course, Bono, everybody must be asking you about all the references to oral sex in your new songs. . . ."

"WHAT?" Bono sputters. "Bill, you've turned to the wrong page in your notebook, you're asking me Prince questions!"

Listen, I say, to these lines from recent U2 songs: "Surrounding me, going down on me," "You can swallow or you can spit," "Here she comes, six and nine again," "Did I leave a bad taste in your mouth." . . .

"Ahh." Bono mumbles something about sixty-nine being one of the most equal sexual positions and then strongly suggests we get onto another subject.

Okay, I say, in "One" you sing, "You say love is a temple, love's the higher law. You ask me to enter and then you make me crawl." That's a hell of a sacrament/sin, temple/vagina metaphor; it's like Yeats's "Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement."

"Yeah, whoa," Bono exhales. "That line, you really touched on some­thing. You know, it was no accident that Jesus was born in the shit and straw. . . ." The bus comes to a halt. We're back in Manchester at last. We head into the hotel to pick up our bags and check out. U2 has a plane waiting to take them back to Dublin. Bono asks me if I want to come along. No, thanks, I say, I've left all my clothes in a laundry in London and I've got to get them back.

A few days later Bono telephones and asks if I saw our Sellafield adventure on the TV news and in the papers. He says the nuclear industry tried to counter all the coverage Greenpeace got by sending PR men out to stand on the beach in their shirtsleeves, "looking as if they were going to build a sandcastle." One nuclear spokesman really screwed up by telling reporters that U2 had no right to get involved in Britain because .they were Irish and they should be home in Belfast trying to

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stop kids from building bombs. That mixed-up statement (aside from its bigotry, Britain considers Belfast part of the U.K.) brought angry charges of "Paddy-bashing" down on the unfortunate public relations man. Then he mentions our bus conversation.

"I think I was talking to you about Jesus being born in the shit and straw," Bono says. "I suppose the nineties equivalent of that is Las Vegas, the neon strip. I found in amongst the trash to be a great place to develop my loftier ideas, and a great disguise as well."

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