Where's your ethical line now? What subject would U2 refuse to sing about?

"There's none. By singing about something you make it clean. Be­cause you bring it out into the open."

Edge told me last winter that the themes of Achtung Baby were, "Be­trayal, love, morality, spirituality, and faith." A lot of the songs deal with the temptations that disrupt and might destroy a marriage. Was Edge's the only troubled marriage you were drawing on?

"Well, I was going down that road anyway," Bono says. "But certainly ... I don't know which came first, to be honest. The words or what Edge went through. They're all bound up in each other. But there are a lot of other experiences that went on around the same time. It all gets back to the fact that it's an extraordinary thing to see two people holding on to each other and trying to work things out. I'm still in awe of the idea of two people against the world, and I actually believe it is to be against the world, because I don't think the world is about sticking together. AIDS is not the only threat, you know. AIDS is the big bad wolf at the moment, but I see all the threats. I see people's need for independence, their need to follow their own ideas down. These are all not necessarily selfish things. Everything out there is against the idea of being a couple: every ad, every TV program, every soap opera, every novel you buy in an airport. Sex is now a subject owned by corporations. It's used to sell commodities. It is itself a commodity. And the message is that if you don't have it, you're nobody.

"I've had my problems in my relationship. It's tough for everybody. I think fidelity is just against human nature. That's where we have to either engage or not engage our higher side. Certainly I'm not trying to come up with easy answers. It's like in school when they tell you about drugs. 'If you smoke drugs you'll become an addict and you'll die the

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next week.' They don't tell you even half the truth. I think the same is true about sex. You know, if you tell people that the best place to have sex is in the safe hands of a loving relationship, you may be telling a lie! There may be other places. If the question is, can I as a married man write about sex with a stranger, 'yes' has got to be the answer. I've got to write about that because that is part of the subject I'm writing about. You have to try and expose some myths, even if they expose you along the way. I don't want to talk about my own relationship, because I've too much respect for Ali to do so. What I'm saying to you is, I may or may not be writing from my own experience on some of these, but that doesn't make it any less real."

Bono and I talk on, we talk for more than two hours. He gives me a quote from Sam Shepard to sum up: "Right in the middle of a contra­diction," he says, "that's the place to be."

Giants Stadium

A history of U2 in the usa/ a tour of underworld/ bono gets hit with a hairbrush/ ellen darst, native guide/ women in the workplace/ how the author lost his objectivity/ canning the support band

kids gather for days in the parking lots of the Giants football stadium in northern New Jersey, across the river from Man­hattan, while the mighty stage is erected for ZOO TV: THE OUTSIDE BROADCAST. They hunker down in wonder and confu­sion, like the apemen studying the monolith in 2001. For their summer stadium tour of America, U2 has blown everything up to elephantine proportions. The stage, huge and black, looms across one end of the football field, its spires crawling up toward the sky like the steeples of postnuclear cathedrals. They are supposed to look like TV towers— black scaffolding narrowing as it ascends to a flashing red point—but the effect is creepier than that. The eleven-story stage is only the framework for the giant TV screens that flicker and crackle above and across the entire proscenium. When the stadium lights go off and all those screens flash to life it hits a lot of tribal buttons in the audience;

U2 may have uncovered a subconscious link between the recent family rite of sitting around the television and more primitive ritual equivalents —such as the clan gathering to be entertained by the shaman. When U2 takes the stage even the helicopters circling overhead for a peek and the airplanes using the stadium as a landing marker seem like blinking red ornaments buzzing around the big voodoo, little mechanical sparks rising from the electric bonfire.

Underworld, the vast network of work areas behind and beneath the stage, is a beehive city. On Edge's right, in a bunker two steps down, sits guitar tech Dallas Schoo with a roomful of guitars, tuners, and spare

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parts. It is a fully functioning guitar shop. During the concert Dallas will break off a conversation to pump a wah-wah pedal so that Edge can get the effect while keeping his own feet free to move across the stage. Just outside Dallas's room, in a cubbyhole that gives him a clear view of the stage, sits Des Broadbery at an elaborate console of keyboards and computer screens. Des runs the sequencers that fill out U2's sound and make it possible to approximate the elaborate sonic effects of Achtung Baby onstage. Des has a computer file standing by with any U2 song the band might suddenly pull out of their hats, and if it needs a synth pad or second guitar, Des is ready to drop it in. When Edge is playing the solo on "Ultra Violet (Light My Way)," for example, Des is under the stage providing a sampled eight-bar guitar figure in the background.

"There's no room for human error in what I do," Des says. "You have to be sharp. There's an awful lot depending on what goes on in my area. What really matters when they're up there onstage is to make sure they're with me or I'm with them."

I ask Des what he does when the band loses their place in mid-song, as a result, say, of Bono getting excited and coming in early, "What would happen," Des explains, "is I let them find out where they all are and then I go ahead of them to a chorus or verse and wait there until they catch up."

U2 first used sequencers in concert to get a handle on "Bad" from The Unforgettable Fire. By the Joshua Tree tour sequencers were beefing up eight numbers. Now it's a rare U2 song that doesn't have Des adding some sample, phrase, or backing part.

From Des and Dallas's wing you can go up a short flight to a vast backstage hall, across which sits a small dressing room with a punching bag where band members hover during the encores, and where they can switch clothes during breaks. One night Bono came in raging during Edge's guitar solo on "Bullet the Blue Sky." Everything was going wrong that night and he was furious. Before he fell into the chair where stylist Nassim Khalifa dolls him up he punched the bag, threw a chair, and kicked the wall. While Nassim was trying to brush his hair he pounded the table and screamed, "Fuck! Fuck!" So she bonked him on the top of the head with the hairbrush as if he were a bad dog. Bono was startled.

That hurt! He looked in the mirror and saw Nassim calmly combing, saying nothing. He shut up and behaved.

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