The people watching the Billboard Awards at home see the people on TV applauding this montage that they just watched on TV. Larry

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wanted no part of such foolishness. He's taken a seasonal powder. Adam is glad to get home to his mansion on the hill. He lives in a huge house on twenty acres in Rathfarnham, south of Dublin, overlooking the snotty boarding school that expelled him as a teenager. Neil Young reportedly said upon seeing Adam's castle, "That's the bass player's house?!" The bass player collects art and sometimes makes his palace available to artist friends to use as a studio. Although he's U2's heartiest partier, Adam has a bucolic side; he doesn't mind being the Laird of Manse Clayton.

"Adam's actually a really down-to-earth, homey guy," his younger brother Sebastian observes. "That's his main fight or disadvantage. He loves rock & roll and living the whole rock star thing, but then again he likes planting an oak tree by himself on a sunny Sunday morning. He's been trying really hard to come to terms with that contradiction. Espe­cially in the last year or two, I think he finds it really hard."

Adam's British family moved to Ireland when his father, a pilot, took a job with Aer Lingus when Adam was five. They settled in Malahide, a beautiful Dublin suburb that still looks and feels like a 1940s village. The Claytons became friendly with another family of U. K. settlers in the town, the Evanses. Young Adam went to primary school with little Dave Evans before he was the Edge. Then the boys were torn apart by the cruel cleaver of boarding school. After Adam was booted out for not giving a rat's ass, he landed back with Dave at Mount Temple school, where he met Larry and Bono.

Bono tells a funny story of going on the bus with sixteen-year-old Adam to break into the boarding school, St. Columba's, after Adam was expelled. Being Protestant, Bono had met some posh people—there were even some at Mount Temple—but not like this: he couldn't believe it. They went over the wall and Adam's friend invited them into the dorm. A very proper fellow named Spike reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and produced a brick of hashish. The room was decorated with Hendrix posters and they were saying things like, "Have you heard the new Beck album?" Then they all picked up guitars and strummed through their blissed-out hippie stupor. This, Bono realized listening to them, was where Adam picked up all the technical terms—"gig>" "fret," "jamming"—that had so impressed Bono, Edge, and Larry that they figured he was some kind of musical genius and they'd better get him in

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their band. Bono was stunned to realize that everybody at this place talked like that!

The headmaster found out about Adam's nocturnal reappearance and sent to his parents a polite but subtly threatening letter, which now sits framed above the toilet in Adam's mansion, the mansion that looks down on St. Columba's and whose walks and garden abut the school property and that stands as a glorious middle finger to the faculty that expelled him and a stirring example to all the kids stuck there of at least one alternative to the perpetuation of the British class system that the school by its policies espouses.

The brand St. Columba's left on Adam, his bandmates claim, was the pitiful boarding school habit of standing by the dirty plate bin with a fork waiting to salvage other people's leftovers. Edge says Adam will wait for a spare potato with the vigilance of a hawk and spear it from the garbage. "Even now," Edge insists, "if Adam's walking down a hotel corridor and he sees something sitting on one of the room service trays left outside someone's door, he'll reach down and grab it."

"I've seen him salvage half a hamburger," Bono claims, the air hot with hyperbole, "with another guest's false teeth still in it!"

Among the painters who have used Adam's house as a studio are three artists with an imminent exhibition: Paul Hewson, Fionan Hanvey, and Derek Rowan, who in their teenage years bestowed on each other the names Bono, Gavin Friday, and Guggi. Guggi is an artist by profession and singers Bono and Gavin certainly fancy themselves men of vision worth sharing. They have committed to a joint show at a Dublin gallery in the spring and now they have to slap down some masterpieces to fill it.

In their teens and early twenties Guggi and Gavin led the Virgin Prunes, a theatrical, glitter-inspired experimental rock band that some­times also drafted Adam, Edge, and Larry into sideman duty, and which featured Edge's older brother Dick Evans on guitar. They often played shows with U2 at Dublin's Project Arts Centre, a gallery/theatrical space run by Jim Sheridan (who has since become a world-class film-maker with movies such as My Left Foot). The confrontation-goosed Prunes wore makeup and dresses and risked getting their heads busted by bottles every time they walked onstage.

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