Resinging the song, and suggests that as he is being brave enough to charge into the machine-gun nest of public humiliation for his art, the least Eno could do is provide cover.

Edge tends to listen quietly, scrutinizing these arguments between Eno's professor and Bono's martyr, and then punctures their balloons with his own talmudic logic. Edge analyzes the conflicting propositions like a rabbi and bides his time before zeroing in on the weak spot where Eno's circumlocution or Bono's manifesto can be shattered.

Flood listens to it all and says nothing. When everyone else is talked out, exhausted, and home in bed, he will still be here, making it sound the way he wants.

"A lot of the time I'm like the junior partner," Flood says when the others are gone. "It's almost like you go around with the broom after­wards."

Making Sausages

Songwriting by accident/ the movie critic/ one from column b/ a camera tour of adam's nakedness/ gavin's dirty duty/ the year of the french

while U2 is dredging their psyches and adrenaline to make it through these recording sessions, the hysteria of tour preparation is going on all around them. There are a hundred decisions to be made, and everyone wants U2's attention. In the sitting room at the Factory, illustrations of various designs for Edge's wool hats are laid out for his inspection. There is a check mark next to a drawing of a snake eating its tail, along with a quotation from a mythology text: "Ouroboros: A gnostic name for the great world serpent." Fintan Fitzgerald, the wardrobe captain, has so despaired of ever getting the band to sit still long enough to have their butts mea­sured that he has convinced Suzanne to grab pairs of their jeans to send overnight to the tailor in London standing by to cut his clothes. The tailor will just have to base his work on these swiped trousers.

There are piles of faxes with handwritten messages across them, things like "Needs Answer Todayl" Suzanne tells the band members they have to agree on the aliases they are going to use for their hotel reserva­tions. They decide to take the names of Irish fashion models. "I want to be Mr. Doody!" Bono declares. "You can't," Suzanne says, "Edge al­ready has it." Edge says he will be "Mr. Rocca" in honor of the former Miss Ireland now dating Van Morrison. Bono can be Doody.

U2 wants to focus their attention on the big stuff. They want the Zooropa tour, the European stadium shows, to be different from what they did in America. Bono is sure that they can push the boundaries of taste further in Europe than in the USA. They convene in the sitting room to look at the video footage that will play on the great Zoo TV

[192]

Screens during the concerts. The men responsible for assembling this are Ned O'Hanlon and Maurice Linnane, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the mighty U2 enterprise. Ned and Maurice run Dreamchaser, a Dublin video company that, while dependent on U2 for much of its revenue, is not actually a U2 subsidiary. In other words, although U2 are Ned and Maurice's biggest clients, although Ned and Maurice are very close to the center of all Zoo tour action, Ned and Maurice are not U2's employees. (Ned's wife is, though—she is Anne-Louise Kelly, the director of Principle Management Dublin.) This independence manifests itself in small ways, such as Ned and Maurice not having to sign the confidentiality agreements Principle employees sign, and in the bemused demeanor the two men affect as they deal with translating and executing U2's endless ideas about their video image.

As Ned and Maurice roll in a big TV and prepare their latest video presentation, Adam is in a chair getting his hair done for the impending tour. His head is wrapped in a towel and his hair is piled high with some horrible purple goop. Adam looks up from under his turban and asks Maurice if he went on holiday during his recent break.

"Yeah, to a Greek island."

"The gay one?"

"No."

Bono comes into the room saying, "Larry went there once. He couldn't believe it. The nightmare of his life. Everything that's hap­pened to him since he was twelve years old times a thousand."

Edge and Larry come in. Ned and Maurice put up the film montage that will open the concert. There's an opera singer cutting to a 1950s dancer cutting to African tribesmen cutting to Bono in his fly shades speaking in a jumble of European languages.

Bono says hold it. He doesn't want himself in there. "It's not good enough, there's no content." He objects to the jokiness of the image of himself. Ned and Maurice won't let that go by.

"This from the man who came out on stage and said, 'Bend over, San Francisco!'?" asks Maurice.

"The man who said, 'Seig heil, Berlin!'?" asks Ned.

Bono will not be moved. He also wants the African tribesmen put somewhere else—the way the film is cut now they come right after a series of ridiculous images. Bono thinks it will look like U2 are mocking them.

[193]

Ned and Maurice groan and note the changes. Next up is the video that will run across the screens while U2 plays "With or Without You," a long, slow mood-lit pan across the mountains and valleys of Adam Clayton's naked body. "Uh-oh," Adam says while unwrapping his head to reveal hair of phosphorescent blondeness. "Maybe I should see this one alone first."

"It's going to be seen by thousands, Adam." Bono laughs. "This is no time for modesty."

The film rolls. On the screen a nude Adam, standing at attention, is bathed in deep shadows and red light as the camera pans slowly around him. The cinematography is artsy, the focus fuzzy. It is tasteful to a fault. "There's no narcissism in this," Bono explains to me as we watch. "The idea is to eroticize the male body instead of the female. You're not sure at first which it is."

The film was a reaction to an objection raised by Catherine Owens, the band's artist pal, Trabant painter, and Zoo TV board member, who insisted that the tour needed some male eros to balance the belly dancer and the pulling-women-from-the-audience-to-dance-with-Bono bits. As usual, Adam "Body Double" Clayton was drafted for the buff shot.

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