Among the contributors who each wrote or painted on a page were

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Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Brendan Kennelly, Thomas Kinsella, and Ted Hughes. Now finished by Bono and Gins­berg, the weighty tome is to be sold to the first person who will cough up a million pounds for it. The money will go to charity and the book will go wherever the new owner wants—perhaps on tour, perhaps into seclusion, perhaps into some Nipponese bank vault.

So far this trip Ginsberg has ditched Van Morrison, who turned out to be a little too intense for the poet to handle, and challenged Bono to explain to him why he wants to believe in God and thus circumscribe his universe. Ginsberg told Gavin, "Bob Dylan and Van Morrison don't know who they are. Leonard Cohen does; he knows exactly who he is. I haven't figured out Bono."

"I wonder what he meant by that?" Bono asks.

"Maybe," I suggest, "it means Cohen still returns his phone calls and Dylan and Van don't."

Also in town to tape a spot for the Triplecast is cyberpunk author William Gibson. Gibson's view of a funky interactive future has been a big influence on Zoo TV, and Bono has been going back and forth about an offer to make his acting debut next year in the film Johnny Mnemonic, based on a Gibson story. The artist Robert Longo is going to direct. Other actors lined up are Ice-T and Henry Rollins. Bono is enticed by the possibility of mixing it up with his antagonist Rollins on­screen. Three pop stars in a science fiction movie by a first-time director from outside the film world: sounds like a recipe for disaster. Bono's been offered a stack of cinematic roles for U2's year off, including Batman Forever. He's waffling on whether to do any of them.

Gibson's futuristic fiction describes a world not unlike the one U2 inhabits now—a blur of intense, electronically enhanced intel­lectual stimulation and activities shooting from country to country in a jumble of languages and colliding cultures. Gibson's name for the darkest section of the twenty-first century technolopolis is "Night City," an overpopulated hot-wired extension of Joyce's Night-town.

After taping his Triplecast contribution, Gibson sits down with Bono and Edge to conduct an interview for Details magazine. "Part of what you do is like rock & roll glasnost," Gibson tells U2. "You've adopted this deliberate policy of openness."

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"We've got the media bonfire going," Bono says half-seriously. "The fireworks are lighting up our sky and we're just exploding the cliches whilst warming our hands on them. It's different when lightning is your business."

"There's myth and mystery," Edge adds, "and they are two com­pletely different things. Although it's part of being a big group, I don't particularly like myth, but to me mystery is everything."

"At first, when you're reading stories about your life in the media," Bono says, "who you're supposedly sleeping with, how much money you're supposed to be making, what you had for breakfast—you feel violated. Then you start to realize that the person they're describing has very little to do with you and is in fact much more interesting than you are. . . . Your public image is interactive: people stick on arms, an extra leg; it's sort of a Robo-Bono thing."

Gibson observes: "This prefigures the truly digital pop figure, of course, who won't exist in any literal way. We already see that in quite a pure form in the idoru scene in Japan. These 'idol singers' are con­structed from one girl's looks, another girl's voice, and a P.R. team to handle moments like these. . . ."

They talk about U2 abandoning their old save-the-world persona and Bono says, "In the '80s we had this real struggle: we felt that we had some kind of onus to literally save the planet, and though that's not a bad instinct, if you start walking like you're carrying the planet on your head, it's not a very funky walk,"

At the Factory, rehearsals for the Pacific tour—Australia, New Zealand, and Japan—are under way. U2 is using this opportunity to actually work out arrangements of songs from the Zooropa album, a luxury they didn't have before the European tour. Only "Numb" and an acoustic, B-stage version of "Stay" got into the summer sets regularly (attempts to do "Babyface" ended in the Bono-straddling woman from the audience who so annoyed his dad).

Edge was the first one to arrive today, so he programmed the machines for the set. Now he's standing in front of the bank of se­quencers and keyboards that will be stashed in underworld during the concerts, playing "Where the Streets Have No Name" and "Angel of Harlem" while his bandmates sprawl on the chairs in the next room delaying the start of another workday. Edge's guitar stops. He comes

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into the room and picks up the phone. He calls Morleigh in Los Angeles—eight time zones earlier—to ask if she'll be around next week when he stops on his way to Australia. When he gets off the phone he's as happy as a sixteen-year-old with a prom date. Then he glances around at his partners with a look that says, "Work," and they all struggle to their feet and file into the studio behind Edge like the cover of Abbey Road.

Bono, the last in line, drops out at the studio door to get himself a cup of tea and decides to put off work a little longer by holding forth on how Adam and Larry always put off work. "They'll do anything to get out of rehearsing," Bono says as the sound of the band beginning comes through the door. He sips his tea as the music turns into something unfamiliar, a jazzy 5/4 groove. Bono listens and says, "They'll write a new song just to get out of rehearsing!" Bono takes his time wandering in; in his absence U2 plays their set with Edge singing lead.

Joe O'Herlihy's behind the sound desk. I take a seat on an amp and enjoy the private concert. It's valuable to see U2 play in a room without any lights or videoscreens or hoopla; it's a reminder that along the way to becoming big stars U2 also became terrific players. Watching Adam's fingers I think that his slippery bass should not sound so full-bellied, but it does. Larry has the snap and precision of Charlie Watts. They're a great band from the bottom up. Bono stands off to the side, listening to Edge finish singing "New Year's Day" and then, as Edge begins to lead the band into "Satellite of Love," Bono steps forward and says, "We should do 'Dirty Day.' "

'Satellite' is just as important, in a way," Edge says. They do Satellite" first and "Dirty Day" second, Bono's voice taking over for Edge's. Their vocal tone is very similar. U2 is figuring out how to approach "Dirty Day," "Lemon," and "Daddy's Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car." Edge keeps playing with different sounds. When he discovers a sharp, grinding guitar tone he grins and says, "Whoa! Captain Beefheart!" He then proceeds to gnash at that sound until blood runs out of my ears.

Adam is standing near an artist's easel, on which he sometimes jots chord changes while he's learning a song. Facing the band is a chalk­board on which are listed various running-order options:

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OPENER

 

B-STAGE

 

CONFESSIONAL

Zooropa

 

Satellite

 

Fanfare

Fly?

 

Dirty Day

 

Crashed Car

 

 

 

Bullet

 

Lemon intro

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Macphisto vibe)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lemon

 

 

 

 

 

 

Phone Call

 

 

 

 

 

 

With or Without You

 

When U2 plays "Crashed Car" Bono suddenly slinks across the room to the mike stand in hobble-legged Macphisto character. In his street clothes it looks pretty silly, but I notice that Edge is moving the same way, lurching and weaving, as if to give Bono encouragement and make sure he doesn't feel like he's out there alone. It is the sort of tiny gesture of solidarity you almost never see in rock bands, where the players like to maintain their cool while the lead singer makes a prat of himself. It's subtly generous, and typical of U2.

That song slides into "Lemon," which grooves along great until the end, when Bono signals the band to get quieter and quieter. They do, but when they actually stop playing it stops flat, with a clunk. "Fading down is fine," Edge says, "but we still don't know how to actually end it."

A break is called while Bono goes off to do an interview with an Australian TV show. When he emerges it's Edge's turn. Passing in the hall, Edge asks Bono how they are. Bono says they're very nice but they know nothing about music. Edge's eyes light up. "Oh, so we can make things up." He smiles. "I think I'll take them on a tour of the mixing board!"

I join Larry and Adam in the Factory lunchroom. They are rumi­nating on the latest international movements of the elusive Michael Jackson and ask what I've heard. I tell them that when Edge and I were in L.A. I met a couple of self-proclaimed Jackson insiders who said they knew all about the sort of terrible stuff Michael had been up to. But whenever I pressed them to be specific—"So you know for a fact he slept with little boys?"—they'd hem and haw and admit, Well, no, 1 never saw that, hut you could just tell something bad was going on over there. Talk about the buzzards circling! What does it say about these people that they now claim to have been scandalized by what Jackson was up to, which

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only they knew about, but they did nothing to interfere with it? Holly­wood puts the "hype" back in "hypocrisy."

We go on speculating for a while and then Adam and Larry look up and notice the crew leaving. They thought U2 had more playing ahead. "Edge already left," they are told. The two haircuts look at each other and laugh. "Well, that was a tough day," Larry says.

"Get my stuff ready!" Adam calls to no one. "Larry and I are going to rehearse!"

With U2's workday done, Bono heads over to his second job. He joins Gavin at STS—the studio where he did the Sinatra duet—to continue his work on the Name of the Father soundtrack. As is his lifetime habit, Bono arrives just in time for dinner. There is shepherd's pie on the STS stove and Gavin, his partner, Maurice Seezer, and the studio crew are wolfing it down while arguing about Northern Ireland, inspired less by the music they are working on than by the current news that the Hume-Adams initiative, a first-step proposal for peace in Northern Ireland, is moving forward faster than anyone expected. John Hume is a member of British Parliament from Ulster. Gerry Adams is the presi­dent of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA. Such progress is a mixed blessing. The Belfast gangsters who use the Unionist or IRA flags as an excuse to make big money in extortion and protection have no desire to see their rackets disrupted by peace. Any real movement toward a settlement of the Irish Troubles is bound to set off more violence, as the thugs try to make sure the Catholics and Protestants keep hating each other. Peace would destroy their profits.

Over dinner some of the studio crew are maintaining that Ireland should relinquish its constitutional dims to the northern counties in return for a real peace settlement. Givin says he would not go along with that. Seezer says, "They've already got it, Gavin."

Confronted by Gavin, most of the opinionated Irishmen at the table admit they've never even been to the North. Gavin tells how for one of the last Virgin Prunes shows they drove up to Belfast very early to get a sound check before opening for Siouxsie and the Banshees. En route they heard the announcement of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement be­tween Prime Ministers Fitzgerald and Thitcher. It was just a promise to talk about the situation, but it was not well-received among the British loyalists in Ulster. As the Prunes drove through Belfast they saw people in the streets burning Irish flags. The band didn't know what was going

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on. When they arrived at the gig the nervous club owner pulled them inside and said, "This is not a good night to put on a band of Republicans.

"We're not Republicans," Gavin said. "We're Irish!" The club owner said that was not a distinction worth mentioning to the angry gangs in the street. He told them not to try to go out to eat, he'd bring food in to them. That night the crowd tore the Prunes apart. They hurled bottles at them, and covered them in so much spit that Gavin had to finish the set with his coat on. After the set they had to crawl under their car to check for bombs.

Another time, Bono and Gavin were driving in the northern part of the Irish Republic, on their way to visit Guggi in jail (don't ask) and getting carried away with free-associating into a Walkman their plan to write a play called Melthead, about people who get in your ear and don't let go until your brain is running out of your skull. They were having such a good time drinking whiskey and being creative that they didn't notice they had accidentally driven across the border into Northern Ireland until a British soldier with a flowerpot on his head for camou­flage leaped out of the tall grass screaming and waving a rifle at the car.

"Get out of the car!" he shouted, holding the rifle barrel in their faces. "Get out of the car!"

"Don't get out of the car!" Bono insisted under his breath.

"GET OUT OF THE CAR NOW!"

"Don't get out of the car!"

Slowly every flower in the meadow rose up to reveal itself attached to a British helmet. A squad of soldiers, rifles ready, moved out of the grass and surrounded the tipsy musicians. Gavin was ready to get out, Bono put his hand out to hold him in. The soldiers, fierce and shouting, fingers on triggers, moved in closer and closer and said . . .

"Good Lord, It's Bo-no!"

War was averted! The happy soldiers in their flower hats danced around the car like a scene out of Fantasia and asked for autographs.

Gavin recalls how as a child his father told him that Martin Luther was a Catholic who fell off his horse, hit his head, and came up with Lutheranism. Henry VIII was a syphilitic old reprobate who invented the Anglican Church so he could marry everyone he saw. There is a lull in the conversation and then one of the Irishmen around the table says,

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"Well, your da was right." The others mumble agreement. Then they get up and head upstairs to go back to work.

Bono and Gavin take advantage of the sudden privacy to grab some pens and paper and finish the lyrics to the film's title song. Part of the track is a litany, like "Numb," listing flash points of Anglo-Irish culture. They need words for the rest. Bono stops writing and reads aloud "In the name of United and the BBC/ In the name of Georgie Best and LSD/ In the name of the Father and his wife the spirit," which I mishear as, "In the name of the father and his wife, despair." I tell him that's great and he corrects me. Bono likes to emphasize the idea of the Holy Spirit as feminine. He claims the Hebrew word for Cod meant "breasted one."

"The Holy Spirit is like a woman," Bono says seriously. "Undependable." He cracks into a smile. "Joke! Joke!" The rhythm on this track weaves back and forth between a Lambeg (Unionist military) drum and Irish bodhrans, a gut-level representation of the theme of the movie.

Gavin and Bono sit facing each other across the table, scratching away at their lyrics like two students taking a test. Bono eventually looks up and reads out, "There's peace in the sound of the silence spilling over." He asks for a better word for silence and lands on either white or black— something to represent blankness. Bono tries it with white, tries it with black, then tries, "There's peace in the sound of the white and the black spilling over." He thinks that's better. "I just got a shock," he says, "at the idea of death calling me." He looks for approval to Gavin who nods, perhaps considering that this close to deadline Death looks a lot like Jim Sheridan. The line is accepted.

Gavin asks, "Keep the doorway imagery in the second verse?"

Bono says, "Yes."

Bono starts remembering some of what he said in his Australian TV interview this afternoon and wonders if the tabloid press will take it out of context to hang him with. "I said the British left a cancer in North­ern Ireland," Bono says. "The loyalists will hear that and say, 'Oh, a cancer, are we?' The interviewer said, 'Fachtna O'Ceallaigh called you the lard-assed godfather of Irish rock.' I said, 'This is not about what he said. It's about that he's a supporter of the provisional IRA and I'm not!' "

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