Gavin flinches. He tells Bono to forget the cancer bit; there's the quote that will cause him trouble. Fachtna O'Ceallaigh, an outspoken

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Irish Republican, used to work for U2, used to manage Sinead O'Connor, and has been one of U2's most quoted critics.

Which brings up another subject: they've got Sinead coming in to sing and by singing to formalize a detente that has been blooming between the two opposing kingdoms of Irish rock since Sinead split with Fachtna. While sticking an occasional forkful of pie into their mouths, Bono and Gavin switch to the lyrics of the next song, "You Made Me the Thief of Your Heart." Neither of them had been able to sing the song the way they heard it in their heads, so in a fit of pub-talk they decided they should ask Sinead to come in and do it. Unlike most pub-talk, they followed through. She is arriving tomorrow. The sound­track has to be delivered within two days. They better get the song written.

They scribble for a minute more, passing one sheet of paper between them, then hand it to me and watch my reaction while I read it. I tell them I have trouble with one line: "I was a child to your dark star."

They nod. "That's the line that was buggin' us," Gavin says.

I ask if they might say the child of "your darkest part." They tell me no, that "part" is a bad word to sing. Bono says, "I was a child to you so far."

He explains that he liked the Dark Star because it's a reference to Lucifer, the rebellious child, and this is a song for a child who has murdered its father. I'm sure Bono and Gavin are conscious that the cadence of their lines ("You were a hard man/ No harder in this world") echoes Yeats's Irish patriot poem "Come Gather Round Me, Parnellites" ("For Parnell was a proud man/ No prouder trod the ground"). They're out to hit every hot spot in the Anglo-Irish psyche.

Bono and Gavin are grabbed by the inspiration that this soundtrack needs a fiddle playing the melodies of the Irish, U.K., and U.S. national anthems. They haul me upstairs and have me show Seezer the "Star-Spangled Banner," which none of them know. Pretty soon nine sweaty men are crammed into the tiny control booth, along with enough keyboards, synths, and pieces of outboard gear to cut a Rick Wakeman album. One of the engineers opens a window to let some air in, and Bono ends up standing in that window with his microphone, singing "In the Name of the Father." He's been rehearsing with U2 all day every day this week and he's having trouble catching his breath. To give

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Himself a chance he adds little passing phrases that leave him time to breathe between longer lines.

A little after II p.m. I say good night and head downstairs to the empty street. It's cold. Winter has come to Dublin quick and early this year though it's not yet Halloween. The deserted street is filled with the sound of Bono's voice, singing from the open window on the third floor. A couple of bleary-eyed boys stumble by on their way home from the pub and pay no attention at all. I'm sure they think it's just another open window with a U2 record coming out of it, one of the thousand in this city. If they looked up they'd see Bono in the flesh, giving them a private concert. But they never look up.

Another Troy for Her to Burn

The emperor's new clothes/ fachtna's version/ sex and politics/ sinead o'connor scares the studio crew/ U2 as the justice league/ a moonlit journey over the halfpenny bridge

Fachtna o'ceallaigh went to work for U2 in 1986. The band wanted someone to run the day-to-day operations of Mother Records, their altruistic label for young Irish bands. The idea of Mother was that it would release the first single by new bands, give them a leg up, and then set them free to sign deals with whoever they wanted with no strings attached. Island had agreed to distribute Mother and U2 wanted someone representing Mother stationed at the Island offices in London. Ossie Kilkenny, U2's accountant and McGuinness's sometime partner in extra-U2 businesses, suggested his friend Fachtna, one-time manager of the Boomtown Rats and lately unemployed. Fachtna barely knew U2 and he did not like their music, but he was glad for the job and impressed by the noble ideals of the little label.

Not long after settling into his new office at Island, Fachtna got another call from Ossie, asking him to look up a young Irish girl who had just arrived in London to record for Ensign Records, was having a hard time, and had few friends in England. Her name was Sinead O'Connor and her claim to fame was having sung a song she cowrote with Edge on the soundtrack to a movie called Captive, which Edge had scored. Fachtna, twenty years older than Sinead, called to say hello. He quickly got involved in trying to mediate her disputes with Ensign (a label that, like most, had passed on U2 in the olden days). Pretty soon Fachtna was managing Sinead, helping her win the right to record her first album, The Lion & the Cobra, the way she wanted. Eventually Fachtna and Sinead became lovers too.

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