As U2 end the year with their album , 'How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb', at No 1 in 30 countries, Bono and Larry Mullen tell Brian Boyd about how they still feel insecure, what they think of their contemporaries, and why they are endorsing iPods.
'We're not virtuosos, we struggle to get it right, We've nothing to fall back on, we don't have the same musical roots as other bands, we're relying on each other, we're incapable of finding our stride, it is tough, there is no moment of comfort . . ."
Bono and Larry Mullen are sitting in their Hanover Quay studio reacting to the news that their new album has just hit the toppermost of the poppermost in more than 30 countries worldwide within mere hours of release. That's a strange reaction. "We're a very strange group of people," they conclude.
A conversation that began with a look at some of the other musical highlights over the past 12 months ended with that above bout of self-flagellation, via Van Gogh, Morrissey, Buddy Holly, The Clash, Croke Park, ClearChannel and trout farms.
Question: The Streets - genius or geezer?
Bono: A very unique voice there, very unique. He reminds me of that beautiful playwright, Dennis Potter; he would be dream subject matter for Potter. Bit of Blur in there too. It's all based around a parable? Well, I've been around the scriptures and that's a new one on me.
Larry: I didn't like the first single off this album, Fit But You Know It, but the second one, Dry Your Eyes, I heard it on the radio and I had to turn it up - it really is something.
Q: The Libertines - snorting their talent up their nose?
Bono: This soap opera of people setting fire to themselves - my objection is we don't get to hear the second, third, fourth album, and my other objection is if it's one of my friends. But fretting over people torturing themselves - I'm over it. There was that whole bleeding-ear thing - Van Gogh and the garret. There was that culture of painful periods of music, and almost these Maoist ideas of what music must be like for us to like it.
Q: Franz Ferdinand - Gang of Four tribute band?
Larry: No, they're a modern interpretation of a guitar rock band, they're not pastiche. But yeah, I do know what their influences are.
Bono: The Gang of Four are re-forming! But there is that 20-year leapfrog. Look at 1976 and punk - 20 years before that it was Buddy Holly who was an influence on how The Clash sounded. Pop has eaten itself - it's just that some people have been on strange diets.
Q: Morrissey - good or great?
Bono: I remember hearing How Soon Is Now for the first time. You can always tell a truly great song when you can't speak after you've heard it, you have to pull over your car for fear of crashing. Edge was an immediate Smiths fan, right from This Charming Man, and I got into him as a humorist. I remember us playing Manchester Poly, way back, and he was around. He's certainly a lot more interesting than the indie stable he came from. I loathed that scene. But Morrissey - he's like Oscar Wilde in a Ford Escort.
That indie scene he came from - [ it was] a bunch of lies sold to people and it made our life a lot less interesting and a lot more lonely, even just in terms of who we were sharing hotels with. All those bands that were broken up by that "cultural revolution" - they're not there any more. It was a "cultural revolution" disguised by words such as "street cred". This is the lexicon of what we lived through during the 1980s, the excuses used for not having a good song. It was mesmerising, really mesmerising. We were smart enough to go to America and bypass that. We took a few blows for that; a few connected. That scene was bananas, it really was. It broke up The Smiths, broke up The Clash, stopped a band called Echo and the Bunnymen. And then it moved to Seattle - Kurt Cobain - another five minutes and he would have been out of that scene.
Q: It's Morrissey's proud claim that The Smiths are more Irish than U2 (seven out of the eight Smiths' parents are Irish - more than U2).
Bono: The Beatles are more Irish than U2!
Larry: But you see we thought of this back in the 1970s when we formed. We were always a forward-looking band and we were thinking about this new pluralistic Ireland!
Bono: But is there a Presbyterian in The Smiths? We have the Edge, who is Methodist blood, Presbyterian heart.
Q: REM - where did it all go wrong?
Bono: I think Leaving New York is one of the best songs I've ever heard. Maybe there's too many songs on the one album. This is what vinyl did, it forced you into exactly the right length for a listening experience. But CDs . . . 15 tracks shouldn't be allowed. People should be spanked for that. You've no time to listen to it, you lose the beginning, middle and end of an album. It's why people download.
Q: Speaking of which: U2 in the Apple iPod ad?
Bono: We always say that we are a gang of four but a corporation of five.
Larry: It was a very clear idea. They make products that we like, also they have single-handedly saved the music industry, they have developed the technology to download the music and for it to be paid for. Record companies couldn't do that - they were faffing around suing people. We are big fans of Apple, we're happy to stand up and say that, "yes, these guys design the best stuff". When it came to the single, Vertigo, they were going "can we use that song" and we were thinking, we want to get that riff out there. They wanted to make an ad and we told them we would be in it.
Bono: No money changed hands.
Larry: I'm very precious and conservative about the use of U2's music anywhere because I have concerns about the perception of the band. We're not endorsing a product we're embarrassed about - we use it [ the iPod], we like it, it's helping us and other musicians to get paid for their wares. Ninety per cent of people will pay for downloads. Apple and Steve Jobs are saving music for the future. It won't be Universal, EMI or Sony running record companies in 10 years' time - it will be Apple and telephone companies. We don't do advertisements, we did do the Apple campaign.
Bono: We did think about doing a car ad at one stage. We were offered $23 million for one song. Here's a moral hazard for you: we, and I particularly, know what $23 million can buy if you're not going to keep it.
Larry: Yeah, a yacht!
Bono: You can build a lot for $23 million in the countries I've been in. But you either tell people you're giving it away - then, by our definition, it is no longer charity, in the sense that the right hand shouldn't know what the left hand is doing. Finally, the reason we didn't do it was because it was for Where The Streets Have No Name. If a U2 show is going askew, as it can, the one song you can rely on to get that room back is Where The Streets Have No Name, and we didn't want some 16-year-old kids turning to each other and saying "oh great, they're playing the car ad". Now, had it been a different song out of the U2 canon . . . It's not zealotry [ that stops us] - in the end we didn't want to embarrass our fans, we didn't want to change the mood in which that song is perceived.
It's not the "in bed with a corporation" usual thing that stops us. We are in bed with many corporations: MTV are a Viacom corporation; ClearChannel - they play us on the radio; Universal, our label, is a Vivendi corporation. It's not the cash, it's just "don't embarrass us". In my other life [ as a lobbyist] I will be looking for $223 million and I'd prefer to spend my time doing that.
Q: Band Aid 20?
Larry: When I heard it the first time, it sounded strange. Then I heard it again on the radio and it sounded fine. I'm always going to be passionate about the original because that was our time. But I like it. It's a great idea to have Chris Martin there and Thom Yorke on the piano.
Bono: I prefer it to the original. I always thought the original sounded a bit cheesy.
Q: The next U2 album will be a covers album. Discuss.
Larry: We find it hard enough to play our own songs.
Q: You can only tour one U2 album. Which one?
Bono: Our most complete album in terms of beginning, middle and end is Achtung Baby.
Larry: I'd like to have another go at the Pop album, finish the songs and play them live. We were caught in a situation there where we had to write and record it in a year because a tour had been put in place. The album you hear still has incomplete ideas. It's not embarrassing, it's just frustrating. I still believe in those songs.
Q: Croke Park show - on or off?
Larry: The tour begins in Miami on March 1st. We'd like to have Snow Patrol and Kings Of Leon doing some shows with us. We're working on Croke Park. There are a few difficulties, some issues to be resolved. But we're ready, willing and able to play it.
Q: There's four trout farms waiting for you out there . . .
Bono: We're fishing for more interesting trout.
It's all about the incline and the decline, and I think all the work we've done after The Joshua Tree has been better than before The Joshua Tree.
Larry: It's like they say: two bad albums and you're out. It's still about getting it right and that excitement. Trying to take that away from us will be very hard. It's not about commercial sales, it's not about being the biggest band in the world - that's meaningless. It's about making music that competes at the top end.
There's still that sense of discontent - and that's the very thing that still drives us. We still don't feel that we've all the ducks in a row . . .
