SATURDAY PROFILE: Bono is riding high, what with the cover of Time Magazine and another clutch of Grammies under his belt. Oh, and by the way, he also wants to save the world. Brian Boyd profiles a man with a mission. He's inordinately proud of the fact that he can talk for over an hour,without notes, on 'HIPC conditionality', the terms under which the mosthighly indebted countries of the world are forgiven their loans.
Bono wears those sunglasses all the time in case God recognises him and stops him for an autograph. It's a tough gig, this messiah business. When he's not watching the blood-red sky, listening to the howling wind and crawling on the face of love, he has to lay his healing hands on the African continent. It's the rock star's burden.
When he was born on a ley-line in Ballymun, the three wise men of Phil Lynott, Bob Geldof and Rory Gallagher visited his crib bearing gifts of a red guitar, three chords and the truth.
He began preaching the good word in the humble Baggot Inn hostelry before he spent 40 days in Windmill Studio, emerging with a copy of the Boy album. This week he adorns the cover of Time Magazine: the headline is "Can Bono Save The World?" Bono v The World. Why doesn't he pick on something his own size?
Bono's in Time to talk up the launch later this month of DATA (Debt, Aid, Trade for Africa), a non-profit debt-relief advocacy group of which he is founder and chief spokesman. DATA will harangue Western governments and the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund into delivering economic aid, lowering export tariffs and providing money to fight AIDS in African countries.
By wiping the public debt of $350 billion from their books, the Western world will allow the countries concerned to spend on health and education rather than repayments, argues DATA. In return the countries will be expected to provide greater democracy, accountability and transparency in government.
"Believe me, I know how absurd it is to have a rock star talk about the World Health Organisation or debt relief or HIV/AIDS in Africa," he says.
Absurd enough for the New York Post to write recently that he was "so liberal and so politically correct he makes you want to puke green" or for an opinion column in this newspaper to wonder why he couldn't be like other Irish pop singers - Bridie Gallagher and Larry Cunningham, say - and "know his place".
But then the man born Paul Hewson 41 years ago always had ideas above his station. Although he signed up to the punk rock movement as a teenager, he opted out on the clause that said you must have disdain for commercial success. Told by everyone in the music industry that his band couldn't go global without relocating to Britain or the US, he stayed put in Dublin.
And instead of doing what all other filthy rich rock stars do - buy a trout farm in the country and develop some interesting addictions - he has been busy bending the ear of US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, Secretary of State Colin Powell, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the Prime Ministers of France, Britain, Canada and the Presidents of Russia and Nigeria looking for an answer to his $350 billion debt-relief question.
Thankfully he has remained as bewilderingly gnomic as always (because after all this time, we'd sort of miss it). "U2 is about the impossible. Politics is about the art of the possible. Music's the thing that stopped me from falling asleep in the comfort of my freedom," he told the Time journalist, who was obviously labouring under the illusion that everything Bono says makes sense.
There has been no sudden conversion on the road to Madison Square Garden for Bono. At school in Mount Temple - a "progressive" multidenominational school on the north side of Dublin - and for the first few years of U2, Bono was an active member of the "Shalom" Christian prayer group.
Such was the pull of his Christian calling that even when U2 were beginning to break through, he seriously considered disbanding the group because the rock 'n' roll lifestyle was incompatible with his Christian beliefs. It's something that now raises an ironic smile among those who have been out socialising with him.
Love it or loathe it, U2's music has always been built around the core values of faith, hope and redemption. Songs like I Will Follow, Rejoice and Gloria reflected a lyricist asking bigger questions than Who Let The Dogs Out?
It wasn't until the 1984 Live Aid concert that Bono did the walk to go with the talk.
While other bands on the bill that day were busy checking their new goodwill chart position, Bono and his wife, Ali, spent six weeks working in an orphanage in Ethiopia where one of his jobs was the counting of dead bodies each morning.
A close friend of Bob Geldof, he and the Live Aid organiser do a neat good-cop-bad-cop routine when they're out haranguing world leaders about debt relief for Africa.
"Bono's great. He goes into the meetings with these world powers and he's really polite and he makes his case very intelligently," says Geldof. "Then I get up and start f---in' screaming at them. It usually works".
What distinguishes Bono from other air-head rock stars whose analysis of geopolitical affairs amounts to "Poverty is a really bad vibe" is his willingness to hit the books and learn. He's inordinately proud of the fact that he can talk for over an hour, without notes, on "HIPC conditionality", the terms under which the most highly indebted countries of the world are forgiven their loans.
When he first met Larry Summers, the US Secretary of the Treasury (whose signature is on all dollar bills) to argue his case about debt relief, Summers spent the first 15 minutes drumming his fingers on the table and staring at the ceiling.
But, according to Bono, after an hour of having facts and figures chucked at him, Summers went to his chief-of-staff saying: "He knows what he's talking about. We've got to help this man."
Bono is also showing signs of developing the rhetorical skills crucial to the lobbyist's cause. He has banned the use of the word "compassion" and has recast his troika of demands, dropping the debt, making trade rules more advantageous for poor countries and getting more funding for AIDS drugs and healthcare, as a type of Marshall Plan.
Cognisant of the changed political climate, he now argues that debt relief is also a pressing financial and security issue for the US. "There are potentially another 10 Afghanistans in Africa, and it is cheaper by a factor of 100 to prevent the fires from happening than to put them out," he says.
It helps Bono's case that a significant number of world leaders and major economic organisation chiefs are of the baby-boomer generation and as such may have been tainted by rock 'n' roll idealism at some stage of their adolescent development.
He knows he can use his rock fame as a skeleton key to enter offices of power, and he will have learnt from Bob Geldof's battles with bureaucracy and how Sting was cynically derided for using his rock-star status as a campaigner for the environment.
While supportive of his efforts, the other three members of U2 have expressed some concern about the amount of time he spends on DATA-related activities. The band are currently at an all-time high in terms of record sales, concert attendances and awards received. Bono, though, will continue to work U2 and DATA in tandem.
Although he has begun slowly to earn the respect of politicians, aid workers, activists and UN and development bank officials, to some he is still tilting at windmills and stoking the furnace of his own ego so that we may love him even more for his boundless philanthropy.
Whatever way you cut it, Bono should, if necessary, be criticised for being a dilettante and for having his facts, figures and arguments wrong and not simply because he's a rock star.
Can Bono savethe world or can the world be saved from Bono? Either way, it's too late to stop him now.