From Weekend 1
quality control." "They make you think everything is great," Bono chimes in. "I don't think it's a big part of our music to be drunk, or out of it. We're out there enough as it is. Drugs only offer junk food transcendence. I wouldn't knock someone who uses them responsibly but I don't like to see people be a slave to anything. I'm in favour of the legalisation of all drugs except those which are chronically addictive, like heroin."
"It all boils down to whether you can use drugs responsibly," says the Edge. "I don't know. `Don't touch them' is the only way to avoid risk, but a government policy based on lies and shock tactics isn't working. Your generation was told that if you smoked a joint you would spontaneously combust. Everyone, including Clinton, found out that was not true. You must tell the truth, to be even allowed into the consciousness of a generation that is making up its own mind."
U2's main path to transcendence, of course, has always been religion, and much of Pop roars with anger at the apparent emptiness of Salman Rusdie's "god-shaped hole". They still describe themselves as "believers" but what, exactly, does this mean?
"It has nothing whatsoever to do with religious practice or sacraments," says the Edge. "Those things might, in some bizarre way, have a resonance, but to bridge, the gap it has to be one on one. Does he pray then? "Yep... but if faith could be explained, it wouldn't be faith."
"I do believe," says Bono, "that there is a love and logic behind the universe.
Really? After Auschwitz? After Sarajevo?
"That anger you pick up on the record is there, but it might not be my personal point of view. I never saw this as God's world, I see it as a world wrestled away from God. People can't shock me with their capacity for evil - or for goodness."
Ask him again about Sarajevo, however, and his lower lip quivers with fury. Mightn't it have been more practical to send the Bosnians guns instead of satellite messages? Wasn't it American war planes which actually stopped the slaughter? He seems to take a minute to answer.
"It's hard to be a pacifist in a place like Sarajevo. Europe was made meaningless by what happened there. That the US jets, turned out to be the cavalry in the end was the final insults." He speaks passionately about visiting the city's burned-out national library with President Izetbegovic, about the "targeting of memory"
of the Bosnian people, about the "surreal shower of words" which rained on the city after that attack.
He catches himself on, pulls himself back. "People say I should get back in my box because I'm Just a rock star. What do I know about these things? But in every pub in this city at this moment, there is somebody shooting their mouth off on every subject under the sun. Why shouldn't they? Why shouldn't I?"