Now What?

What do you think we should do?"

On a cloudy afternoon in Dublin, U2 isn't acting much like the band with all the answers. Instead, the members of the group are acting more like four guys who are themselves trying to answer a few important questions, and the main question — which Bono poses within minutes of the time he sits down in a pub and orders a pint of Guinness — is what this band should do on the heels of Rattle and Hum.

If they don't have an answer, at least they finally have the free time to think about it. That's something that's been in short supply for the past two years, from the release of their 1987 breakthrough album, The Joshua Tree, through the subsequent international tour, to the recording and filming of the controversial two-record set and motion picture Rattle and Hum.

"The last few years," says Bono, with his customary intensity — but also with a distracted air that suggests he's groping to put a rather deep-seated confusion into words — "have been such a merry-go-round that when you get off and you're on dry land, it keeps spinning. And we haven't quite come to terms with being at home. I have to be strapped in at night, you know? There's this thing of wanting to move..."

He trails off, then looks around at his three band mates. "Wanderlust, I suppose," he says. "That's been with the group for a few years, in many ways, and I suppose it's what Rattle and Hum is about. Not just in terms of locations — towns and cities and places — but musical wanderlust. So now we're in detox.

"We would be lying, I think, if we said that everything is okay these days. Everything's not okay, you know? Even talking about U2, we really don't know how to talk about U2 anymore."