U2: Band of the Year 2001

Bono leads the way through a maze that runs from Dublin's Clarence hotel — owned by U2 — to behind the bar of the Kitchen, the nightclub beneath it. "I love the fact that at the bottom of this posh hotel is this sewer of a nightclub," he says.

It is early March 2000. U2 have already been recording a new album for more than a year, and they are far from finished. Tonight Bono's going out, but his head is still full of manifestoes and overexcited abstractions: "I feel like it's always raining in our songs, that bittersweetness. I try to resist it, actually...What I like about pop music is its pure joy, and in the end it's harder to make ecstatic, electrifying music. It's the hardest thing in the world. We surrender too easily to the blues. We, if we're not careful, are bleeding all over the world. What's striking about our Eighties music is, it's ecstatic a lot of the time — as gauche as we sometimes came across then." He tries to explain how he'd like their new record to be. "Joy!" he hollers. "Happiness means nothing — happiness means getting rid of a headache. Joy is another thing altogether. It's the hardest thing to conjure. You can't conjure it — it's more like a spring. But when it's in music, that's the top of the pyramid." He waves a drink in his hand, explaining how in the Nineties, U2 wandered away from joy — "We got darker and darker, but the lights were all the brighter at our concerts" — in an effort to communicate other things. "Joy in our group comes out of vowels, words with very few consonants, words that form when you're singing," he says. "So as a writer it can be frustrating." And you're not going to be scared of short words with vowels on this record? "No," he raves. "I'm trying to be embarrassable. I think that may be our job. I want to say these things that people are thinking and not saying. Things have got very constricted. I think it's the job of the singer: to fess up to the stuff. I want to make a record that does that, that's nonsense and makes sense, because that's the way we're all living. Red Bull, beats, talking about girls, the Death and Resurrection Show — that's how we're living now. I want that feeling on the record.

I think there are more colors available to us than before. Our music in the early Eighties, it might have been ecstatic, but it wasn't really sexy, was it? Now we're sexy and ecstatic." It has, he says, to do with the rhythm section, with the bass. "Now, literally, we're bringing up the rear."

Tonight there will be more drinks, and more talk of joy, but it is half a year before U2 finish their record. On its release, All That You Can't Leave Behind will be an instant success, the most welcoming record U2 have made in years, and many of its listeners may well imagine it is the joy-infused record Bono had intended. As long as they don't listen too carefully.

December 5th, 2000. U2 are in New York, toward the end of seven weeks promoting their record around the world. On their travels they have been doing things they have resisted for most of their career — playing on TV shows, for instance — and tomorrow night they will play a club show at Irving Plaza. U2 never fell for the romance of small clubs — they always wanted the stage and the audience to be bigger — and since they graduated from them in the early Eighties they have never been back.

Tonight they must rehearse. Though they know they will play the four songs from the new record that they have rehearsed for TV appearances, they must decide what else. Bono addresses his fellow band members. "I have an idea," he says. "Two ideas, which I'd like to think about. A little controversial — two cover versions. One is the Who, 'Won't Get Fooled Again,' and the other..." He begins to sing: "'I remember lying, awake at night, and thinking just of you; but things don't last forever, and somehow, baby, they never really do.'"

It's a Ramones song, "I Remember You." Bono says that U2 played it at their first rehearsal, in 1978.

"Maybe no drums," Bono suggests.

"That sounds great," drummer Larry Mullen says, dryly. "I'll put the kettle on."