U2 Drops the Bomb

Later, in the encore, Bono, 44, shows what that feeling sounded like in the beginning by leading U2 into a thrilling version of their first single, a song he wrote in 1978, on his eighteenth birthday: "Out of Control."

The next morning, Bono is in his Manhattan apartment, sipping a Diet Coke to nurse a throat ravaged by the long-weekend campaign for Atomic Bomb: the free gig, the flatbed shoot, a three-song appearance on Saturday Night Live. The payoff will be huge. The album debuts at Number One in Billboard with first-week sales of more than 840,000 copies, the third-best figure of 2004 (after Usher and Norah Jones) and the year's best for a rock band.

Bono, Clayton, Mullen and the Edge (real name David Evans) took two years to record How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, with a small army of producers and mixers, including Chris Thomas, Steve Lillywhite and new Irish wunderkind Jacknife Lee. Now U2 are in high rock-combat gear: chewing up screens with a TV ad for the Apple iPod that doubles as a knockout video for the single "Vertigo"; compiling a "digital boxed set" (Bono's phrase) of U2's catalog for iTunes, to go with a personalized U2 iPod; revving up for a world tour to start in the U.S. in March. But today, in his high-rise living room, Bono is looking back at the start of his life with U2, recalling the incident that inspired his flood of memories in "City of Blinding Lights."

Bono was attending the opening of a museum exhibition in Holland by U2's longtime photographer Anton Corbijn, "and he had a room full of Bonos, if you can think of anything worse," the singer says, chuckling with embarrassment. "But to see these giant pictures, through the years — I got stuck in front of one, it must have been 1981 or '82, of me taking a ride in a helicopter. The eyes were so open. The whole face was so open.

"A journalist sidled up to me and said" — Bono affects a thick, old-world accent — "'Vat vould Bono now say to dis Bono?' I went, 'Well, I would tell him, he's right — and stop second-guessing himself.'

"The band was what I believed in then," Bono contends. "My faith in myself was a different matter. That innocence — you don't just want to shed it. You want to beat it off you, scratch it off. You think that knowledge of the world will some how give you an easier route through it.

"It doesn't," he says emphatically. "In a lot of ways, that's the essence of this album — the idea that you can go back to where you started, that you can start again." To press his point, Bono quotes the last verse of Atomic Bomb's Who-ish blitzkrieg "All Because of You," chanting the words like a prayer: "I'm alive/I'm being born/I just arrived, I'm at the door/Of the place that I started out from/And I want back inside."