The Rolling Stone Interview: Bono

Then a note appears from this kid twenty-nine years ago last Saturday. Like really a kid -- he's fourteen, and I'm sixteen. He wants to start a band. He plays the drums. So my friend Reggie Manuel says, "You have to go." He puts me on the back of his motorcycle, and he takes me out to this suburban house, where Larry Mullen lives. Larry is in this tiny kitchen, and he's got his drum kit set up. And there's a few other boys. There's Dave Evans -- a kinda brainy-looking kid -- who's fifteen. And his brother Dick -- even brainier-looking -- who's built his own guitar. He's a rocket scientist -- a card-carrying genius.

Larry starts playing the kit -- it's an amazing sound, just hit the cymbal. Edge hit a guitar chord which I'd never heard on electric guitar. I mean, it is the open road. Kids started coming from all around the place -- all girls. They know that Larry lives there. They're already screaming; they're already climbing up the door. He was completely used to this, we discover, and he's taking the hose to them already. Literally, the garden hose. And so that starts. Within a month I start going out with Ali. I mean, I had met her before, but I ask her out.

That was a good month.

Yes, a very good month. What's interesting is, in the months leading up to this, I was probably at the lowest ebb in my life. I was feeling just teenage angst. I didn't know if I wanted to continue living -- that kind of despair. I was praying to a God I didn't know was listening.

Were you influenced by punk rock then?

No, this has nothing to do with punk. This is September of '76. Punk has just started in London that summer. Adam [Clayton] goes to London the next summer. London was burning. And he comes back with the Stranglers, the Jam, the Clash. Oddly enough, though, in our very first rehearsals, we were talking about what music we should play. Everyone got to make suggestions. I wanted to play the Rolling Stones, from the High Tide and Green Grass era, and the Beach Boys. I was getting tired of the hard-rock thing.

Hard-rock being . . .

Big hair and extended guitar solos. I was saying, "Let's get back to this rock & roll thing." Then people said, "Oh, have you heard the Clash?" And then seeing the Jam on Top of the Pops in '76, just going, "They're our age! This is possible." Then the Radiators From Space -- our local punk band -- had a song called . . . "Telecaster" or something: "Gonna push my Telecaster through the television screen/'Cause I don't like what's going down." And it's a twelve-bar thing -- so you can play it.

How far into the band are you now?

It's just occasional rehearsing. We're playing the Eagles. We're playing the Moody Blues. But it turns out we're really crap at it. We actually aren't able to play other people's songs. The one Stones song we tried to play was "Jumpin' Jack Flash." It was really bad. So we started writing our own -- it was easier.

Were the Ramones the big punk influence on you? Or the Clash?

More Ramones than the Clash -- though we saw the Clash first, in '77, in Dublin, and it was extraordinary. There was an air of violence, the sense that somebody could die. But their music didn't connect with us the same way that the Ramones did.

What connected about the Ramones?

I didn't have the gravel or the gravitas of Joe Strummer. Joey Ramone sang like Dusty Springfield . . . It was a melodic voice like mine.

Was David Bowie a big influence?

Gigantic, the English Elvis. Bowie was much more responsible for the aesthetic of punk rock than he's been given credit for, like, in fact, most interesting things in the Seventies and Eighties. I put his pictures up in my bedroom. We played "Suffragette City" in that first wedding-band phase.

We started to listen to Patti Smith; Edge starts listening to Tom Verlaine. And, suddenly, those punk chords are just not the only alternative. Now we've got a different kinda language and we started finding different colors, other than the primary ones.

III. A SPIRITUAL LIFE

What role did religion play in your childhood?

I knew that we were different on our street because my mother was Protestant. And that she'd married a Catholic. At a time of strong sectarian feeling in the country, I knew that was special. We didn't go to the neighborhood schools -- we got on a bus. I picked up the courage they had to have had to follow through on their love.

Did you feel religious when you went to church?

Even then I prayed more outside of the church than inside. It gets back to the songs I was listening to; to me, they were prayers. "How many roads must a man walk down?" That wasn't a rhetorical question to me. It was addressed to God. It's a question I wanted to know the answer to, and I'm wondering, who do I ask that to? I'm not gonna ask a schoolteacher. When John Lennon sings, "Oh, my love/For the first time in my life/My eyes are wide open" -- these songs have an intimacy for me that's not just between people, I realize now, not just sexual intimacy. A spiritual intimacy.

Who is God to you at that point in your life?

I don't know. I would rarely be asking these questions inside the church. I see lovely nice people hanging out in a church. Occasionally, when I'm singing a hymn like . . . oh, if I can think of a good one . . . oh, "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross" or "Be Thou My Vision," something would stir inside of me. But, basically, religion left me cold.

Your early songs are about being confused, about trying to find spirituality at an age when most anybody else your age would be writing about girls and trouble.

Yeah. We sorta did it the other way around.

You skipped "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and you went right . . .

. . . Into the mystic. Van Morrison would be the inverse, in terms of the journey. It's this turbulent period at fifteen, sixteen, and the electrical storms that come at that age.

There was also my friend Guggi. His parents were not just Protestant, they were some obscure cult of Protestant. In America, it would be Pentecostal. His father was like a creature from the Old Testament. He spoke constantly of the Scriptures and had the sense that the end was nigh -- and to prepare for it.

You were living with his family?

Yes. I'd go to church with them too. Though myself and Guggi are laughing at the absurdity of some of this, the rhetoric is getting through to us. We don't realize it, but we're being immersed in the Holy Scriptures. That's what we took away from this: this rich language, these ancient tracts of wisdom.

So is that why you were writing such serious songs when you're nineteen?

Here's the strange bit: Most of the people that you grew up with in black music had a similar baptism of the spirit, right? The difference is that most of these performers felt they could not express their sexuality before God. They had to turn away. So rock & roll became backsliders' music. They were running away from God. But I never believed that. I never saw it as being a choice, an either/or thing.

You never saw rock & roll -- the so-called devil's music -- as incompatible with religion?

Look at the people who have formed my imagination. Bob Dylan. Nineteen seventy-six -- he's going through similar stuff. You buy Patti Smith: Horses -- "Jesus died for somebody's sins/But not mine . . ." And she turns Van Morrison's "Gloria" into liturgy. She's wrestling with these demons -- Catholicism in her case. Right the way through to Wave, where she's talking to the pope.