The Brag

U2
In Which A Long-time BRAG Contributor Finally Conquers Her Everest
By Elmo Keep

Who the fuck is Bono, anyway? Is Bono the Pope? Barack Obama? Is Bono J.D. Salinger, or someone else equally famous and dead? Is Bono a hologram and not a real person, but rather a globally projected group hallucination? Is Bono actually a doomsday device, and not a man? I ask this because trying to interview Bono is pretty much fucking impossible, let me tell you. I’ve spent the last five years of my life trying to secure an interview with him, and no mortal can get close. It’s become something so intangible to me now that I struggle to even explain it anymore. Every writer has their personal Jesus, that one interview they can tick off their list and then die happy. And for me, that person is Bono.

Actually, this goes back much longer than five years. I’ve loved U2 with a ferocity that would frighten most people, for seventeen years. That makes it the longest-standing relationship of my life. And believe me, loving the shit out of a band is a relationship. I have crossed the world to see U2 play. I have suffered with them through the last decade of their career, during which they released albums so terrible that I wept. In the pre-internet dark ages I lined up for tickets overnight – and I bought their records at the living, breathing record store at midnight. I’ve spent money on U2 that would probably by now have made for a nice deposit on a very, very small house… In Adelaide. I have read every word in books and magazines and newspapers ever written about them. I own without exception everything they have ever released (an archive I intend to donate to the National Library on the occasion of my death). U2 are why I write about music. My name is Elmo Keep, and I fucking love U2.

And all I want is just 20 minutes with Bono to talk with him about the meaning of life. And also maybe about motorcycles, if he would be into that. And then if there is time afterwards, perhaps we could have a little cuddle.

But I am not Jann Wenner. I am not Chuck Klosterman. I am not the staff music writer of a prestigious city daily. I am not the host of a prime time television talk show, I am not Oprah Winfrey. I am but a lowly freelancer and this, coupled with the fact that Bono is perhaps the most famous rockstar on the planet, makes the likelihood of me interviewing him roughly zero. But I am not deterred. Lifequests were not meant to be easy; if they were, Moses would have just walked on water rather than parting the Red Sea. So when it turned out that in order to interview Bono all I had to do was almost nothing after five years of pitching up against walls, it was, well, pretty much the awesomest fucking thing that has ever happened.

My buddy Lucy was assigned this weird World AIDS Day event, where Bono would be turning the Opera House red to raise AIDS awareness (because all that needs to be raised is awareness?), and she would be covering it for the ABC: “So you can come along as my intern.” And that was it. Accreditation sorted. Bono would be there, with the Premier, the Prime Minister, the rest of U2 and some other people, who (combined) required a security detail that looked like something out of Clear and Present Danger. Oh, and there would be a media scrum that we would have to fend off, in order to get in what would be, at most, one question for Bono… One question. For Bono. I’ve been thinking for many, many years what this one question for Bono would be. Just the one. Where so many others had failed to ask him something even vaguely interesting, I would not.

Those last 17 years of my life careened up behind me and hit me full-force in the back of the head when he was suddenly standing there, Bono, looking right at me…

-

The next time I saw Bono was not at such close quarters, despite my offering to buy him a drink at the conclusion of our little chat (I’m still good for that though, Bono.) A week later the band played two nights at ANZ Stadium. Of course, I went to both. The highlight was not the eye-popping staging, which could only be more impressive if it disassembled itself, bellowed ‘IT’S OVER’ and strolled out of the stadium at the end of the show. Neither was it when support act Jay-Z jumped in on a verse of ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ (that was a terrible, terrible idea). No. U2 have now come a point of such hugeness that their staging is alienating: their show is so big that they are prisoners to choreography. Are they really a band, or performers acting out a play? Do they really connect, or are they just going through the motions? From such a distance, it’s often hard to tell.

Or it was, right up until Bono recounted U2’s history in Australia: shooting the Lovetown documentary with Richard Lowenstein in 1989; broadcasting ZOO TV to the world in 1993; and copping to what exactly happened to Adam Clayton the night he was so wasted he missed a show with the band on that tour. And then, U2 took requests. They ran through a gorgeous version of ‘All I Want Is You’ followed by ‘Love Rescue Me’ – which Bono wrote for Bob Dylan on Rattle and Hum, and hasn’t played live in full in over 20 years. For these tunes there was no stage show to speak of, no seizure-inducing visuals on a 40 foot screen – just the band holding 50,000 people in hushed, rapt attention.

These are the things that U2 can do that makes breaking up with them after seventeen years impossible. They are still capable of heartbreaking intimacy, in spite of the epic scale.

-

“Your skull is wonky.”

That’s what I said to Bono, as I reached across him and straightened his tie-pin: a tiny silver skull which was facing the wrong way up. I did this in the way I would straighten my boyfriend’s tie. Everyone in the press pack had their cameras trained on us. They were laughing. And Bono laughed. “Oh, thankyou. They both are,” he said, pointing at his head. Then he kissed me on the cheek and disappeared into the night, off to continue on his own lifequest, trying to fix everything wrong with world, safe in the knowledge that he is sartorially symmetrical.