Music

U2 Drops Bomb

After 25 years of making records the hard way, how do they keep it together? "We had no interest in being the biggest if we weren't the best," says the Edge

ByDavid Fricke

David Fricke

View all posts by David Fricke

December 30, 2004

Bono spins around on his heels to take in the dazzling night above and behind him: the illuminated cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, lacing the sky like golden thread; the lighted offices of the Manhattan skyscrapers across the East River, staring back at him like jeweled eyes. “Look at this!” the singer yells. “It’s wild! What a sight!”

He swings back to face theU2 fans packed on the riverside grass of Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park for a free concert, the climax of a November 22nd video shoot in which the Irish quartet plays all day, all over Manhattan, on a flatbed truck. “When you’ve been doing this for years,” Bono tells the crowd, “you remind yourself why you wanted to be in a band in the first place — to come to the U.S., over the bridge into Manhattan for the first time. An amazing, powerful time.”

Then he introduces “City of Blinding Lights,” from U2’s magnificent new album,How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb: “The chorus is set in New York,” he says, “looking from Brooklyn.” Guitarist the Edge fires up a steely barrage; bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. lock into a jubilant gallop. At the mike, in black leather and dark glasses, Bono again becomes the excited, 20-year-old Dubliner, the former Paul Hewson, who first saw these lights in December 1980, on the way to U2’s U.S. debut at the old Ritz on East Eleventh Street: “Neon heart, day-glo eyes/A city lit like fireflies/They’re advertising in the skies/For people like us.”

Then as the Edge builds a wall of chime under him, Bono achieves liftoff. “I’m getting ready,” he sings with delight, “to leave the ground.”

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 18th 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 forAtomic Bomb: the free gig, the flatbed shoot, a three-song appearance onSaturday Night Live. The payoff will be huge. The album debuts at Number One inBillboard 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.

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Bono, Clayton, Mullen and the Edge (real name David Evans) took two years to recordHow 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 ofAtomic 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.”

“We’ve closed the circle,” he says, beaming, “back to our first album” — 1980’s echo-drenched thriller,Boy. “Maybe we should have called this oneMan.”

Three of the four members of U2 are on the stage at Studio 8H in New York’s Rockefeller Center, sound-checking forSaturday Night Live. Bono is not one of them. He is late, which is not unusual.

It is not a problem, either. The Edge, Clayton and Mullen are used to Bono’s long, frequent absences. They spent much of this and last year working onAtomic Bomb as a trio while he was busy with his other job: touring world capitals, debating and charming dignitaries into joining the fight against poverty and AIDS in Africa. Bono first went to Africa in the mid-Eighties as a volunteer aid worker. In 2002, he co-founded the nonprofit activist group DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa) with Live Aid creator Bob Geldof and billionaire philanthropists including George Soros and Bill Gates. Bono is nearly as well-known now for his tireless lobbying as for his singing. “He seems permanently on view,” says U2’s longtime manager Paul McGuinness. “Somebody once said to me, ‘In America, you can only be famous for one thing at a time. That’s clearly not true in Bono’s case.’ “