That Irish Times columnist remarked: ‘It’s not as if most of Bono’s friends are either dead or in jail. Last time I looked, they were making soundtracks and bowls.’1 This rather strangely and cleverly inverted put-down perhaps says more than it intends to about how the Irish Times sees the essence of Northsidedness – ‘dead or in jail’, like something out of a rapper’s boast about his unlikely rise from the streets. But it also helps us to get a handle on how misleading, or at least inadequate, Bono was being when he summarised U2 as ‘four Irish boys from the northside of Dublin’, a description that in the circumstances certainly signified (to listeners and viewers of whatever sensitivity) origins distant and isolated from centres and moments of cultural power like the one he was enjoying on Washington’s Mall, whether or not it signified full-blown poverty and deprivation.
The reality is that Bono grew up in a middle-class (that term is more upmarket in Ireland and Britain than in the US) and slightly countercultural enclave of the poor and working-class north Dublin area called ‘Ballymun’ (another signifying Appellation Controlée that he is occasionally abused for employing). ‘Violence … is the thing I remember most from my teenage years’, he has said, but without giving any more detail than a suggestion that, when he and his pals strayed into working-class territory, it was, you know, kind of scary.2 Ballymun’s notorious, now-demolished tower blocks may have been evoked in Bono’s ‘Running to Stand Still’, but he grew up a safe distance away on Cedarwood Road, full of comfy semi-detached homes with nice gardens, lawns and driveways.
In the early 1990s Bono tried to convince an American journalist, Bill Flanagan, that as a child he used to hustle tourists in (Protestant) St Patrick’s Cathedral:
‘I would charge them for tours of the cathedral’, [Bono] says. ‘I made good money.’
‘Oh’, I say, ‘you were an urchin.’
‘I was!’ Bono says brightly, at which [Bono’s wife] Ali bursts out laughing. She knows her husband never urched.3
Bono was no child of the streets; nor were the city and country he inhabited the complete backwaters that they look like in so much retrospection. Born in 1960, Bono was raised in a Republic of Ireland that was economically and culturally emerging from the isolation of the first four decades after independence. Emigration had slowed very dramatically, and with a new economic strategy of seeking foreign investment, the country was even attracting families from Britain like those of Bono’s future bandmates: Edge’s dad was an engineer, Clayton’s a pilot – higher earners than Bono’s father, with his white-collar job in the postal service. The sometimes-maddening tendency of the Irish economy to be out of sync with its neighbours was occasionally a good thing: for example, while Britain went slouching toward the Winter of Discontent in the late 1970s, Ireland, including the boys of U2, enjoyed a mini-boom.
New political winds were blowing through the era too: a leading politician could credibly claim that ‘the Seventies will be socialist’; there was a vigorous women’s liberation movement that got a good airing in broadcast and printed media; and there was of course a civil rights movement and ‘armed struggle’ across the border in British-controlled Northern Ireland. By the time Bono was starting secondary school at the new, liberal, Protestant-run, multi-denominational, co-educational Mount Temple, one of Britain’s favourite blues guitarists was Cork-based Rory Gallagher, and within another year or two Thin Lizzy – with a black Dubliner, Phil Lynnott, as frontman – were blasting up the rock charts on both sides of the Atlantic. And that’s to say nothing of the centrality of Irish music and musicians in the ongoing international ‘revival’ of traditional and folk music. Ireland wasn’t rich, but it was a reasonably cool place to be from, and in, with nothing much cooler and more connected than to be a teenage rock ’n’ roller at Mount Temple, with its largely well-off student body. When 1977 came along, some of the punk bands made it to Dublin on tour.
You might call them cosmopolitan provincials, or provincial cosmopolitans; either way, middle-class young people in Dublin in the 1970s were capable of being clued-in about the wider world, and even feeling that they could exert some influence over it. Pirate radio and a TV aerial that could pick up the BBC meant that you needn’t miss a thing. In 1977 Niall Stokes launched an ambitious and specifically Irish title, Hot Press, an irreverently liberal music magazine, which quickly turned into a must-read for local fans and bands alike, especially in Dublin.
Ah, but there was, of course, the power of the Catholic church to spoil all that, and for many people it was a terrible scourge on their lives. Its role shouldn’t, however, be exaggerated, as it often is in the memories and polemics of those who get over-excited about Ireland’s eventual liberation from its yoke. While it was true that the Catholic hierarchy cast a long shadow, including over national legislation on matters such as divorce and birth control – U2 would eventually play their first benefit gig in 1978 for the Contraception Action Campaign4 – it didn’t especially darken places like Mount Temple.
Bono has made much of his parents’ religiously mixed marriage: ‘My mother was a Protestant, my father was a Catholic; no big deal anywhere else in the world but here’ – benighted Ireland, the only place in the world where denominational differences matter. Except that Bono has never shown that his parents’ mixed marriage was anything like a ‘big deal’ in the circles he inhabited. Indeed, it is striking that in an Ireland where the Catholic church’s Ne temere doctrine of 1908, ruling that children in mixed marriages must be raised Catholic, had been declared by the Supreme Court in 1950 to be enforceable in law, Bobby and Iris Hewson felt free to make their own arrangements: they agreed to raise their children alternately, the first Protestant, the second (Paul, later to become Bono) Catholic – or, by another telling, boys Catholic and girls Protestant – and then didn’t stick to that arrangement in practice, with Bobby leaving their two boys in their mother’s (Protestant) spiritual care. Young Paul went to mainstream Protestant primary schools.5
The Hewsons’ mixed marriage, and whatever agonies they may have suffered because of it, is of course a private matter; it may well have been harder than we’ll ever know. No one would dream of questioning the real trauma and loss that accompanied Iris Hewson’s death when young Paul was fourteen. But it is difficult not to suspect that Bono locates himself as a childhood victim of sectarian pressures at least partly to associate his origins with the conflict in Northern Ireland, understood in much of the rest of the world to be a sectarian Protestant-versus-Catholic war. Bono’s repeated insistence that he had a little piece of the war in his very own childhood home – he had, he said in a Washington speech in 2006, ‘a father who was Protestant and a mother who was Catholic in a country where the line between the two was, quite literally, often a battle line’6 – is part of the backdrop to his decades of posturing on that conflict. (Strangely enough, in that speech he reversed his parents’ actual religious affiliations.) In reality the Troubles took place almost in their entirety sixty-plus miles up the road in Northern Ireland; and when the conflict made rare, bloody intrusions into the Republic, it didn’t discriminate between Protestant, Catholic and ‘mixed’ victims.
The four boys in U2, meanwhile, were not very different from most of the people who would become their fans across Europe and North America: comfortably off, liberally raised, and drawn inexorably to the international language of rock ’n’ roll. Somewhat more unusually for teenagers at that time and in those circumstances, Bono and his mates were attracted by another global language: that of Christianity.
In many ways, their enthusiasm for Jesus was more outré and cutting-edge than their musical aesthetic. Under their first two names of Feedback and The Hype, the band that would become U2 played covers of songs by middle-of-the-road chart acts such as Peter Frampton, the Eagles and the Moody