It was striking that Bono made his watery political declaration sound such a false and borrowed note. But he had more to say. In an extraordinary bout of self-pity, he turned part of the long and winding final section of ‘Bad’ into an apparent tribute to himself. Singing over the repeating guitar figure to the tune of Elton John’s terrible, maudlin song about Marilyn Monroe, ‘Candle in the Wind’, Bono achingly intoned: ‘You have the grace to hold yourself, while those around you crawl. They crawl out of the woodwork, on to pages of cheap Dublin magazines. I have the grace to hold myself. I refuse to crawl.’44
Refuse to crawl he might, but even today the effect of viewing this outburst via YouTube may make the viewer’s skin crawl. It was clear that the attack on ‘cheap Dublin magazines’ was aimed at McCann and Waters, but to whom on earth was he directing his refusal to crawl? Was he really just declaring himself satisfied with his display of courage in belittling his critics? And this grace – then as now among his favourite words – did it come direct from God? U2 biographer Eamon Dunphy, critical by the standards of Dublin journalists but still inclined to cut Bono slack on this incident, wrote that it showed that ‘Dublin still got to them’ – that their hometown’s mode of badmouthing had a knack for getting under their skin – but also that, ‘this being Dublin’, Bono and McCann had chatted and cleared up any ‘misunderstandings’ at a party after the gig.45 What could hardly be misunderstood was that this young man had a disproportionate sense of his own righteousness.
However, Bono’s strange and chilling onstage attack may have had some effect. It would be more than two decades, until the time when U2’s tax arrangements were revealed, before there was any comparable sustained criticism of Bono in the major Irish media. (Paul McGuinness was also capable of his own brand of chilling: when in 1991 a Dublin paper rounded up a few mildly mocking comments about Bono’s lyrics for ‘The Fly’, the band’s burly manager wrote a nasty letter to the bylined journalist, calling him ‘a creep’, and CCing the chief executive of the newspaper company.46)
The main exception to Irish press quiescence in the face of Bono’s power and glory was the small investigative and satirical magazine Phoenix. While Phoenix mostly kept a close eye on the band’s business interests in Ireland, it wasn’t above teasing Bono on other fronts. When, for example, in the year 2000 the magazine reported on the legal negotiations then ongoing between Bono and a local tabloid over paparazzi shots of the singer’s sunbathing buttocks, his lawyers threatened Phoenix with prosecution under the Offences Against the State Act – generally employed against serious crime and ‘subversion’ – for revealing ‘sub judice’ material, and said they had sought the intervention of the attorney-general over the matter. Phoenix responded by reproducing the lawyers’ letter under the unusually large headline: ‘L’ETAT C’EST MOI! KING BONO INVOKES OFFENCES AGAINST THE STATE ACT’ – and by continuing to produce story after story about ‘Bono’s bum deal’.47
It was also Phoenix magazine that reported on how Bono’s wife Ali described their relationship with journalists. Ali had been contacted by an old acquaintance named Dónal de Róiste, the brother of one of her closest charitable partners. De Róiste was still fighting to clear his name more than thirty years after being unjustly ‘retired’ from the Irish army under a cloud of suspicion of IRA connections. Ali refused to help, though in the nicest possible Christian way: ‘I wish I knew a journalist that one could entrust with this cause … but I’m sorry to say I don’t at present … the nature of our position unfortunately means that we stay as removed as possible from the press.’ She continued sympathetically: ‘I am sorry that you feel so wronged. I, like you, believe in fair play and justice … which I know you will receive in the next life …’48
Bono was rarely shy about where he felt U2 fit, in this life, into the history of rock ’n’ roll, the art form and the business. ‘I don’t mean to sound arrogant,’ he told Rolling Stone rather redundantly soon after their first album had appeared, ‘but at this stage, I do feel that we are meant to be one of the great groups. There’s a certain spark, a certain chemistry, that was special about the Stones, the Who and the Beatles, and I think it’s also special about U2.’49
So it is not surprising that U2 established a record label, in the mode of the Beatles’ Apple Corps, with the stated ambition of nurturing Irish talent, though it is perhaps surprising how quickly they got around to this task: they established Mother in August 1984, before they had even started playing arenas, let alone stadia, in the US (and almost exactly ten years after the death of Bono’s mother, Iris). The Beatles left the task till rather later in their development as the world’s biggest group – that is to say, when they were indisputably on the top of the world and were in a position to establish a sophisticated corporate apparatus in the heart of London, then probably the world’s pop capital – and still made a mess of it.
Perhaps the worst that can be said with certainty about U2’s label, Mother, is that it fits quite comfortably within a history of poorly performing record labels founded by artists themselves. That is not the worst that is said about Mother, however. While U2 have benefited from a compliant press in Ireland, the gossip that plays such an important role in this small, talkative society is often far less kind. One persistent and false strand of local discourse – now of course searchable on the internet – has long suggested that Mother was deliberately established, and operated, to kill off the Irish competition, to ensure that, far from a ‘next U2’ emerging from a thriving scene, Irish acts who threatened U2’s hegemony would be signed up to Mother, then mismanaged into obscurity. This false theory is the writing-large of the false story of Paul McGuinness’s malevolent impersonating phone call to promote U2 from the band’s early days, and frankly it has just as little evidence to support it. It vastly overestimates the power of U2 to affect the behaviour of a whole range of international companies that would have been delighted to make stars of an Irish ‘next U2’, and it equally underestimates the extent to which plans and intentions can go awry and astray with just a little nudge from incompetence and complacency, and no help at all from conspiracy.
But how did Mother, and the associated distribution company Record Services, even manage to offer a plausible imitation of an enterprise established to kill off promising Irish acts? The answer is somewhat surprising, given how quickly and capably Paul McGuinness and U2 had professionalised the management of their own affairs in the early 1980s. The fact appears to be that, with Mother, U2 deliberately set their sights unusually low, then lacked the commitment and professional capacity to achieve even a modest set of notional targets. A label established in the mid 1980s to help young acts in Ireland ended up with its only really notable success being the Icelandic artist Björk in the early-to-mid 1990s. Indeed, Mother may be the only cause ever associated with Bono to have been allowed to fade quietly into obscurity.
One mark of Mother’s lack of ambition was its explicitly stated determination to limit its nurturing function to getting artists’ singles out on the label. Once an act was at the stage of releasing an album, the theory and practice went, it could and should move on to another label. This was a little strange given that U2 were already themselves recognised as the latest in the long line of quintessentially album-oriented rock groups, and the 1980s as an album-oriented era like no time before or since in the history of popular music.
Irish music-industry insiders don’t need especially complex explanations for Mother’s failure. U2 may have been helping to drag the business out of the showband era, dominated as it was by cowboy impresarios and their network of dance-halls around the country, with only a thin veneer of a recording industry slapped on to this live-music infrastructure.