Neil McCormick is the Daily Telegraph’s chief pop and rock music critic. He is an author, radio pundit and television presenter. His memoir, Killing Bono (originally published as I Was Bono’s Doppelganger) has been turned into a feature film and adapted as a stage play (Chasing Bono). He lives in London.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
U2 by U2
Killing Bono (aka I Was Bono’s Doppelganger)
‘My name is Nobody.
Mother, Father, friends
Everybody calls me Nobody’
Homer – The Odyssey
For my mother, who set me on this wayward path, with love as my guide.
For Gloria, who lit the way home.
And for Finn, who made the journey complete.
With special thanks to
David Joseph
Marlene McCormick
John McGlue
CONTENTS
1
Here goes nothing.
Sing, O Muse, of the fall of Zero, of the hollow king who outran his shadow in the last days of the crumbling empire of poop. Spare no details. We’ve heard the story before and know how it usually ends.
The Shitty Committee were up before I was, as per fucking usual, rapping a gavel on the inside of my skull. Rat-a-tat-tat, retard. No order in the house. All speaking out of turn, a cacophony of the usual complaints. You’re nothing special. You can’t fool us. We want our money back. And a few fresh voices to twist the knife, make it really personal. See that porter you tipped a hundred dollars? He called you a cheap prick behind your back. The chef spat in your food. The waiter pissed in your drink. The coat-check girl with the big bazookas you zapped in the cupboard? She faked her orgasm and now she’s telling all her Spacebook fiends you were a lousy lay. It’s all over Blogoslavakia. Top ten on U-Bend. Trending on Splatter. Beaming down the wire to a billion mobiles. Tomorrow it’ll be front page on the Daily Rage. Can’t sing. Can’t dance. Can’t even get it up. Take your punishment. You fake. You loser. You mother—
‘Rise and shine, superstar,’ sang a voice, not from my dreams, obviously. It was far too nice.
‘Fucker,’ I groaned.
‘Well, that’s nice,’ tutted the interloper. It was Kailash, known to one and all as Kilo (only not when passing through customs): management lapdog, brown-nosing lickspittle, personal assistant to the talent (that’s me), Mephistopheles’s little helper, can-do candy man. I wasn’t sure where I was or what time it was but I couldn’t help noticing that Kilo had already arranged a neat line of pure white powder on a polished bedside table, mere millimetres from my slowly stirring nostrils, Satan bless his evil soul.
I hate drugs. OK, so I’m not exactly a poster boy for Just Say No. But when I was sweet sixteen (or was it sour seventeen? I don’t know. Might have been twelve) I made a promise to myself that if I was going to amount to more than a hill of Heinz baked beans I had to stay away from bad shit. Mind you, that was probably while the universe was collapsing after a snakebite and hash binge. Or was it the time I gobbled my guitarist’s pills before a Zero Sums gig only to lose all control of my limbs, with the sneaky fucker giggling about K-holes? Which is another very good reason why I fucking hate drugs. Really. It’s just that sometimes, well, nothing else will do. Like first thing in the morning after a bad dream in a strange bed when your mouth is dry and your head is soggy and nausea is creeping up your gullet and it’s not being helped by your so-called assistant prattling away like it’s the first day of spring and all the chicks are hatching.
So I did what had to be done, lifting my head just high enough to snort through a tightly rolled hundred-dollar bill. No one can accuse me of being a cheap junky. I sat bolt upright with a vertigo-inducing lurch, poison kick-starting my heart.
‘Fuck,’ I said. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
That’s how the day began. Pretty much like any other. Before I was ready for it. The last day of my so-called life.
When I say I didn’t know where I was, I’m not joking. I didn’t know what city. I didn’t even know what country. Somewhere on planet Hotel, for sure. You fall asleep in Berlin and wake up in Beijing and the only thing that changes are the sheets, freshly laundered, air artificially cool and distilled, walls a sea of soothing beige. I’ve lived in and around hotels all my life. As a kid, I padded along behind the old man, buttoned up in