The band whose “clobber” could change your life, according to Bono
As Phillip Seymour Hoffman once sighed down the phone in Almost Famous, “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.” Being lame is the closest thing you can get to a universal experience, and if you haven’t felt it yet, you’ve just got something to look forward to, cowboy! It’s nothing to be afraid or ashamed of, though. Coolness itself is a fickle mistress that will stay with you just long enough to get you noticed, then flounce out of your life just when you’ve got the most eyes on you. Few people are as familiar with this feeling than U2 frontman, world’s saviour and the self-described “man who brought you the mullet” Bono.
The Joshua Tree hitmakers have a strained relationship with fashion. Believe it or not, there was actually a period of time when U2, in their intensely sincere fashion, were cool. From War to The Unforgettable Fire, they were Brian Eno-approved post-punk firebrands. Slinging a more pop-infused take on Joy Division’s sound into the stratosphere and making pretty radical political statements while they were at it. This was absolutely not an accident. Nothing about U2 has ever been left to chance. From the sound to the look, to the influences, everything has been plotted out to ensure the maximum chance of hitting big and that goes for their look too.
This is nothing new either. Every member of U2 probably says a little prayer at a shrine to The Clash before going to bed, and Joe Strummer himself once said, “Like trousers like brain.” If you’re going to be in a pop group, you absolutely have to care about the way you look and Bono himself detailed his feelings towards this in a piece he wrote for Rolling Stone. He said that seeing them on tour in the late 1970s changed him on a cellular level seeing “the clobber, the stage gear worn at all times. The look as well as the sound of revolt… gave (us) a sense that activism could be sexy and dangerous.”
Loathe though I am to give ol’ Bono Vox of O’Connell Street credit, he’s bang on the money. If you want your message taken in by the masses, especially young people, you must make it look good. The irony comes from when too many people cotton on that you’re trying to be cool. This is precisely what bit The Larry Mullen Band hard on the posterior when they became the biggest band in the world. A case in point is the video for ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’, where they staged a concert on the roof of a Los Angeles liquor store and attracted the attention of an estimated 30,000 onlookers.
The idea of the video was to stage the concert, get shut down by the cops, look like rock ’n’ roll firebrands, and then go home for tea and biscuits. However, according to manager Paul McGuinness, the cops kept letting them play because they were all huge U2 fans.
Eventually, they had to ask one of the cops to go on stage and say they were shutting the show down cos they’d have no story for the video otherwise! Is it lame? Absolutely. But as we said previously, coolness never sticks around. Just ask The Clash, who by the time U2 were huge, were an embarrassing trainwreck being co-opted by their manager to release some of the worst music of the entire 1980s.
The most important part of both bands was always the message. Sure, they were using existing trends to help the message get across, but unlike many other artists, both did so with the knowledge that the message was the most important thing. Once the hype train moved along, both of them remained resolutely, thrillingly themselves. Would that we all can do the same.
