“He was so vivid”: Bono on the artist that was everything a rock star should be
There’s no textbook definition of what a rock star is supposed to be. Some frontmen or guitar players might have similar mannerisms whenever they take to the stage, but there’s always some subtle ex-factor that separates someone like Mick Jagger from David Lee Roth as the true rock stars in their respective acts. Although Bono has no problem reminding people of the importance of U2 at times, he still had a different image of an archetypical pure rock star.
Then again, Bono wasn’t born to be the person acting as a rock and roll messiah whenever he took to the stage. When the Irish legends first started, he was more interested in the punk rock movement, but once he started writing songs of his sound, the more he realised that there was a certain power that came from a great rock and roll riff that had a spiritual quality beyond people playing in a room.
Going through most of U2’s discography, half of Bono’s mission was to make those special moments come to life, whether that was on The Joshua Tree or trying to twist everything on its head when they made Achtung Baby. The whole premise was about changing things up as he went along, but being a musical chameleon wasn’t anything new, either.
The Beatles had already shown the limits of what someone could sound like if they mixed things up on every record, but David Bowie was the purest version of someone shedding their musical skin. Going through his body of work, ‘The Starman’ was interested in going in a different direction from the mainstream, whether that was deliberately trying to dismantle his sound on Station to Station or making the kind of music that people fawned over like on Ziggy Stardust.
And it’s not like Bono wasn’t paying attention when he started shedding his own skin. Considering how much they took themselves seriously in the 1980s on The Joshua Tree tour, seeing the frontman adopt stunning white makeup and play an exaggerated version of a rock star may as well have been Ziggy Stardust and ‘The Thin White Duke’ all combined into one.
When Bowie eventually passed away in the 2010s, Bono had heaps of praise to shower on his idol, telling Rolling Stone, “I’ve played at being a rock & roll star, but I’m really not one. David Bowie is my idea of a rock star. He was so vivid. So luminous. So fluorescent. We had one of the first colour TVs on our street, and David Bowie was the reason to have a colour TV. I’ve said he was our Elvis Presley. There are so many similarities: the masculine-feminine duality, the physical mastery of being on a stage. They created original silhouettes, shapes now seen as obvious, that did not exist before.”
It’s hard to really deny that Bowie did capture the same mystique that ‘The King of Rock and Roll’ could as well. Even though he was insanely engaging in interviews and played with the audience as best he could onstage, there was always some unknown factor that made people realise that they would find the true person underneath it all.
That hardly seemed to matter. The Davey Jones that started life in the late 1960s may have been a thing of the past, but Bono knew that the world had fallen in love with the glam rock superstar who inspired everyone to be proud of who they were and to be brave enough to put those feelings out into the world.
