“Tears running down”: The artist that threw down the gauntlet for Bono
Few bands have ever been as competitive as U2. For them, the job of being a rock star is just as important as the art, to the point where sometimes you feel they’ve misplaced the joy of it all. Perhaps that’s one part of why so many have so little time for them. That mix of joyless, po-faced seriousness and open-hearted sincerity is bad enough when you see it in a random person. To see it from someone like Bono, who lives it up as a rock star, is truly galling.
To me, though, there’s something more than a little admirable about it. The last 20 years of British rock have seen a parade of nice, well-mannered upper-middle-class boys form nice, well-mannered upper-middle-class bands who make nice, well-mannered, upper-middle-class music.
You get the feeling that, to the likes of Mumford & Sons, Royal Blood, The Maccabees and the like, all that’s ever mattered is their own self-expression. You’ve seen it in interviews, these doe-eyed Topman models mumbling in cut-glass, private school accents that they “just make music for themselves and if anyone else likes it, that’s a bonus”. A little ambition never killed anyone, lads.
U2 were the exact opposite. They saw rock ‘n’ roll as an almost sacred duty, one that they were blessed to have and needed to constantly earn. Why yes, a few members of the band grew up Catholic, what made you ask? Its what made them constantly change and evolve with the times, always seeking to win back the title of “best band in the world” if they ever lost it.
This is a fight that U2 are never going to admit to giving up, even as they get on in years. After all, several artists are making some of the best music of their whole careers in their dotage. Nick Cave is currently the biggest he’s ever been, graduating to arena-slaying success off the back of some of his most esoteric work. One of last year’s best albums was The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World.
Bono himself talked about the ultimate example of this in an interview with Q Magazine. He said “I had an epiphany last year. I went to see Leonard Cohen in Monte Carlo. At one point I found myself with tears running down my face. I realised that all my favourite songs he wrote in his 50s and 60s. To me, that was a throw down.”
Which makes perfect sense to me. Bono is, after all, a die-hard fan of Laughing Len and has been for years. All of U2 are. Bono, of all people, would have been achingly aware that some of Cohen’s best music didn’t just come from his 50s and 60s either, but his 70s and 80s too. It’s that kind of attitude that will drive him to always try to be the biggest, best, most unignorable version of himself possible.
Which is sort of the problem. That’s a tiresome thing for normal people to put up with. For me though, given the choice of more aimless dilletantes navel gazing through a delay pedal and more people who actually care about pushing themselves to make the best music they can? I know which I prefer.
