The Beatles song that gave Bono a “messianic complex”
The U2 frontman Bono will often cite Jesus Christ and his teachings as part of his spiritual spiel, but despite that, he actually adheres to the Lewis trilemma school of thought rather than ardent belief. C.S. Lewis’ theory postulates that Christ either was the Messiah or, over 2000 years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Mark Wahlberg, have been dedicated to a “complete and utter nutcase”. Many folks who question U2’s credentials to be quite such a potent force in rock wonder the same thing when it comes to Bono.
But prior to his bespectacled arrival, the fuse for a spiritual rock ‘n’ roll revolution was already blazing. In 1967, around 200 million people saw The Beatles play ‘All You Need is Love’ via a ground-breaking satellite link-up. At the time, that wasn’t far from one in 16 people on the entire planet receiving a message of unified peace in one fell swoop of sonic beauty—the largest single audience ever amassed in human history. That’s far more of an immediate impact than Christ ever made, so perhaps John Lennon wasn’t far wrong when he claimed that his band were “more popular than Jesus“.
Fittingly, it was the Fab Four who first got the Irish singer thinking about life beyond the confines of his childhood home. “It’s my earliest memory of music,” he says about their early anthem, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. “I was three years old and in the back garden of 10 Cedarwood Road… I associate the song with the smell of freshly cut grass as I was lying on my back on the damp green patch after my Da had cut the lawn… Beside me was a lawn mower with green stained rotors that had to be repaired. My brother Norman could fix it… he could fix anything.”
It’s a very personal corroboration, especially for a three-year-old to retain, but the way that The Beatles transcend the usual palatinate of pop culture and become a fixture in our everyday lives and memories has always been the clearest sign of their transcendence. “It was the spring of 1964,” Bono continues in his open letter published in Rolling Stone, “The song on the radio felt like life force… like I was for the first time conscious that I was alive and that being alive was a really, really great idea!”
“I’m not sure whose hand was on your mind when you wrote this,” he continues. “It might have been nice to imagine it was my mother’s, but at age 3 most wee boys are trying to break away from such clutches… I had no such maternal or even romantic thoughts. In my head it felt like the universe was singing to me directly… and I still feel that now when listening to most of your songs.”
Before concluding, “Maybe that’s how easy a messianic complex can start out.”
That messiah complex is not the only element that has apparently lingered in the life of Bono; he has also frequently mused over the notion of whose hand is being held. While recently accepting the Fulbright Prize for International Understanding (you couldn’t make it up), he recited some of his favourite lyrics ever. “I was thinking about the Beatles ‘I Saw Her Standing There’,” he said in his speech. “It’s about as great a song lyric as I’ve ever heard. It does not describe itself as poetry. It’s better. It’s adolescent and it’s transcendent. It’s instant and it’s eternal. It’s fun, but not funny, although funny’s OK.”
Alas, it has to be said that the messiah complex that The Beatles have imbued over many is proof of the idiosyncratic nature of pop culture whereby the performer is readily relatable and evidently present as a potent individual force, entirely part of the art created. To use the horrible parlance of out times, pop culture can make you ‘feel seen’ and welcome you into bohemia. The Beatles did that better than just about anyone.
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