U2 Talks Pop

March 1, 1997

THE four members of U2 are caught between two worlds at the moment, and it's not a place they particularly like to be. The first world was the private, inward-looking process of making their 11th album, Pop, which was finished, several months late, last November, and goes into the shops on Monday. The second will be the public, fiercely exposed world of Popmart, the global tour of that album, which begins in just seven weeks' time in Las Vegas.

This in-between-worlds is the grey area of rehearsal, frustrating at the best of times, and quietly frantic for the band, this time out. It is no secret that U2's failure to meet Pop's deadline for the big Christmas market didn't exactly delight their record company, but the band's towering stature in the rock world weatherproofs them against a storm like that. Much more seriously, however, they have squeezed themselves very tight between finishing the record and starting the tour, with a schedule set in stone.

"We're fucked. We're really in trouble," a tired Bono freely concedes, taking a break in their Dublin studios last Thursday night, though his buoyant tone belies his words. He gives the impression that he rather enjoys the extremity of the situation. "We're really up against it, when you realise the jeopardy involved," agrees the Edge. However, the band's lead guitarist is more politic than Bono, and he quickly adds: "The good news is that the songs are going to come across very strongly live. Discovering that was reassuring and uplifting. If we played them on a banjo, they'd still come across well.

"Let's hope we don't have to," Bono cuts in, cheerily enough, and then abruptly shifts his attention to the pounding of Larry Mullen's drums from the studio next door. "You hear that groove, that one?" he says to the Edge. "That's very good." They suddenly both seem a little happier.

Because of the way an album like Pop is made, rehearsals for the tour are far from the straightforward process you might imagine. This is true even before the band confronts the daunting task of weaving the music into a stage spectacle of Zooropa-type proportions. U2 do not record one song as a finished object one week and another the next. Instead, the whole album is built up by a complex series of overlapping moves.

An afternoon's recording might be spent deciding whether to add another bass layer to a track that they had previously thought complete; the same evening might be devoted to testing out half-conceived lyrics and melodies for an entirely new number; the early hours of the morning to splicing in samples of choral music to a third song.

This means that the finished songs on the album can seem almost as novel to the band as to the first-time listener. "I haven't quite got a grip on them yet, I find it hard to talk about them," says Bono. So U2 literally have to learn to play them as the first step in rehearsal, the second being to decide to what extent they should try to replicate the CD in performance, and to what extent they might take the live songs in new directions. "Options are the enemy," is one of Bono's current catch-phrases and, under this sort of time pressure, it is easy to imagine why he feels that way.

It is all the more surprising, then, to enter the studio and find Bono, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen working with Flood, their regular producer, on a song which is not on the album. It turns out be one of John Lennon's blackest little masterpieces, Happiness Is A Warm Gun. Mock leopard skin boot on fuzzbox, Bono is trying out guitar licks over the deeply ambiguous lyrics: When I hold you in my arms/with my finger on your trigger/I know nobody can do me no harm. The grim refrain, I need a fix 'cos I'm going down has been given something approaching a rap treatment the tag down/uptown ironically attached.

"What kind of drugs were they taking?" Bono wonders aloud, adding sardonically: "Paul (sic) must be turning in his grave." In between takes, he explains that film-director Robert Altman has asked them to record this song for his new TV series on guns. It may also be released as a B-side.

The studio control room can barely accommodate us all. Adam, his wry warm, lived-in face behind white-rimmed sunglasses, is picking away at bass lines. Flood and Rob, a sound engineer who does little dances to different beats with different limbs, twiddles knobs at banks of blinking mixing desks. For some reason the place is littered with minute packets of Smarties, and an article asking "Which sex is your brain?" is taped in multiple reproductions on the wall. The music to a much earlier Beatles song, You've Got To Hide Your Love Away, is strewn on one of the two small sofas which share the rest of the space with numerous guitars on stands.

Larry Mullen, who has been playing drums in the studio itself, somehow manages to squeeze in, morning-fresh in the late evening, in blue denims and white T-shirt and looking 10 years younger than his 36 years. The others may look more like thirtysomethings (36 is the average age), but it is still necessary to remind oneself that this is a 20-year-old rock band, with many millions of international record sales and hundreds of millions of pounds, to their credit before they release their 11th album. The enthusiasm monitor registers a much younger, hungrier group.

Larry Mullen frankly acknowledges some cock-up in the beat he was laying down, and as that post-mortem gets under way with Flood, Bono takes me to a lounge next door. The room looks out over the Grand Canal Docks basin. He brings me outside onto a floating dock, from where they used to row a dinghy ("toys for boys", he says selfdeprecatingly) across to Windmill Lane Studios during midnight rehearsal schedules.

He talks eagerly about the forthcoming visit of Flamenco dancer Joaquin Corte's. "Naomi Campbell is going out with him and wants to show him round, so we'll see the Spanish steps." There seems to be no acrimony after the break-up of the supermodel's engagement to Adam Clayton. "Naomi's quite a deal, really, quite loyal about people. She and Ali (Bono's wife) are great mates."

TURNING to the new album, agrees that it is much bleaker than its title implies. "It starts off like a party record and then gets mean on you." Not only are there songs like Wake Up Dead Man, a despairing and angry demand to Jesus "to put a word in for me". Even songs like Staring At The Sun, which at first sound like languid summer pop erotica, sneak in lines like "God is good but will he listen?" "Yeah, we're sad bastards," Bono says, grinning. "We can't turn it off, we have to spoil our own party, spoil the Pop.

"But," he adds, suddenly serious, "it's an attempt to paint a picture that is real, that is not advertising. You enjoy the light by contrast with the dark, I think that's how it works. Let's call the first listen Pop. After that it starts to, hopefully, unravel, and you begin to pick up all the little pictures.

He believes that the strategy U2 adopted with Achtung Baby and the ZooTV tour has worked well. This involved using self-mocking irony to distance the band from the earnest, born-again image which had reached its (to some) derisory apotheosis with the Rattle And Hum concert movie. "Once we had dodged the bullets and got our plexi-glass protection together, we could write the most fragile songs, like the songs on this record, and get away with it. I still sit uneasy when I'm listening to them, because they seem kind of rude in their intimacy, and you could only do that when you have some protection."

He looks back at his Fly/MacPhisto disguises with affectionate gratitude: "I was surprised how much insincerity suited me. The second skin started to stick. It's much easier to negotiate the world behind goggles. It was the ride of a lifetime, but what it was really about was just getting some air." Now, however, he thinks the band can take a half-turn back to where they were, and he dreams of making the stage of this tour "an irony-free zone, because the songs are so raw. I want it to be funny, I want it to be funky . . . I haven't figured it out yet. I'm gonna try not to use a mask. We have this big show to put on, but we want to puncture it in some way.

Hours later, he will screen a computer-animated draft version of the Popmart scenario. There is a giant, MacDonalds-style arch over the stage, and the backdrop is a huge horizontal screen which will carry "jumbotron" images which are simultaneously state-of-the-video-art and lo-tech. There is an "olive" on a 70-foot stick which turns into a mirror ball. And there is a lemon, which moves right out into the arena, to split open and let the band emerge from its core and descend onto a thrust stage. "We do realise it's a lemon, you know," says Bono half-apologetically. It's hard to see how irony won't invade this zone. He does not disguise the fact that he's still pretty confused about it himself.

"This is just the wrapping paper, bright because the songs aren't so sweet. It's garish, but it will go beyond that . . . well, we're living with these questions every day, figuring it out as we go along. It's mad, I don't know if we can go on spending this amount of money on touring but at the moment it feels right."

He is beginning to discuss the deadline difficulties when the Edge arrives. Like all the band, he is impeccably courteous but, compared to Bono's impulsive, intimate engagement, he is distanced and wary, though he doesn't dodge questions. They talk through the roles of the other members. Larry, they say, is the black-and-white one, the man with the bullshit detector. Adam is the conscience of the group, the one who has always believed in U2 in a way the others didn't, perhaps because they had spent the early years in a bubble of charismatic Christianity. He is the man who brought us all the way to where we are, Bono says simply.

If Adam keeps the band on Earth, they must have felt pretty uprooted on the notorious night in Australia when he failed to show up for a ZooTV gig. "We didn't have time to think about it too deeply," says the Edge. "We made a decision to play because there were already people in the building. " "And because we felt Adam would have wanted us to have a go," adds Bono. They co-opted a flabbergasted sound technician, and the band played on. "It was only three songs in, when I realised it would work, that I began to think 'Oh gosh, what's this?'," says the Edge. No harm to the sound technician but, unlike most bass players, Adam was sorely missed. "You couldn't go to a show and not feel his magic,'" says Bono. "He's like trying to catch lightning. " The episode is closed, and there seems to be little fear of it happening again.

That incident is only significant because it was unique. Most other megabands lead far more dissipated public and private lives than U2. An American magazine, however, mentions the casual use of soft drugs around the meaning of Pop, and their music, both sonically and lyrically, is not innocent of the drug culture. Where do they stand on this?

"It's very dangerous to speak about that, " says Bono, who was clearly not aware of the article. "It's against the law and it makes easy headlines. But some artists seem to think they need drugs. I don't."