From Morocco to Dublin, via meetings with presidents and royalty, the making of the new U2 album saw the band confront a changing world, and face up to their own vulnerabilities. Over 18 months, Sean O'Hagan followed themIt is the middle of January this year and Bono is at home in Killiney, County Dublin, with an hour to spare before he heads into town for an afternoon of meetings. "Things are looking good," he says. "It's a beautiful, sunny, winter's day and Edna O'Brien has just been sent me her book on Lord Byron."
He has been up "from the early hours", his working day now devoted to juggling the demands of family, rock stardom and the ongoing campaign for African aid and debt relief. U2's long-awaited new album, No Line on the Horizon, is finally finished. "It began and ended in a flash," he says. "The last 24 hours were just extraordinary. It was like Chinese calligraphy, where the monks take ages to mix the ink and then - bam! - it all happens in seconds."
In three days' time, the band will fly to Washington, where they will perform Pride, their Martin Luther King song, and City of Blinding Lights, their Barack Obama song, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. "The world is waking up again," says Bono. "It's going to be a tough transformation, but it's going to be exciting. Things are shifting in surprising ways."
Over the next hour, Bono will talk about what it means to be the world's biggest rock star and the world's most famous global campaigner, about music and faith and activism, and the tensions his high-profile tightrope walk has caused in the band. He will also talk about U2's new music, and the shift in his song-writing style away from the first person ("I'd just worn myself out as a subject matter").
No Line on the Horizon is U2's 12th studio album. It sees the world's biggest band challenging themselves - and their audience's expectations - in a way that they have not done since the 90s' experimentation of Achtung Baby and Zooropa. It was, though, a difficult and protracted birth, and I was a witness to its gestation. In the original plan, hatched almost two years ago in a casual conversation with Bono, I had been invited to Fez to track the making of the new album, stage by stage, from inception to completion. So it was that, what seems like an eternity ago, I boarded a plane to Morocco.
Fez, Morocco, June 2007
Bono, guitarist The Edge, drummer Larry Mullen and bassist Adam Clayton are gathered, with producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois in the ancient North African walled city to start recording a handful of new songs. Their "studio" is the enclosed courtyard of a riad on the edge of the medina. Moroccan carpets have been spread across the stone floor, ornate pillars and spreading palms tower over the amplifiers and sound desks, and, from time to time, small birds dart overhead, startled by the constant bursts of rough and ready music.
The mood matches the makeshift setting: a batch of new songs, tentative, half-formed, sketchy, are elaborated on or set aside for future reference. Eno, who has assumed the role of musical director, shouts out tempo changes, instructions, suggestions. "The chords sound a little too vanilla," he says of one laid-back, swampy groove. Bono, who has a couch all to himself, concurs. "We need to find that nightclub-in-Tripoli feel," he shouts back, swaying to the beat, "then move it on down to Bamako." The vibe is one of unhurried creativity, the six musicians - Eno on keyboards, Lanois on guitar and pedal steel - stretching out and enjoying themselves. It feels like the beginning of a new adventure.
"What's happening down here is beyond reason," Bono had enthused, when the idea of me shadowing them had first been broached. "Spirits are hovering. We're chasing the Joujouka drummers and different structures for pop."
The legendary Joujouka drummers drew both Brian Jones and William Burroughs to Fez in the late 60s, but this time around, other guiding spirits were also at work. Every night, as darkness fell, the haunting voices of devotional Sufi singers would rise up and drift across the rooftops, their song-prayers lasting for hours at a time. "There was definitely something in the air down there," Bono will tell me later. "And we picked up on it."
Could he describe what that something was exactly?
"Not without sounding pretentious," he says, laughing. "I mean, a lot of people have gone there, searching. There's a bit of the Mighty Boosh about it. Out in the desert, looking for the new sound. Have you seen that episode where they are out in the desert looking for the new sound? They find Chris De Burgh and he's been out looking for the new sound for 10 years [laughs]. It's probably no more profound than that."
Eighteen months later, though, sitting at a table in his home studio in Notting Hill, Brian Eno, a man not given to exaggeration, will describe a song that "was hatched almost fully formed in a breathtaking few hours" in Fez as "the most amazing studio experience I've ever had". Which is saying something. That song is called Moment of Surrender, a thing of complex rhythmic beauty and cumulative power, that, as Bono will later point out, occupies the same place on No Line on the Horizon as One did on Achtung Baby. That is to say, it is the emotional centrepiece of a big, overloaded, creatively risky record. "Apart from some editing and the addition of the short cello piece that introduces it," says Eno, "the song appears on the album exactly as it was the first and only time we played it."
Later, too, Larry Mullen, who in the past has been less than enthused by U2's more experimental work - he all but disowned the ambient album Original Soundtracks 1, released as Passengers, back in 1995 - will tell me that "the work we did in Fez was the most joyous and liberating part of the whole album process. It was what I had always imagined being in U2 would be about: just playing music for the joy of it with no real end in sight. It was chaotic at times but even the chaos was creative. You can lose sight of that sometimes with all the other stuff that now comes with being in U2."
(Later Bono will say of Morocco: "What surprised me was that Larry went with it. I was waiting for the eyes to roll. But they didn't. I mean, most of the time, it's hard enough to get Larry to come over to the south side of Dublin.")
On the second day I spend in Fez, I catch a dramatic glimpse of "all the other stuff that now comes with being in U2". In the afternoon, Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and the 41st richest man in the world, drops in on rehearsals. And he brings his band with him; four middle-aged guys in sailing gear and baseball hats. A couple of them even strap on guitars, and, for a brief moment, it looks like they might sit in on a U2 rehearsal. Then, after an impromptu burst of bar-room rock, they depart, grinning like teenagers.
That evening, Allen and his buddies reappear at a dinner that Bono is hosting on the hotel balcony for Queen Rania of Jordan, who, the following afternoon, will also drop in on a U2 rehearsal. "The elegant Jordanian Royal", as she is referred to in the tabloids, sits on a couch, looking, well, elegant and regal, while Bono sings one of the quieter songs the group have been working on. It's a long way from bottom of the bill at McGonagles and the last bus home to Ballymun Avenue, that's all I can say.
Both Queen Rania and Paul Allen are major players in the world of high-end global philanthropy, which is one of several rarefied socio-political networks that Bono now inhabits as part of his other gig: the world's most well-known campaigner for African debt relief. There were moments in Fez, though, when it was difficult to tell which one was now his day job.
After dinner, I chat with Mullen over a few cold beers. "There is a danger," he says, when I mention how strange it was to witness Bono's two worlds colliding in such a spectacular fashion, "that people start to perceive U2 as a part of the Bono show. Now, I admire and support everything he does," he continues, "but that is categorically not the case."
When U2's sojourn in Fez ends a few weeks later, Bono jets off to a Ted [Technology Entertainment Design] conference in Tanzania, while the rest of the band head back home to Dublin.
U2 have now been together for 33 years now, an eternity in pop terms. For the past 22 years, since their fifth album, The Joshua Tree, pitched them into the ether of global rock stardom, they have been the biggest rock group in the world.
In their time at the top, the band have seen several generations of contenders to their throne come and go, including the Clash, the Smiths, Nirvana, the Stone Roses and Blur. For a moment, it looked like REM, then Radiohead might steal their thunder, or even Oasis. As if... Maybe the Kings of Leon or the Killers may yet step up to the challenge, but let's just wait and see. Thus far, love them or hate them, U2 have been unassailable. No other rock band has lasted longer, nor made such consistently good, and often challenging, rock music, nor staged such epic and technologically cutting edge shows.
What is most intriguing - and, to their detractors, infuriating - about U2 is that they succeeded by ignoring, indeed breaking, most of the unwritten rules of rock stardom. They didn't - with the exception of the pre-rehab Adam Clayton - do sex or drugs and, as their critics pointed out, neither did they really do rock'n'roll. They were not rebellious, nor angst-ridden, nor did they trade on adolescent alienation or anger. Instead, they did joy. And spiritual joy, to boot. This made them unfashionable in Britain, the irony capital of the world, where sincerity, especially sincerity tinged with spirituality, is seen, at best, as uncool, at worst as downright embarrassing.
"One of the reason's for U2's longevity," says Brian Eno, "is that they are not in music for entirely selfish reasons. I don't want to make them appear as evangelists, which, of course, they were seen as by some sections of the music media in the early 80s, but I do believe that they really think that what they do serves some greater purpose than simply filling their bank accounts."
Initially, I had little time for U2, their songs, their haircuts, their Christianity. My epiphany occurred when I was sent to Rome by the NME in the summer of 1987 to interview Bono after the first gig of their European tour - The Joshua Tree tour. Put simply, it was a revelation: a rock group whose music made sense in a stadium, whose songs retained - and inspired - a kind of communal intimacy in a crowd of 60,000 people. And, boy, did Bono work that crowd. He was one part rock star, one part showbiz trouper, one part preacher man. In America, where cool is not such a reductive currency, U2 were embraced with open arms. The rest, as they say, is history.
By Achtung Baby, as Bono famously put it, they "discovered that irony was not the enemy of soul". The Zoo TV extravaganza was, and remains, the most technically innovative - touring rock show of recent times. And anyone who still thinks U2 don't have a sense of humour obviously missed the Pop Mart tour, where they emerged nightly out of a giant lemon dressed like some postmodern version of the Village People.
This is the version of U2 that I prefer, the one that challenges our preconceptions of U2. It has not been around for a while, but now it has popped out of the closet again on (most of) No Line on the Horizon, which is a world away from the two traditional sounding, good-but-not great albums that preceded it. They seem to me, at times, to be the last of something: the last rock band that insists rock music has some greater meaning at a time when the form seems dogged by a lack of cultural resonance.
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