ANDREW DENTON: You’re such a persuasive advocate and you know better than anyone how quickly the media spotlight moves from one issue to another. How do you make debt relief and fairer trade rules the default position for world governments, if someone like you isn’t there to scream and shout?
BONO: Yeah. Well, as we were saying earlier, celebrity is - it’s at the kind of oppressive level, and it’s a pretty ridiculous thing, if we - if we’re honest. But it is currency, and I want to spend mine, you know, well. But, actually, I think what’s happened with myself and Bob is a little different. We have managed to - like those cartoons I see on children’s television, we have managed to sort of shape change and, you know, we’ve managed to get both sides of the barricade, and it’s much more glamorous, you know, to be on a barricade with a handkerchief over your nose and, you know, the Molotov cocktail. That sells albums. Having a sort of bowler hat on and a briefcase and being in those rooms, in the back corridors of power, whispering your arguments is not so sexy but it is really effective.
But I think it’s only effective when there’s people at the barricades too. And our access comes from our celebrity, but our power comes from the movement that we do not command, but certainly represent.
ANDREW DENTON: We live in an age where Sharon Stone is on an official visit to the Middle East and Michael Douglas is a UN peace messenger. Is that currency being devalued? The currency of celebrity, is it…
BONO: Could it be more devalued?
ANDREW DENTON: Yeah.
BONO: I mean, let it be, but what I’m saying is…we’re about to move - myself and Bob and others, are moving away from the need to live off this ridiculous thing called celebrity. We’re actually starting to get access because we represent a lot of people. That’s a different kind of power.
ANDREW DENTON: Criticism made of what you and Bob have done — not what you’ve done but the way people perceive it — is they - they go to this event, they buy the t-shirt, the revolution is just a t-shirt away, as Billy Bragg said, they think something’s being done, but still the hard work continues in the back rooms. Ultimately, though, are people good at writing cheques but not necessarily cashing them?
BONO: Yeah, the politicians love to write cheques and it is hard to get them to cash them. But, again, I answer you the same. It’s about the movement. The movements are there. They’re much more important than people like me and they’re made up of all kinds of people. You know - we’ve got - you know, it’s a - it’s a big tent, that’s what Bill Clinton said to me once. He said, “That it is a big tent. You’ve got rock stars, soccer mums, you know, religious folks.” You — actually, in some ways the politicians are much more scared of the soccer mums and the religious folks than they are the student activists and the rock stars. But when we all start hanging out together, they’re terrified…
ANDREW DENTON: You talk about AIDS, something that you’re very strong about. You said that one of the most significant meetings in your life was with Pope John Paul II, whose - and the Vatican’s policy on condoms, of course, has been one of the reasons AIDS has been allowed to spread. Did you talk with him about that?
BONO: No, we went to meet with Pope John Paul on debt forgiveness, which they were very good at, but it was interesting. An Irish person - a lot of people have very strong feelings about the Pope in Ireland, for and against, particularly women, because of his attitude towards condoms, and, of course, in Africa, condoms are a - you know, are a necessity. But the truth of it is - is I have learned a respect for conservatives that I wasn’t expecting to have. Don’t ask them, don’t ask nuns to give out condoms. Let’s get other people to give out the condoms. They can do something else.
The agreed-upon basis for assistance to the AIDS emergency in Africa is called ABC — Abstinence, Be faithful, Condoms. Everyone knows that, including the nuns. They just don’t do the C bit. Because, actually, it’s OK. It’s OK, you don’t - nuns don’t have to give out the condoms. Somebody else can do it.
ANDREW DENTON: As a man of faith, when you look at Africa, what’s your concept of a working God?
BONO: Look, on the God thing, I have to be really careful because I’m not a very good advertisement, and so I don’t want to sit there and - you say I’m a man of faith. I’m sort of, yes - there I am - I just can’t. You know, I just recently read, in one of St Paul’s letters, where it describes all the fruits of the spirit, and there was none of them - I had none of them. You know and…
ANDREW DENTON: You fulfil the Christian ideal though.
BONO: I don’t know. I don’t think so. I mean all the commandments are broken and the ones I haven’t I’ve probably wanted to. But, that said, I do have a faith, and it is - it is challenged on a daily basis by what I see in Africa, yes. And, yet, more than that, I have a sense that, really, people are the problem, you know, we’re the problem really. And we blame - God gets a lot of bad press.
You know, the tsunami was very eloquent in a way, responses, and there’s a - there’s a natural disaster, you know, all this awfulness done by Mother Nature, you know. It’s just dreadful. But in Africa you have an avoidable catastrophe of tsunami proportions every week, so I’ve kind of - I’ve gone through my shouting at God, I’ve gone through my angry phase but I finally end up looking at my own indolence and fighting with it, and indifference, because I have it too, you know, and I feel that I’m not alone in this. I feel there’s a generation of people - I kind of realise this isn’t something that we can really blame God for. This is - this is about us, really, and so that’s where I am on it.
ANDREW DENTON: Of course, your long-time friend and collaborator, Bob Geldof - what kind of a man is he in your life?
BONO: Well, he occupies the position really no other occupies because he lit the torch paper for me, and not just political activism in the sense that - what is achievable, but in so many ways had - how a - how a - how a singer can change shape. He probably thinks that his creative life is in one corner and then he has all this other stuff that he does. He’s really wrong. What Bob needs to know is that his is - his life is the creative life, it’s not just the music, he has made his whole life the work.
You know, we were talking about the Pope earlier. I just remember standing there with the Pope and I’d swapped my glasses for a pair of rosary beads, which I’m wearing now, look, these ones, the crooked - the crooked cross it’s called, Michelangelo designed it, right. So, I mean, I had my rosary the Pope had given me and I’m going, “That’s really great,” Bob’s there, “Listen, could I have another three? I have four kids, I and…” He's…really is remarkable and, you know, people say, you know, it’s good cop, bad cop, but I actually - both of us are very tough, and it’s whatever - by whatever means necessary.
I think we’re both into ultimate fighting. The only difference is that and I accept the rules of ultimate fighting, which is you can’t poke someone in the eye or bite them, and Bob doesn’t do that. So, I have seen him try to bite Prime Ministers and I’ve had to call up Tony Blair. I’m actually — literally, spittle coming out, invective coming out, and Tony reaching over to me, going, “I believe you’ve a greatest hits coming,” I mean, just as a - to get a break from Geldof.
ANDREW DENTON: Do you have a secret signal?
BONO: There is - there is…
ANDREW DENTON: …Just a sort of a…
BONO: There’s no - there is no off with him at all and he is our greatest poet. If media and music is the lingua franca, as he calls it, then he is our greatest poet.
ANDREW DENTON: A man you love?
BONO: I love him, yeah.
ANDREW DENTON: You were asked recently why you never took off the glasses and you said, “Because I don’t want to give - it would give too much away.” And the eyes are the window to the soul. Bono, what is it that you don’t want us to know?
BONO: There’s a lot.
ANDREW DENTON: Do tell.
BONO: I mean, I’ve got a - there’s many reasons for the glasses — posing, I’m sure, right up there, privacy, and I do like having one step of a remove, actually. I don’t think I have - I don’t think when I’m singing I hold anything back and I don’t think when I’m writing I hold anything back. But I think I’m allowed to hold something back in this kind of a set-up, and, as honest a man that you are and as honest as I’m trying to be, there is a natural insincerity in the kind of - in the set-up, and I’m trying to be much better at it, but I just need one step removed.
ANDREW DENTON: That’s a good answer. When Bruce Springsteen inducted you into the Hall of Fame last year, he marvelled at the fact that the band had been together 25 years and that what he called the "ticking time-bomb" that’s at the centre of every band, that you’d harnessed it, that it hadn’t exploded. When the four of you are in a room together trying to make the next thing happen, what stops the bomb going off?
BONO: We have this huge desire amongst us, the four of us, to not be crap. I think that’s really it, because we have this amazing life, you know, we really have got an incredible life, and the deal is - we feel it’s like a deal with those in our audience, and they don’t mind us having, you know - being able to take a break whenever we want, renting some fancy house on the harbour at Sydney, have all of that, just don’t be crap. That’s kind of the deal, so we always think when we go in to make an album, “Is this going to be the one where we’re crap?” Because we all remember great artists that we grew up with and we go, “Wow, where does - where does this all” - you know, suddenly there’s like three crap albums in a row. In U2, our vibe is, “Two crap albums and you’re out.” We haven’t done that yet.
ANDREW DENTON: As the biggest rock band in the world, with extraordinary shows and deliberate excess on occasions, particularly in the early ‘90s, have you ever looked at each other and asked yourselves, “Are we turning into wankers?”
BONO: I didn’t have to ask the question. At any given moment one of us is being a wanker, and it’s usually probably me, but…
ANDREW DENTON: But didn’t you say you got into the back of your own car?
BONO: Yeah. I was, yeah - coming home from tour is - it’s like re-entering earth’s atmosphere. And, yes, on occasions I have tried to pay at my local restaurant with a room key that’s a month old, or I have, yes, stepped into the back of my own car, which is really sad. You know, I used to think, you know, when I was a kid, “I’ll never change, never change. We’re going to be in the band, we’ll never change.” What a stupid idea. You should change and, as much as you fight off being rock stars, it’s like just, you know, run with it, and I’m kind of amazed we’re getting away with it.
I don’t think we were sort of designed to be rock stars. If you look at us as people, we’re not really - I don’t really - you know, we’re just we’re not that kind of people, and yet we are, I suppose, rock stars, which I find bizarre.
ANDREW DENTON: Well, if you want to lend it, I’m happy to take it over.
BONO: No, I think you’re - you’ve got a, sort of like different thing coming. You’ve got the - the - sort of the Bertolt Brecht revolution round the corner kind of a vibe.
ANDREW DENTON: He who laughs has not yet heard the news. You do walk a fine line, though, between politics and show business, and it’s not always easy. And the Zooropa tour in ’93, when you used to take live satellite broadcasts from besieged city of Sarajevo, so the citizens there could talk to your audiences around the world. There was one night where a woman looked into the camera and said, “I wonder what you’re going to do for Sarajevo. I don’t think you’re going to do anything at all.”
BONO: She did worse than that. She said - she said, “You know we’re going to die,” and she said, “Really, the best thing would just be if you hurry it up.”
ANDREW DENTON: What do you make of a moment like that?
BONO: It was - it was a remarkable thing. There was really no proper response to the siege of Sarajevo for a long time, and we were there just using what we had, to give access to these people to tell their stories. And sometimes it was very hard to continue a rock show after that, yes, and I know it really offended a lot of people.
ANDREW DENTON: I think Larry said, did he not, that if you had to be in the band 20 years just to play that gig, it would have been worth it?
BONO: Yeah, that was - that was really, really astonishing. He told me this — again, you probably won’t run on TV, but sitting in President Izetbegovic’s apartment, which was in a block of flats with a bicycle parked outside. And, you know, we took our shoes off, and we went in, with this wartime president, who was a scholar, and he told us the story of the burning - the burning library. One of the great libraries of civilisation was in Sarajevo, and he told us this amazing story. He said, for days, and even a week, later, after this bombing, words from these sacred manuscripts were just falling, still, through the sky. People were walking around Sarajevo with these priceless words just falling on them like rain. Amazing story.
ANDREW DENTON: That’s fantastic.
BONO: Yeah. Symbol of tolerance. I mean, that’s just, you know — Sarajevo, the reason why they wanted to break the spirit is kind of, in a way, pertinent to what’s going on today, because this was a city where all the different ethnic groups lived together quite well. That’s why they tried to break it. It was a symbol of co-existence, yeah.
ANDREW DENTON: You front the biggest band in the world. You’re heavily involved in global politics and activism - major responsibilities. Where do you find time to be a meaningful parent?
BONO: I have — we’re a very, very gypsy-like family, and my kids travel so well. In fact, this last year of touring we’ve never been as close as a family — and, you know, we’ve got a tutor for the - for the oldest kids; their school work went up. They’ve gone home since, and their headmaster says that their schoolwork’s gone up. They love the adventure of being on the road. I mean, I see people, professional people and people who work in, you know, factories and have to get up very early, at seven in the morning, leave the house and come home at nine o’clock at night. They’re the people who have the most difficult times, you know, to get time with their family.
I’m lucky. I’m at home in the morning. I’m on the phone, the kids are there. I really do have a great life in that sense. Now, I think mostly this is - Ally has organised this. I wouldn’t want to take too much credit for it, but I - but I have an amazing family life, and it’s elastic and it’s a little hectic, little chaotic. But it’s full of laughter and full of - you know, full of - and they’re great kids.
ANDREW DENTON: I’d like to close with a quote from one of your favourite poets, Brendan Kennelly, a poem called the Book of Judas, where he says, “If you want to serve the age, betray it.” What does that mean to you?
BONO: He is an extraordinary poet. The Book of Judas is an amazing epic poem. Well, the mores of this age we’ve discussed already, you know that it is acceptable that 65,000 Africans can die of AIDS - it’s not. You know, equality is always moving. …I mean, I’m thinking about it, that it goes back to this Jewish, you know, idea, back in the scriptures. There’s these Jewish sheep-herders, with poo on their shoes, standing in front of a pharaoh, and the pharaoh is saying, “You’re equal? You say you’re equal to me?” And they’re going “Yes, it says it here in the book, that’s what it says in this book.” And eventually, you know, they’re accepted as equal, but not women, or not blacks, and it’s a pain in the arse, equality, but right now, where we’re at with it is, if we believe that these people’s lives were equal in value to ours, we would not be letting them die like that.
I met this incredible man in the United States congress, Tom Lantos, and he was a survivor of a concentration camp, and he told me that years later it wasn’t the mistreatment in the camps and the brutality that used to haunt them, but the thing that haunted him were the blank stares of the faces as they were being loaded onto the train. And I knew this was a very heavy thing to bring up and I said, “I don’t bring this up lightly but is there some analogy here?” And he said, “Oh no, it’s worse than that.” He says, “Because we know where these trains are going.”
ANDREW DENTON: It’s easy to talk, great to sing, but I really respect the fact you give time. Bono, thank you.
BONO: Thank you.
