BONO GOES TO WAR VS. IRA
FOR most successful rock bands, voicing political opinions is always risky, but criticizing your own fans for their political leanings is completely forbidden. Three decades ago, however, U2 singer Bono did both — in the same breath.
The band is marking the 30th anniversary of “The Joshua Tree” on Wednesday and Thursday with shows at MetLife Stadium. It’s an album that spent two months at No. 1 on the charts and spawned No. 1 singles “With or Without You” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”
But as U2 took to the stage in Denver on Nov. 8, 1987, on the original “Joshua Tree” tour, frontman Bono wasn’t basking in the success — much of it brought about by the support of Irish-Americans. Instead, he was fuming with anger.
Earlier in day, in the small Northern Irish town of Enniskillen, a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army had detonated during a Remembrance Day Parade honoring World War I vets. The explosion killed 11 people and injured dozens — many of them retirees. A 12th victim would pass away after 13 years in a coma.
The broadly Catholic IRA had sought to drive out an occupying Brit- ish Army from Northern Ireland for decades using guerrilla tactics. The Unionists, loyal to the British government, had their own terrorist factions, and tit-for-tat attacks were common. But this bombing was especially heinous: No warning was given, and it occurred in an area packed with civilians. It was roundly condemned; British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called it “a blot on mankind.”
Days after the incident, Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political arm, took the unusual step of expressing “regret” over the massacre.
“Bono was legitimately outraged and upset,” says Phil Joanou, the director of the band’s “Rattle and Hum” tour documentary, which would be released the next year. “The band heard about it, and they followed the news during the day. The mood before the show was very somber.”
As U2 began a powerful version of the song “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” Bono’s rage boiled over, and he gave an impromptu speech, slamming not only the bombing, but the IrishAmericans who he felt were implicitly supporting or romanticizing such actions from a safe distance.
“I’ve had enough of Irish-Americans who haven’t been back to their country in 20 or 30 years, come up to me and talk about the resistance, the revolution back home. And the glory of the revolution. And the glory of dying for the revolution. F--k the revolution!” He went on to specifically mention the victims in Enniskillen. “Where’s the glory in bombing a Remembrance Day Parade of old-age pensioners, their medals taken out and polished up for the day?”
Daring to criticize your own fans was only half the problem. The tensions in Northern Ireland were so serious during the 1980s, the band had to deal with the possibility of deadly retribution for Bono’s statement.
“You have to remember that Bono lives in Dublin and goes to the same restaurants and pubs as everyone,” Joanou tells The Post.
“You damn well know he would have been going into places where people didn’t agree with him. A guy could just go up to you and shoot you in the head for it.”
THE band was aware they had to tread carefully on the subject when writing “Sunday Bloody Sunday” in 1982. Originally, guitarist The Edge penned lyrics that critiqued Republican and Unionist terrorist groups alike, but they were rewritten to be less overtly political and to keep the band (completed by bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr.) safe from reprisals.
Released on 1983’s “War” album, the finished song touched heavily on
both the events of Bloody Sunday in Dublin in 1920, which occurred during the Irish War of Independence, and a massacre in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1972, in which peaceful civil-rights protestors were killed by the British Army.
But the group had continually stressed that despite their Dublin roots, it was a nonviolent call for compassion rather than a rallying cry for Republicans seeking to reunite Ireland. Bono would often introduce the song during the ’80s by stating it was “not a rebel song,” and even flying a white flag on stage to underline the song’s peaceful intentions.
U2 also made frequent attempts to ensure that their success in America in the 1980s did not become entwined with IRA fundraising efforts by Irish-American expats. The band pulled out of a St. Patrick’s Day concert in New York City in 1982 because they realized it might be affiliated with Bobby Sands, an IRA member who had died in jail the previous year while on a hunger strike.
“People were throwing money on the stage during the Bobby Sands hunger strike,” Bono told Newsweek in 1984. “But what was that money for? Those dollars were arriving in the streets of Belfast and Derry as weapons and bombs.”
But for some fringe members of the Irish Republican cause, even that was seen as a betrayal, and they weren’t shy in letting the band know about their anger.
In the 2005 book “Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas,” the singer recalled an incident in the early ’80s when the band’s car was surrounded by IRA supporters, with one even trying to smash the windows with his hands while screaming, “Brits! Traitors!”
On another occasion later in the decade, the band was threatened with kidnapping, which counterterrorism police took seriously. “I remember we all had to have our toe prints taken as well as our fingerprints,” said Bono. “That set the imagination off . . . Were they gonna break our legs, or post [mail] them?”
BUT the events of Enniskillen set a new low in the political tension in Northern Ireland, and in Denver on “The Joshua Tree” tour, the cameras caught Bono’s fury. According to Joanou, the debate about whether to leave the speech in the final edit of “Rattle and Hum” continued for six months, with band and man- agement showing it to trusted friends and gathering opinions.
“In the end . . . the only way for Bono to decide was to consult his wife, Ali,” Joanou says. “It was one thing for Bono to put himself at risk, but another thing to put her at risk. It went right down to the final cut. Bono finally came back to me and said, ‘ Go ahead,’ but still, there was a lot of discomfort about it.”
Just months before “Rattle and Hum” opened in theaters, the risk involved in making public comments about the Irish troubles was illustrated when Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine drunkenly addressed a crowd in Belfast in May 1988. The singer reportedly said, “Give Ireland back to the Irish” before dedicating a song to “the cause.” Within moments, the crowd split into Republican/ Catholic and Unionist/Protestant factions, and a riot almost ensued. “We were escorted out of North[ern] Ireland in a bulletproof bus,” Mustaine told Loudwire magazine in 2016.
“Rattle and Hum” opened in October 1988. Bono found the “Sunday Bloody Sunday” sequence hard to watch and, according to the director, would sometimes even leave the room during premieres.
Once the wider Irish public got wind of the film, Joanou claims that the responses came in as expected. “There were public death threats made by the IRA against Bono and his family. There were rumors that Bono was specifically on an IRA death list. That haunted them for a couple of years afterwards, and they had to ramp up security.”
Danny Morrison, director of publicity during the 1980s for Sinn Fein, flatly refutes the claim of Bono being an assassination target.
“It’s total and absolute nonsense to think that he was under any threat,” Morrison tells The Post. “As an Irish Republican, I would not approve of anyone attacking, or even suggesting attacking, anyone for criticizing the Enniskillen bombing. Could you imagine the press the IRA would get if they took some action against Bono because he said something about them on stage in America?”
But one prominent Irish musician (who grew up during the Irish Troubles and who spoke to The Post anonymously) insists the threat was palpable for Bono, or anyone who spoke publicly on the matter.
“The danger may not have come from someone within the IRA,” the musician said. “It could have come from any Republican angered by Bono’s words, a lone-wolf or rogue element, someone with a lot of rage who felt their cause had been undermined. It took guts for him to say what he said because, as someone in the public eye, the threat of reprisal was real — whether sanctioned or not.”
Whatever the actual threat level for Bono and U2 in the late ’80s, it gradually subsided as the opposing factions in Northern Ireland sought peace during the 1990s. Eventually, the power-sharing government proposed in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 was put to a public vote. U2 even played a cameo role in the process by appearing at a concert in Belfast, designed to help convince young voters to accept the peace deal. They did, and the agreement stands to this day.
But the “Sunday Bloody Sunday” sequence of “Rattle and Hum” remains a tense document of more dangerous times.
“Most Americans didn’t get it,” Joanou says. “When people saw Bono making his speech in the movie, it was like, ‘OK, yeah, cool! Whatever.’ But for Bono and U2, it was completely serious, and they risked a lot by letting the world see it.”