U2 exclusive
As the band return home, they speak to Brendan O’Connor
“Because Bono’s voice went so quickly... there’s a 70pc chance it’s a vocal haemorrhage. If that’s the case, it’s not good”
When the unthinkable happened at U2’s recent Berlin concert and Bono lost his voice, it could have been the end. Bono tells Brendan O’Connor about that emasculating moment, about the crisis of faith sparked by a near-death experience, the reliving of his mother’s death on stage every night, and the gift of an olive tree from the Pope The Showman
In this moment in Madrid, Bono is like a small child. A small, vulnerable child. He seems fragile. You would wrap him up in cotton wool. His voice, which he just used to sing to tens of thousands of people, is tiny. “Performing reduces as it enlarges,” he says later.
It feels wrong to talk to him right now in this intimate moment as he walks off the stage, but vulnerable little boys need approval, and show people, even if they’re Bono, need it, so I tell him that I think it was the best U2 show I’ve ever seen. Funnily enough, in this moment, right now, there is no one else there to tell him that. Even the rest of the band are gone already, whisked off to the airport as soon as the last note is played, to get home to Dublin tonight.
Then someone wraps a towel around Bono, which seems appropriate, and someone hands him a bottle of water. He seems to struggle for a moment with how to grasp this object, maybe with what it is. He is, for now, hollowed out, empty. Because he left it all out there on the stage, for all those people. Because that is the U2 promise, what he calls the punk-rock promise. That you don’t just do the gig. You have to actually go there yourself every night, to find what Bono bluntly calls The Thing.
For Bono, on this tour, that means reliving again and again the death of his mother when was he was a boy. And how he managed to reclaim her, and her memory, in a house where her name was barely mentioned for a long time after she died. It also means reliving an existential crisis, a crisis of faith that arose from coming as close to death as a person can come. And while some of the show is acting, it is method acting. He has to go there to some extent.
Even though you know on some level he does this every night, even though you saw him do it two years ago, the point in the show where he shows those videos — the only precious record he has of his mother — and when he segues from singing The Ocean into Iris, his song for her, it feels almost obscene to be portraying things this raw in a rock ’n’ roll gig.
It is, perhaps, this need to do it for real every night that makes Bono anxious and antsy sometimes on a show day. Sometimes he wakes up feeling nauseous, thinking, “I don’t know if I can do this.” Not play the show, or sing the show, but find The Thing, the thing that “makes it New Year’s Eve wherever you are in the world, on Tuesday night”. So this whole juggernaut, this show, this band, is still a fragile thing.
Sometimes you can’t make it on your own
A few weeks before, in Berlin, there was a stark reminder of just how fragile. When Bono’s voice suddenly went, early in the gig, with no warning, The Edge kept playing. But in his head, as he stood there playing guitar, The Edge was running through options. Should he step up and sing? Then he wonders if they should get someone to go and find the taped guide vocals they sometimes use for rehearsal. And maybe Bono could mime. He’s running through these options really quickly in his head as he keeps playing, but he realises they can’t do that. It wouldn’t be a U2 gig. The gig is halted while they figure out what to do.
When the band convenes beneath the stage, Bono feels not so much embarrassed as emasculated, like he’s had his hair chopped off ala Samson: “The strong man … with no strength”. The thing Bono finds most odd is that there was nothing wrong with his voice. He’s done gigs with a sore voice before. They didn’t finish an encore once about 30 years ago, but there has never been a show cancelled. But this time, he says, “It moved so quickly from singing well to not being able to sing at all — that was the shock.”
Under the stage, the others are being very nice about it. The audience was nice about it, too. They sang the song — Red Flag Day — for Bono. They would have sung the rest of the gig for him, too. Because there is a special bond here. And, as The Edge says about U2 songs, “Once they’re out, we feel in some ways they’re no longer our songs; they belong to everyone who listens to a U2 album, so that spirit really roils us up and supports us.”
Under the stage, they ring Bono’s voice doctor, Stephen Zeitels. The Edge talks to him. Zeitels thinks, largely because Bono’s voice went so quickly, that there’s a 70pc chance it’s a vocal haemorrhage. If that’s the case, it’s not good. If it’s a bad vocal haemorrhage, you’re talking years, if ever, to get back singing.
Bono can tell that people around him are contemplating that it could all be over. Not just the gig, but the whole thing. But Bono knows it isn’t over. He knows he hasn’t broken it. He could feel his voice was working. He knew he would have felt something if it had popped. But Zeitels was adamant the gig could not go ahead. Bono’s throat needed to be checked.
Even now, a few weeks on, at the Madrid leg, no one you talk to seems to know exactly what the problem was. Bono says they’re not sure, but it might have been a vocal spasm brought on by an allergic reaction to something. It might have been smoke; it might have been a blockage in the ventilation system.
Bono was listening to old tapes recently, of a young U2 performing in the Marquee in London, in 1981. The band sounded incredible, he says, “but what’s not incredible is me”. The other three have always been “good to great”, he thinks. And while he can see that he was probably a good frontman back then, a good town crier, spirit, lightning rod, he doesn’t think he was a great singer. Right now, though, he thinks he has finally caught up with them. Everyone is now on top form, and this is why he thinks this is the best time ever to see U2. He had this realisation in the middle of a concert in New York recently. The band were on the smaller E stage, where they play together at close proximity for a good chunk of the gig. They were playing Acrobat, Bono says. The Edge was performing alchemy on the guitar, Larry was playing like Ginger Baker, and Adam was on fire. And Bono had this realisation. That it’s not about the 80s or the 90s; this moment is the best time ever to see this band. They are on fire, he thinks, and now he’s matching their fire.