Bono by Michka Assayas

house, steadycams and cranes, extra lighting—lights, action. Or in this case, lights, no action. We went ahead with the show out of respect for the people who turned up and the size of the bills we were going to have to pay if we didn’t roll cameras. Adam’s bass tech, Stuart Morgan, understudied that night, it was a heroic performance from him, and in fairness a performance deserving to be lit, which he wasn’t. He was left in the shadows. [laughs] In fact, some people who were there thought it was Adam, which probably hurt him the most, though I might say, if I could, something about Adam’s bass playing, and why in the end, it is irreplaceable. The bass can be the blandest of instruments in a rock quartet. Most concerts I go to, and not even rock—jazz, pop, blues—I don’t notice the bass. Nobody does. Nobody knows what the guy who gets the girl is doing. In U2 that is not the case. I felt an enormous void that night and I felt I was falling down it. I felt we all were.
    But had you seen it coming?
    Yeah, yeah, we had seen it coming. But what can you do? He’s so fun, he was so good at it. [laughs] He was very, very good at it. But it takes a long time to recover from that stuff. You can lose the spring in your step for a few years. I think separation from drink and drugs is probably very like separation from your wife. They say it takes about half the length of time that you’ve put in it to get over it. So if you’ve been married for ten years, it’ll take you five. If you’ve been married for twenty, it’ll take you ten for you to be really over it. I think if Adam was at it for ten hard years, it probably took him five years to get over it.
    What sort of impact did it have on the band?
    Whenever Adam got into trouble, we were always there for him. And no matter what scandal was happening, no one cared about the band in those moments. Everyone just cared about him.
    Were there moments when you thought it was putting the band in danger?
    Oh yeah, for sure, I was always concerned. Because, for us, it wasn’t a win until everybody had scored. Everybody had to make it through this alive, to misquote Jim Morrison. Our motto was: “ Everybody gets out of here alive.”
    So Adam was dating Naomi Campbell and you had come face-to-face with the paparazzi and the celebrity business. It must have been traumatic for that zealot still breathing, from time to time, inside yourself.
    No, no, no. Because you remember celebrity was on the list. It was part of the subject matter. Sliding down the surface of things was the energy of that period. I was the one who agreed to do the cover of Vogue with Christy [Turlington], and I had had enough of these po-faced U2ers. We were travelling the same routes as these girls, staying in the same hotels, though we weren’t walking in the same shoes. [laughs]
    Who knows? Maybe in private.
    I’m sure Adam tried them on, occasionally, as a great connoisseur of the shoe that he is. But he certainly poured champagne into a few. There was a certain fascination with their power with the populace. It goes back to the silent movie stars. Because in the thirties, Hollywood was never as powerful as it was in the silent age, and there’s great power in not opening your mouth.
    It’s a power you haven’t relied very much on during your career.
    Which is why I so respected it in the likes of Christy Turlington, who, when she chooses to open her mouth, has a lot to say, thoughtful, considered, and intelligent as she is.
    People say there were no bigger stars than Rudolph Valentino and Greta Garbo.
    None bigger. And these super models [Christy, Naomi, and company] were the silent movie stars of our age. Blank faces and stares that on one level suggest a kind of erotic acquiescence, and on the other a kind of spitting at the cameras, a kind of annoyance seasoned with mischief. [laughs] There was something very powerful. When you