Bono by Michka Assayas Page A

got to meet those who were at the top of that particular tree, they turned out to be very clever, very smart managers of their own brand and, in the case of Christy, Helena [Christensen], Naomi, and Kate [Moss], people you’d want to hang out with.
    Really?
    Hmm . . . They were much more interesting than most musicians. We had a lot of fun, a lot of laughs. We spent summers together. It was great, but it was anathema for a lot of our fans.
    Some thought you had lost it completely, or betrayed some sort of sacred cause. You were living the rock-star life.
    The funny thing is, those girls, all of them, love and know music more than most musicians. Kate and Christy are brilliant DJs, and always know what’s coming round the corner musically. Helena the same, and one of the great conversationalists, hungry for ideas—what can we make happen that night, that year. They can see potential, where others might miss it. And Christy just doesn’t miss a thing. Our summers in the mid-nineties were a little heady, a little hedonistic, but Edge and myself fell back in love with music in a way that was largely inspired by those girls and some of our other friends, like Michael Hutchence: great house parties, dancing, swimming in the Mediterranean, night-swimming—there was a great REM song—Michael Stipe, a true poet. Frivolity, exactly the time when we needed some.
    There’s a word you’re not using, which is decadence .
    I’m not using it because it wasn’t decadent, it was just the opposite. Decadence is when you have it all in front of you and don’t notice. I noticed everything. And I appreciated it.
    What about the rest of your family?
    It was a great time for them also. We were all at home, Ali was now closer to the “big girls,” as they were known, than myself and Edge. There were young kids to look after, so we kept it somehow grounded.
    But living the rock star’s life was not what we expected from U2. Isn’t it a cliché: here you are now, with a villa in the south of France. Didn’t the Rolling Stones have a villa up the road where they recorded Exile On Main Street in 1971?
    They should have stayed there; that’s a great album. I’m one of the people who believes there’s more in them. The music has to come out of a life. If there’s no life, there’s no music. But I think, again, as much as we were playing with clichés, we were also trying to crack them open. You’ve gotta remember the context here, the context of grunge, the sort of Seattle sound that was dominant at the time. I loved Seattle and I loved the sound, in fact the sound in the sense of a river, as it comes into the delta, the mouth of the river. It’s industrial, it’s gray, there’s rainy skies, there’s a plaid shirt, there’s ripped jeans, there’s thrift-shop jumpers with holes in them, and this kind of umbilical roar from Kurt Cobain. And there arrive in the harbor, plastic pants on a giant cruise ship with a satellite dish at the top going the wrong way up the river. [laughs] On Zoo TV, I suppose we were against the obvious definitions of authenticity. Authenticity is about an honest discourse between heart and mind, body, soul. It’s nothing to do with the clothes you wear. These white rock stars, they think they’re authentic, and that Prince is just some sort of show business Christmas tree. But he has more soul in his little finger than a whole harbor full of those rock bands. Kraftwerk . . . There’s another example of cosmic soul.
    The grunge movement was very much anti-eighties. It was aimed against the pretension to glamour of the eighties.
    But the eighties weren’t glamorous. The eighties were ugly: big hair, shoulder pads. I see the eighties as very ugly and very unglamorous. I think U2 are one of the few things you can recommend from the eighties.
    The eighties were the reign of fun, fashion,