Bono by Michka Assayas Page B

style over substance, the love of money, all those things that people thought U2 were standing against.
    We were, and still were in the nineties, challenging them, we just took a different route. The nineties were much sexier.
    The nineties were sexier for you, because you had been a zealot during the eighties. Others hadn’t been. I mean, look at Madonna. I think the funniest thing about the nineties is that pop artists wanted to go dark and introspective, and acts like U2 wanted to go pop and fight for their right to party. They sort of changed sides and crossed each other’s paths. Would you agree?
    But Achtung, Baby and Zooropa are hardly pop. They are as intense and dense as it gets. In fact I remember telling this to a German journalist before the album came out. But he misunderstood “dense” for “dance.” The remixes put the confusion to work.
    That was in Europe. What about America?
    I loved Pearl Jam. Eddie Vedder had an authenticity in that voice of his. They had and they still have commitment as a band. There wasn’t much of that in the eighties. In fact, at the end of the nineties, when the PopMart show eventually got to Seattle, the city was really good to us. It was the best show of the tour, outside of Chicago. All the Seattle musicians came down to show support for what we were doing. You know, even Kurt Cobain, before he died, was dressing up in a silver shirt.
    Who says no the most often in the band? I’m guessing it’s Larry.
    [laughs] Well, I wouldn’t have thought that needed much private detective work. Yeah, he’s by far the most cautious person in the band, and does not want to set out on the journey until he has a clear idea of where we’re going and how we might get there. How old-fashioned! [laughs] You know, he’s the most sensible man in the band in that sense.
    I remember, when The Joshua Tree was released, way before it turned out to be your biggest success, Larry was the one, in the interviews, who was supposed to have convinced you that the duty of U2 was to write and perform timeless pop songs.
    Yeah. He and Paul McGuinness are the two people around us who are the most intolerant of what we might call the artiste , which is to say they’re suspicious of art. [laughs] But that’s all about control. If I were an artist, I’d want to be in advertising, because I would find it very difficult—and Larry would find it impossible—to hand over judgment of the quality of your work to critics. That’s the problem with art: what is and what isn’t art is decided by very few people. So those people, because there’s less of them, become very powerful. Whereas with a song, it goes on the radio: people hear it, they like it, they put it at the top of the charts. It’s not mediated the same way. So I think Larry’s always had a suspicion of art, because, then, we’re depending on the critics. Any band that has ever depended on the critics is usually broken up by the critics.
    Because there’s too much pressure on them? Is that what you mean?
    Well, that’s just no way to live. So he was always looking for the clearer idea, the clearer melody line with the least pretension.
    But was he happy while you were recording Achtung, Baby ?
    Well, no. That’s what I’m saying. So, therefore, the only way Larry was going to like Achtung, Baby is if the songs were great. He couldn’t care less about the fact that we were working with technology. And the art project, that was just Bono and Edge being self-indulgent. Whereas the songs—are they any good? If not, let’s go home, this place is freezing.
    What was his opinion of Brian Eno?
    Well, there again, there is a perfect example. Larry would have the least amount of time for process as an essential ingredient. Brian’s all about process. The first thing Brian does when he arrives at a session is he redecorates the room—I’m not