He rang later that evening, tipsy and genial. Only one thing seemed to niggle him: he was at pains to emphasise that Eamon Dunphy’s characterisation of U2 as a ruthless empire was wrong. Dunphy’s flawed but courageous biography of U2, Unforgettable Fire, had been published the previous year, resulting in sniping between singer and biographer.
I duly spoke to Dunphy, who was unexpectedly warm about Bono. Again there was just one niggle, namely the savage review of the biography that had appeared in Hot Press, written by Neil McCormick, which catalogued the book’s mistakes and denounced it as a travesty. Dunphy assumed a statesmanlike position. “Tell that little bollocks,” he said, “that I’m laughing all the way to my Swiss bank.”
McCormick’s review had been informed by his long acquaintance with the band. He had attended Mount Temple comprehensive at the same time as them and he had been present at their first performance as Feedback.
Over the years McCormick, who is now the music critic of The Daily Telegraph, has written a good deal about U2. The religious tension between his position and theirs has been a constant in his pieces, as it is in his new book, I Was Bono’s Doppelganger, which catalogues the anguish he experienced watching his childhood friend ascend to global stardom while he frittered his life away in humiliatingly fruitless efforts to become a rock star.
The other constant in McCormick’s writing about U2 is the way in which it is so hopelessly compromised.
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One can trawl through his cuttings and find nary a cross word about a band who, even in their more defensive moments, concede that some of their work has been less than tip-top. Even the sprawling, scrappy Rattle and Hum is, McCormick asserts, a great album.
In his work on U2, McCormick has functioned not as a surrogate of the reader — which is the first and irreducible duty of any journalist — but as a fan with a typewriter.
As he details in his book, he has spent his adult life pining to be like U2’s singer, his sleeping hours invaded by dreams of being Bono. With even his subconscious colonised by U2, few could expect objectivity from McCormick.
So taken were the band by his book that they have hired him to work on their autobiography, U2 by U2, which is due to be published next year.
He continues to file stories on the band for the Telegraph and doubtless will carry on doing so from his uniquely privileged position as a confidant. He also continues to denounce Dunphy’s work on U2 as a travesty because of its sprinkling of howlers.
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Stephen Hawking would surely be interested. The closer you get to U2, the more the light bends.