Ivan McCormick is in the music studio in his Hampshire country house. Guitars hang on the bright red and orange walls. He points at a pair of faded framed photographs showing two teenage bands playing at the same gig in a school gym in Dublin in 1978. One was the Undertakers — which included McCormick and his elder brother, Neil. The other was the Hype, featuring their schoolmates Paul Hewson and David Evans.
More than three decades later, Neil has given up on performing and is a writer, while Ivan still plays in a covers band at weddings and events, supplementing his income from doing up property. Hewson, by contrast, is known these days as Bono; Evans as The Edge. Their band, renamed U2 soon after that school concert, have sold 150m records and won 22 Grammys.
We’ve stayed friends, though I don’t exactly hang out with Bono — he hangs out with presidents of countries and Bruce Springsteen McCormick was a 13-year-old Dublin schoolboy when he saw a scrap of paper on the noticeboard at Mount Temple Comprehensive, looking for recruits for a new band. For the six weeks that followed, he played second guitar at band practice with members of the future U2. He was several years younger than them, however, and left to start a band with his brother. The Undertakers later became Shook Up! and, after a decade struggling to make it, released a 1980s pop album and went on tour.
The brothers and their doomed attempt to hit the big time are the subject of a new British film, Killing Bono, which opened on Friday. While U2 headed for international stardom, their schoolmates (played by Ben Barnes and Robert Sheehan) made a series of errors.
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They staged gigs at the same time as the Pope’s visit to Ireland and Live Aid, and turned down a record deal from Bono.
Bono himself has seen the film and liked it. He wrote the foreword for Neil’s book, on which the film is based, and also suggested the controversial title — a play on a running joke between the two men that Neil was soaking up Bono’s bad luck and could change this only by killing him. “We’ve stayed friends, though I don’t exactly hang out with Bono — he hangs out with presidents of countries and people like Bruce Springsteen,” McCormick laughs.
Is there a sense of missed opportunity? Apparently not. “When we started our band, U2 weren’t famous, and we used to play gigs together all the time. We were part of the local scene. Bono helped us in lots of ways — when we did get a record deal, he paid for a solicitor.”
After Shook Up! split in 1998, McCormick, now 48, packed his bags and set off travelling. “I thought ‘I can’t face this any more’, and went off to see the world,” he says, sitting in the sunny garden of his home near Hook. “Originally, I thought I’d do it by touring with my band, but that didn’t happen.” He ended up working in a French ski resort, where he met his wife, Louise, 37. They married in 2002 and have three children — Daphne, 2, Boris, 5, and Alfie, 7.
McCormick has come a long way since he and Neil shared a “box room” in a Victorian house in Belsize Park, north London. “We had no more space than a utility room between us,” he says. “We didn’t have any money — I made the curtains from postmen’s sacks.”
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Now he has 2,700 sq ft of space, half of which he built himself, a large garden with a trampoline and a view of horses grazing in the adjoining field. His band, 29 Fingers (the original pianist had only nine of them — including thumbs, that is), makes him a steady living. Bono, meanwhile, has a personal fortune estimated at more than £100m, owns homes in the south of France and New York, was nominated for the Nobel peace prize and has an honorary knighthood.
McCormick claims not to be troubled by how differently their lives have turned out. “When I was young, all I wanted was glory,” he says. “Now I’d much rather have the money. At the time, I would have done it for nothing — I just wanted people to listen to me playing guitar and singing.”
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The trailer for Killing Bono, out April 1
He says his attitude changed while he was in Australia, working for a man who ran a petrol station: “He was the most popular guy I’ve ever met. I thought, ‘He’s not a rock star, but everybody adores him’. He became a role model and I decided to get on with my life.”
So, in 1997, he bought a £100,000 house in southeast London with a friend. His parents came over from Ireland, and for three months they all worked on it. “It was a dump,” he says. “We made the basement into a flat and the upstairs into a house, then let the whole thing out. That’s when I got into property.”
I got in the digger, started pulling all the levers, found out how it worked and ended up laying the rest of the foundation Within two years, he had bought a £270,000 double-fronted house near Greenwich. He urged Louise to buy and do up her own place as well. “She didn’t seem interested in houses, so she bought the first one she looked at” — a house in Wimbledon, which he also did up.
Deciding to move to Hampshire, the couple sold their London homes and, in 2004, bought the half-converted barn for £370,000.
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“When I drove in, I knew instantly that I wanted it,” McCormick says. “It was little more than a building site — one of the two barn buildings had been badly converted, without heating or insulation. The grounds were concrete.”
Obtaining planning permission to knock down one of the houses and replace it with a big extension to the old barn was a two-year saga, during which their plans were rejected and they had to change architects.
After first hiring a team of Lithuanian builders, who turned out to be hopeless (“I would catch them reading the plans upside down”), McCormick fired them and decided to do the work himself. “I got in the digger, started pulling all the levers, found out how it worked and ended up laying the rest of the foundation,” he says.
In any case, he had a love of DIY, which he had inherited from his father. “He would never pay someone to do a job if he thought he could do it himself,” McCormick says. “And that was nearly everything — he could do plumbing, wiring, plastering, woodwork, decorating. I almost can’t bring myself to hire anybody, because I feel my dad’s looking down at me, saying, ‘Ah, no, you could do that yourself.’”
His bandmates also helped out — including the pianist, who drove the dumper truck. “We saved a fortune,” Louise says. The work has cost thecouple about £110,000 — a little more than half of the architect’s original £200,000 quote.
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Most of the furniture and materials used in the house are second-hand. “I have it ingrained that you don’t buy things, you make them,” McCormick says. “Anything anyone offered us, we just said ‘yes’ to. We had loads of space.” The house is still a work in progress — the master bedroom is a skeleton and he hopes to spend the next few monthsfinishing it.
Would McCormick rather be off touring the world? “I always saw myself married, with kids, and living in a nice place in the country. I thought I’d get here having earned a fortune selling records, and would be sitting here in my studio, dreaming up my next album. It’s not quite that, but it’s not far off.”