M Joseph £10.99 pp330
This book had oodles of potential for falling flat on its face, but Neil McCormick has the bravado, the ego and the bloody-minded obstinacy to pull it off. He also had the good fortune to have witnessed every detail of U2’s rise to stardom, by virtue of having been at Dublin’s Mount Temple school at the same time as the band members. He remains on good terms with them 30 years later, and his encounters and phone conversations with Bono are the spine of the book — argumentative, philosophical and challenging. One thing he doesn’t explain is how either of them manages to get a word in edgeways, since neither he nor Bono ever stops talking. In one scene, McCormick goes to hear U2 working on their Joshua Tree album. “I’m speechless,” he says. “That makes a change,” says guitarist The Edge.
McCormick is the pop columnist for The Daily Telegraph, but it isn’t the career he foresaw. A talented singer and songwriter, he envisaged embracing stardom on the most lavish scale, as the biggest, brashest pop phenomenon who ever trod the boards. His original blueprint went like this: “I would release a classic debut album of teen-angst pop that would delight critics and teenyboppers alike . . . we would make a couple of films that would be the finest synthesis of rock and cinema since A Hard Day’s Night . . . I would be knighted.” Even allowing for McCormick’s inexhaustible capacity for drama and self-promotion, he came pretty close to pop stardom, especially with his band Shook Up!, who were showered with plaudits from the press and on several occasions came within a whisker of a lucrative record deal. Every time, some ludicrous accident or malicious corporate skulduggery intervened (assuming we take his account at face value), leaving McCormick and his brother and band-partner Ivan stewing in morbidity and frustration.
This succession of failures was made all the more unbearable by the soaring trajectory of his Mount Temple pals, who became the biggest band the world had seen for a generation. Every time McCormick opened a newspaper, he’d see a picture of Bono with the Pope, Pavarotti or various presidents, while U2 filled stadiums as nonchalantly as other people boil an egg. It was Bono who was fulfilling McCormick’s own exorbitant ambitions, so no wonder the irrepressible vocalist and global ambassador for all imaginable causes ended up stalking McCormick’s dreams. “I am all of rock’n’roll,” the dream-Bono tells him during one nocturnal visitation. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
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McCormick is forced to admit to the occasional spasm of jealousy towards the new Fab Four, and they probably won’t thank him for reminding readers of their early flirtation with a bizarre group of evangelical Christians called Shalom, but overall he depicts Bono and co as being as rational and balanced as people in their position could hope to be. Visiting them backstage, McCormick tells Bono not to complain, because he has everything he ever wanted. “I’ve got everything you ever wanted,” Bono replies skilfully. “How do you know what I want?”
The book ticks along on several levels. The author’s natural argumentativeness expresses itself in a continuing debate about faith and religion, often with Bono as his sparring partner. McCormick’s portrait of late-1970s Dublin is a stark reminder of how separate the city felt from the London where the author now lives, a backwater still suffocated by the kneejerk conservatism of the Catholic church.
Another strand recounts the author’s debilitating experiences with the music industry in all its mendacious vainglory. McCormick isn’t afraid to strip a few layers off some fairly prominent figures, such as former music publisher Lucien Grainge, whom McCormick considered to be “full of shit”. Grainge is now chairman of Universal Music UK. Ossie Kilkenny, U2’s accountant, comes in for a similar beating, having tried to get the author to sign a management contract of Dickensian onerousness.
McCormick frequently deflates his natural bumptiousness with self-mockery, and the only time I found his tone truly irksome was in his account of his decision to quit music and become a journalist. Instantly, every commissioning editor in London is ringing him up, marvelling at his brilliance and sending him on exotic assignments. He is also an olympian namedropper, ostentatiously recounting how Paul McCartney kept ringing him up to congratulate him on his work, and how much Keith Richards enjoyed his company. On balance, it’s probably just as well it was Bono who became Bono.
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