Word: bandness
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...collective conscience. Bono has been flabbergasted to read that he and his wife Alison, another Mount Temple grad, live in a seaside castle near Dublin. "It's a little round tower," he laughs. "Three levels, three rooms." Domesticity presents its own problems. Although he, like the rest of the band, cherishes a bit of personal distance and privacy, Bono acknowledges, "My life is just a mess. When I am away, I'm not at home. When I'm home, I'm not at home. I come in when she is going out." Ali, who is studying politics at Dublin...
Politics and the past make perpetual demands, of course. The band underwrites Mother Records, an outfit that gives young bands their first shot. "We're trying to provide an opportunity for Irish groups," McGuinness says. "You don't have to be Irish, but it helps. We do have one Scottish group." Besides the trip to El Salvador last year, Bono and Ali found time for seven weeks of relief work in Ethiopia, and Mullen tries to stay tapped in to the roots: "All the neighbors knew my mother, and I try to drop in on them occasionally, just to keep...
There are further signs of changes and counterbalances as well. Although Bono has received lyric credit on the last two albums, the songwriting has traditionally involved the whole band, "chipping away," as Mullen puts it, "chipping away and doing it until it feels right. It takes an awful long time and is incredibly frustrating." Sometimes the system works well -- Pride (In the Name of Love) was written at a sound check in a total of seven minutes -- but the Edge is mulling over further streamlining. "I think in the future Bono and I will work together more closely," he says...
...with a gay Viet Nam vet. "I spotted empty bottles all over the roof with the label Wild Irish Rose wine," he says. "So I started this song. It is about suicide. The opening line is 'This city of angels has brought a devil out in me.' " (Well, the band has been listening to a good deal of country music.) He yearns to write a song that, as Manager McGuinness puts it, "could go into the language...
...second cut on The Joshua Tree, has one of those seemingly casual melodies that, a little like a high-flying version of the Police's Every Breath You Take, is heard once and slips directly into the collective memory. It manages to work much of what the band believes in, yearns for and has gone through, in the past and in prospect, into a single simple, elegant reflection...