Bono by Michka Assayas

to the End of the Night : “When you write, you should put your skin on the table.”
    Rock ’n’ roll is often the opposite. Rather than putting your skin on the table, it’s finding a second skin, a mask.
    That’s one of the big contradictions for an outsider like me. How do you reconcile your earnestness with the need for a showbiz facade?
    Never trust a performer, performers are the best liars. They lie for a living. You’re an actor, in a certain sense. But a writer is not a liar. There’s a piece of Scripture: “Know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Even as a child, I remember sitting, listening to my teacher in school talking about the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats. He had a writer’s block—there was a period where he couldn’t write. I put my hand up and said: “Why didn’t he write about that?”—“Don’t be stupid. Put your hand down, don’t be so cheeky.” But I didn’t mean it as a smart-arse. I have lived off that idea: Know the truth, the truth will set you free. If I’ve nothing to say, that’s the first line of the song. In fact, even on our second album [October] , I was about having nothing to say: I try to sing this song . . . I try to stand up but I can’t find my feet / I try to speak up but only with you am I complete . This has always been the trick for me. And maybe it is just that: a trick. But it tricks me out of myself. I am able to write, always, because as a writer, I am always unable not to be true. As a performer,it isn’t always so. You know the thing that keeps me honest as a performer? The fucking high notes I have to sing. Because unless I am totally in that character, I actually can’t sing—it’s out of my range. That’s what keeps me honest on a stage. If I could perform with one step removed, I probably would. It is very costly, by the way, to go on tour and have to step into those songs every night. I suppose I’d like to be a non-Method actor.
    Well, you put yourself closer to the tradition of gospel, of the preacher possessed. I mean, when rock ’n’ roll first appeared, it had evolved from mad preachers.
    That’s right.
    Are you implying that you’re not able to be a pure comedian, and that you’ve become this mad preacher?
    Isn’t that interesting that U2 is, in one sense, in exactly the same spot as so many rock ’n’ roll people, right back to Elvis? That thing of the gospel and the blues: one hand on the positive terminal, one hand on the minus terminal. And Elvis’s dance was really electrocution.
    Coming back to the early eighties, is there some point when you said to yourself: maybe this won’t work out, maybe this band will fail, and maybe I will have to go back to having a proper job, and earning a living and being a serious person?
    Maybe before PopMart [the 1997–98 U2 tour]. Around that time.
    That was late.
    Yeah, because, well, we were risking bankruptcy. You see, Zoo TV cost so much, I mean, it cost a quarter of a million dollars a day to take that thingaround. So, if ten percent less people had come to see us, we’d have gone bankrupt, and with those kinds of bills, you don’t go bankrupt a little, you go bankrupt a lot. I can’t think about it now. A quarter of a million dollars a day, that’s a lot of money. We’ve since found good people who are prepared to take that risk for us, but anyway at the time it was scary. I remember speaking to Ali about the consequences of failure. She was fearless: “What’s the worst, to sell the house, and get a smaller one to get rid of the other one we don’t need, end up living like all our friends who lead a normal life? What’s wrong with that? They’re still our friends. It wasn’t like we changed communities and we’re like a great disgrace. They’d probably be relieved: ‘Oh,