HelloAngel
ONE love, blood, life
The son also rises
Bob Hewson loved opera. Now, whenever his son Bono hits the high notes, he can't help but think of him. Here, U2's charismatic front man talks to Sean O'Hagan about the song he wrote for his father's funeral, why photographer Anton Corbijn is the band's 'fifth member' and his life-changing moment in an African orphanage
It is 22 years since the most famous photographer in rock met the four gauche young Irishmen who were destined to become the biggest rock group in the world. Back then Anton Corbijn - an implausibly tall Dutchman - worked for NME, and carried just two 35mm cameras. Back then, U2 looked like a bunch of Dublin scruffs, all ponytails and shaggy cuts, and sounded as resolutely unfashionable as their taste in headwear suggested.
'That's me wearing what Larry used to refer to as "the souffle" on my head,' says Bono. 'That's the beret they begged me not to wear.' He sighs in a way that suggests that they - the other three - were right. Corbijn, though, somehow made even the young, beret-wearing Bono look, if not cool, certainly credible.
Bono has decamped to his house in the south of France on the eve of another marathon U2 world tour, which begins in San Diego next month. He is leafing through selected images from U2 & I, a lavishly packaged diary of Corbijn's long relationship with the band. As the 400-odd pages attest, it is difficult to imagine another pop group whose music, in all its myriad shapes and forms, has been so defined by a single photographer. 'I think of Anton as a collaborator, visually,' elaborates Bono. 'He taught us to experiment.'
The book's trajectory of images backs up that statement. Here, for instance, is U2 as an awkward and uneasy young group, looking all at sea in the sleek and shiny early Eighties pop world. Flick forward a decade, and here is U2 hamming it up in drag for the quantum leap into irony and sonic experimentation that occurred around the Zoo TV tour in 1995. Here is the young Bono, in yet another hat, looking like a Hopi Indian, and staring at the camera with the suspicion that it might indeed steal his soul, or, at least, compromise his integrity.
Flick forward again, and here is Bono as The Fly, playing the role of the world's biggest rock star to the max, lounging in a bath several storeys above Broadway, in shades, with champagne on ice. Even without the music, you can trace, in these images, that great leap from monochrome to Technicolor, from po-faced to po-mo and beyond.
'There was definitely a sense, early on, that we didn't belong,' says Bono. 'I suppose we felt guilty we weren't real rock stars. We felt that we were pretending. And we sensed disappointment from other people that we were so awkward.'
From the people around you? 'No. It was a more general thing. It was, like, "Of all the people to become the biggest rock band in the world, who would have thought it would be them?" That was a prevailing attitude. That we didn't have the star thing down.'
And, for a considerable while - say, the first 10 years of their existence, an eternity in pop terms - they really didn't have the star thing down. What is palpable in the early photographs is the sense of a would-be rock group not quite knowing how to be. Though they were inspired by Seventies * È punk, and by the Clash in particular, there is no rebel posturing on display here.
'Well, we tried it, but it didn't work,' says Bono, laughing. 'We tried on various guises before we found ourselves. I think the only time we were self-conscious was when the cameras came out. The thing is, we knew we didn't know how to look good. We were acutely aware of that. Our attitude has always been: if you don't know, find somebody who does. In this instance, that somebody was Anton.' Corbijn obviously saw some seed of greatness in the group, despite the hats.
'Instinctively, he got us,' Bono recalls. 'He saw the possibilities. Remember, this was the New Romantic era. People were dressing up as potted plants to go out for the night. And you know what? A lot of people still looked better than us! The general look at the time was effete and homoerotic, but we were Irish; we couldn't be that. We looked like we'd just got off the boat. Because we had.'
Then, suddenly serious, he says. 'In truth, I think Anton found a masculinity in us that was very out of step with the time, but that has stood the test of time.' Corbijn's great gift, according to Bono, is that, 'He shoots the music you are making, who you can be rather than who you are.' Perhaps the most definitive illustration of that gift was his now iconic image of U2 that graced the cover of their breakthrough album, The Joshua Tree, in 1987: four stern figures in a barren and biblical desert landscape. 'It was Anton who sent us down that dusty road.'
To read the remainder of this article, please visit The Observer's website: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1405169,00.html
Thanks to Party Boy!
Bob Hewson loved opera. Now, whenever his son Bono hits the high notes, he can't help but think of him. Here, U2's charismatic front man talks to Sean O'Hagan about the song he wrote for his father's funeral, why photographer Anton Corbijn is the band's 'fifth member' and his life-changing moment in an African orphanage
It is 22 years since the most famous photographer in rock met the four gauche young Irishmen who were destined to become the biggest rock group in the world. Back then Anton Corbijn - an implausibly tall Dutchman - worked for NME, and carried just two 35mm cameras. Back then, U2 looked like a bunch of Dublin scruffs, all ponytails and shaggy cuts, and sounded as resolutely unfashionable as their taste in headwear suggested.
'That's me wearing what Larry used to refer to as "the souffle" on my head,' says Bono. 'That's the beret they begged me not to wear.' He sighs in a way that suggests that they - the other three - were right. Corbijn, though, somehow made even the young, beret-wearing Bono look, if not cool, certainly credible.
Bono has decamped to his house in the south of France on the eve of another marathon U2 world tour, which begins in San Diego next month. He is leafing through selected images from U2 & I, a lavishly packaged diary of Corbijn's long relationship with the band. As the 400-odd pages attest, it is difficult to imagine another pop group whose music, in all its myriad shapes and forms, has been so defined by a single photographer. 'I think of Anton as a collaborator, visually,' elaborates Bono. 'He taught us to experiment.'
The book's trajectory of images backs up that statement. Here, for instance, is U2 as an awkward and uneasy young group, looking all at sea in the sleek and shiny early Eighties pop world. Flick forward a decade, and here is U2 hamming it up in drag for the quantum leap into irony and sonic experimentation that occurred around the Zoo TV tour in 1995. Here is the young Bono, in yet another hat, looking like a Hopi Indian, and staring at the camera with the suspicion that it might indeed steal his soul, or, at least, compromise his integrity.
Flick forward again, and here is Bono as The Fly, playing the role of the world's biggest rock star to the max, lounging in a bath several storeys above Broadway, in shades, with champagne on ice. Even without the music, you can trace, in these images, that great leap from monochrome to Technicolor, from po-faced to po-mo and beyond.
'There was definitely a sense, early on, that we didn't belong,' says Bono. 'I suppose we felt guilty we weren't real rock stars. We felt that we were pretending. And we sensed disappointment from other people that we were so awkward.'
From the people around you? 'No. It was a more general thing. It was, like, "Of all the people to become the biggest rock band in the world, who would have thought it would be them?" That was a prevailing attitude. That we didn't have the star thing down.'
And, for a considerable while - say, the first 10 years of their existence, an eternity in pop terms - they really didn't have the star thing down. What is palpable in the early photographs is the sense of a would-be rock group not quite knowing how to be. Though they were inspired by Seventies * È punk, and by the Clash in particular, there is no rebel posturing on display here.
'Well, we tried it, but it didn't work,' says Bono, laughing. 'We tried on various guises before we found ourselves. I think the only time we were self-conscious was when the cameras came out. The thing is, we knew we didn't know how to look good. We were acutely aware of that. Our attitude has always been: if you don't know, find somebody who does. In this instance, that somebody was Anton.' Corbijn obviously saw some seed of greatness in the group, despite the hats.
'Instinctively, he got us,' Bono recalls. 'He saw the possibilities. Remember, this was the New Romantic era. People were dressing up as potted plants to go out for the night. And you know what? A lot of people still looked better than us! The general look at the time was effete and homoerotic, but we were Irish; we couldn't be that. We looked like we'd just got off the boat. Because we had.'
Then, suddenly serious, he says. 'In truth, I think Anton found a masculinity in us that was very out of step with the time, but that has stood the test of time.' Corbijn's great gift, according to Bono, is that, 'He shoots the music you are making, who you can be rather than who you are.' Perhaps the most definitive illustration of that gift was his now iconic image of U2 that graced the cover of their breakthrough album, The Joshua Tree, in 1987: four stern figures in a barren and biblical desert landscape. 'It was Anton who sent us down that dusty road.'
To read the remainder of this article, please visit The Observer's website: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1405169,00.html
Thanks to Party Boy!
(Makes spoiled baby noises.) Do any of our UK members have a scanner, please?
