A 13 years old interview...

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Laney_82

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A 13 interview Bono....for The Guardian!
(if this has been post allready ...sorry:( :huh: )

CORMAC: You were a teenager in Dublin in the Seventies. What was it like being a teenager in Ireland then before mobiles and the internet ?

BONO: How you receive and impart information doesn't make that much difference. No matter what the technology is, you still manage to do what you need to do: Fall in love with your idols (in my case Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, David Bowie and Marc Bolan), plot with your mates, get pushed around and push back. We had a lot to rebel against as teenagers in a depressed Dublin of the 70s. Ireland was just emerging from being almost a theocracy. I believed in God, but I wasn't sure about churches of any denomination. I hated all the -isms, especially -isms where ideology was more important than people. Terrorism. Even the violent republicanism that rose up to respond to the bullying of the Catholic minority in the North of Ireland. Things got out of control very quickly. If the war had crossed the border, Ireland in the Seventies might have looked like Bosnia in the Nineties.
I just about missed the bomb that ripped apart the street I used to buy music in. My friend Guck was in the middle of it and still can't bring himself to talk about what he saw. Even though I thought it was normal at the time, it does appear with hindsight, violence was too large a part of my teenage life.
My friends' and my best response to the dull, grey housing estates was to make them luminous, with an imaginary altered state we called Lypton Village. We gave everyone in our gang new names for our new imaginary lives. I gave my friend Derek Rowen the name Guggi and he gave me the name Bono. There was Clivejive, Guckpants Delaney, Reggie Manuel the Cocker Spaniel and Gavin Friday. We'd do all kinds of surreal stuff to defend ourselves against the bootboy and skinhead culture that was popular on the housing estates at the time. Humour was our best weapon, followed eventually by music.
Some of us were good at violence, but it started to dawn on us how moronic the weekend drinking and beatings were. Your enemies define you, so choose them carefully. Make them interesting. Never pick an obvious fight.

CORMAC: Did you enjoy school? Were you a hard worker or a slacker?

BONO: We were lucky that the school we went to catered to our needs, rather than the other way round. I wasn't a swot but I don't remember being a slacker. I had plenty I wanted to do but I'm not sure it was all on the curriculum. My school provided well for me, it gave me a lot of my friends, a hall for our first gig, my wife ... not bad going really. When it comes to school, like many other things, it's best to make the one you have work.

CORMAC: My twin sister, Claire, wants to be a campaigner to stop global warning and help animals that are in danger of being extinct. Can you give her any tips on how to get results? (She's a bit wacky.)

BONO: Tell her to stay "wacky". She's driven; she's right.

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People should take the energy they spend on hatred, put downs and negativism and do something useful with it- there are a million problems in the world, pick one and help to make a change. - oh, but most of them are just not smart enough to think of that. :sad: :rant:
 
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