Here's the entire article. Enjoy and you're all welcome! Just spreading the Ali and Bono love here.
Thanks for your kind words. And Galeon Girl, thanks for the uploads and your offer to help me.
Have been wondering about the last sentence of the interview though, it seems like some kind of typo there, well, I just don't get it.
But I gave it my best shot with translating.
Interview with Ali Hewson, wife of Bono and the driving force behind fair trade label Edun
'We dream each other's dreams'
She has been called Bono's best quality at times, the woman who keeps the U2 singer with his feet on the ground. Nevertheless, loving B. is only one of the many callings in her life. Next to wife, she's a mother of four, an activist, and since a year even a trendsetter. The Sweetest Thing tells her story to DM Magazine.
February 6, 2006.
Ali Hewson greets me together with designer Rogan Gregory in Edun's show room, the fair trade, but trendy fashion label which she and her husband Paul Hewson aka Bono founded a year ago. When she talks about him, she calls him B. Sometimes Bono, but more often Baby. Alison met Bono when his name was still Paul, at High School in the Northern part of Dublin. She was 12, he 13, and he fell for her the day they met. Alison, as she says it, took a liking for him after four days, but they only started dating when she was 15 and he had just started a band with his friends. Almost 30 years have passed since then. That same band has become world's biggest rockband. Ali and Bono have been married for 24 years and have got four children together. Time seems to have no hold on Ali. She still has the same youthful face as on photo's from the early years. Dark eyes, ravenblackhair, laughing wrinkles. A natural beauty, without any vanity. That is, as we read in several interviews with Bono, one of the main reasons he immediately fell in love with her. "Her careless style." is his answer when being asked what exactly made Alison so attractive to him. "She used to wear wellies with Scottish skirts. She seemed to be so unaware of how she looked like, that I thought that she was the most beautiful girl in the world."
Although she's married to the world's most famous rockstar, she isn't your typical rockstar wife. She rarely goes to parties, never shows herself in borrowed or free designer clothes, and neither has any interest in free designer bags from Louis Vuitton or Tod's. "Me not being your typical rocker's wife, could tell you more about Bono then about me", Ali says. "The more famous he got, the more I retracted myself in the shadows. The result of that is that we get to live a reasonable normal life when he's home. In Ireland I'm quite well known as well, but we can still go and have a snack in the local pub without being hassled there."
For special occasions, she's willing to sacrifice her beloved privacy. Back in 1993 for instance, when she agreed to present the Oscar winning documentary Black Wind, White Land, about the consequenses being suffered by habitants of White Russia of the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl in 1986. Since last year, she's making an exception again, this time as the driving force behind Edun, the fair trade jeans label that she has launched together with her husband and designer Rohan Gregory. "If I can help with making the Third World livable again and at the same time raise consumer awareness, why wouldn't I do it? It's better then staying at home and just write a big, fat check from time to time for some charity organisation", she states. "I couldn't do it, just watching from the sidelines.
Since I was young, I've been dreaming to help people. I've always wanted to become a nurse. I already pictured myself in a hospital at the other side of the world. Helping people, giving them medicines, talking with them. The training to become a nurse was too demanding and couldn't be combined with a husband who travelled the world. It would have strained our relationship too much, so I gave up that dream. I'd choose to study political and social sciences instead to get insight in the world and learn to do something to help and make it better. It's
not the same, but it comes pretty close to nursing."
Ali for president
At the evening before our meeting the couple presented the new winter collection of Edun in a gallery near Central Park. Don't expect a big, fancy party for the Bono family label, it's an intimate and casual affair where artists, friends and a few journalists were invited. Moby was there, Michael Stipe and Lou Reed. A celebrity party by coincidence, with an eccentric jazzband, naive paintings on the walls and Bono speaking passionately about projects he's involved in. Ali stood by his side and listened to her man with on her face an expression of pride and well hidden amusement.
Bono's legendary charm still gets to her, even though she knows him better than anyone. I tell her that he almost gave me a heart attack that night. The singer spotted my little notebook, he then grabbed it out of my hands and signed it. She laughs out loud. "You think that's charming?" Some people would call that megalomania." Coming from someone else, this comment could come across as being sour, but not when it comes from Bono's loving wife. She doesn't put him on a pedestal. If he returns home after a tour and has to go cold turkey from all the addictive attention, she sometimes tells him quite bluntly that his family is not a crowd of 50.000 people, the table no stage and would he please shut his mouth. Bono says sometimes, jokingly, that he feels like some displaced goods at home, waiting to be sorted. "She's the evil eye", he tells Time Magazine in 1987. "I musn't try to flaunt with her. She's got her own mind, she knows what she wants. So you could call our relationship stormy." But he also calls her his hero, an example of mental health, despite of the fact that she has chosen to spend her life with him.
Dreams
U2-biographer Eamon Dunph agrees that Ali is Bono's best character trade. Calm, rational and not easily impressed by a famous name. During writing songs for U2's album War, the singer wrestled with writer's block. Each morning Ali dragged him out of bed and put a pen in his hand. The song The Sweetest Thing he wrote for her birthday, which he forgot. Ali claimed the rights of the song and the profits of it went to charity. Bono did let her star in the video and she could pick the extras, she choose for The Chippendales, an elephant and the boyband Boyzone.
"We have been able to put up with each other for so long, Ali explains, because we give each other the freedom to do something with our life. We dream each other's dreams. Bono stimulates me to develop myself. He always supports me."
Standing up for a better world is a big thing these two've got in common. After the first Live Aid concert in 1985 the couple went to Ethiopia for five weeks, where they worked in an orphanage as volunteers. Not long after that Ali enrolled in college. Two weeks after Jordan's birth, their first girl, she graduated as a political scientist. Although she was planning to add a study Morals and Ethics to her curriculum, she gave birth two years later to her daughter Eve. Because studying wasn't an option then, she decided to become an activist instead and to fight against the nuclear plant in Sellafield, Great Britain, which got rid of its waste water in the Irish Sea. Her actions didn't go by unnoticed. When the British government opened a site where nuclear waste from over the whole world be stored, she got U2 to hand out protective suits during the delivery of radioactive mud.
After that followed the famous documentary in 1993, and she was a patroness of an Irish charity project which helped children who suffered distortions due to the Chernobyl disaster. In 2002 she got 1,2 out of 1,3 Irish households to send a card to the British Prime Minister, Prince Charles and Norman Askew, the President of British Nuclear Fuels, on the cards a plea to finally close down Sellafield.
It's not very surprising that the Irish Labour Party did ask her in 2004 if she wanted to run for President. Ali turned the request down: "I don't have the capacities and I have to raise four kids. And because my husband tells me that us six would never fit in the presidential residence." was how she explained her decision to the BBC. In the middle of her career of an activist the couple had two more children, two boys this time: Elijah Bob Patricius Guggi Q en John Abraham.
Now that she has Edun to watch over as well, she has to, like every working mother, organise her household strictly. The kids are already 16, 14, 6 and 4 years old. They know very well what I'm doing if I aren't home.", she says. "If one of them would suffer because of my job, I'd stop. But they fully support us, and they learn much this way. Our household functions like a militairy operation. Before we leave, the four children have to stand in line and they get their orders for the coming week. It's a fulltime task to keep up with who's being where at which moment of the day."
Fashion with a message
It may be obvious by now that Ali Hewson doesn't make the easiest choices despite of her status and money. However, the career switch from demonstrator to fashionista isn't a very logical one. Hewson sort of agrees with that. "I'm probably not the most capable person do be doing this. Before I've started this adventure, I wasn't really bothered with fashion. I didn't have the time for it. But Bono has been lobbying for years for Africa on a macro level, and we've been searching for a project where the people would immediately profit from. The textile industry seemed ideal, because so many people work in it. The fashion industry is guilty of global problems."
"The main problem is that due to the globalisation complete populations find themselves without any income", Rogan Gregory adds. "Because the United States oversubsidide their own cotton cultivation and then ship to Africa, local farmers are being ignored. African or Peruvian cotton doesn't get subsidided. The competition is not only unfair, but crushing as well."
"Bono's motto is that you can't battle terrorism without battling poverty", Ali continues. "Half of the African people has to live on a dollar a day, or even less. At the end of the seventies, the beginning of the eighties, Africa had 6 % of the world trade in hands. Today that has been brought back to barely 2%. Even if we can only win back 1%, that would mean 70 billion extra income. They have to get back in the game on all costs. If we can help with that, we certainly will.
The consumer is ready for fashion with a message", she knows. "People buy much more conciously today. Ten years ago nobody asked questions about what was in the food. Now they even ask themselves where their clothes are being made. Or even better, who made them. Moreover I've got the impression that shopping is going to become more important than voting. Your political vote tells a lot about you, but the way how you spend your money, even much more. Shopping did get a political dimension. It's a trend and we've jumped on the train."
And that train has departed fast. It all started when a stylist ordered clothes for U2 at the show room of the premium jeans label Rogan. She met the designer and thought that his principles, and those of his business partner Scott with whom he owns fair trade label Loomstate as well, were equal to those of Bono and Ali. Because she knew that the couple had been thinking about setting up a line of clothes, she introduced them to each other the next day. It instantly clicked and four months later Edun was born. The clothes are being made among others in shops in Peru and Africa. The workers are being trained, paid the minimum wages and no children are working there. Cotton is as far as possible organic and dying procedures are vegatable. And yet the collection doesn't come across as hippy like. If you had to describe it, it can best be described as trendy folk. Rogan has been inspired by Ireland, a phrase of the Irish poet James Joyce is printed in the lining of the clothes. The titching on the back pockets have vague Celtic references, shirts are checkered or cut somewhat longer, for the winter they even have hand painted dresses.
No martyrs
Ethical responsible labels like Edun, American Apparel, Loomstate and Earnest Sewn are slowly gaining terrain in the fashion world. It isn't impossible to make responsible clothing. But it isn't easy either, Ali knows from experience by now. "Our road is full of obstacles. The fashion world is very competitive, everything has to go very fast. If you have high standards for a product, you can't work just as fast. Finding the good material can sometimes be a problem as well. Biological grown cotton still is a very scarce good, we had to compromise. Should we choose resolutely for the ecological aspect, or should we prefer the social side of it all? We have chosen for the esthetic side of things, meaning that if the clothes wouldn't look good, we wouldn't be able to sell them and reach less people that way. We don't want to be label for old hippies, we don't want people to go and point their finger. To the contrary, we want to reach them in a positive way.
The most important thing to Edun", she implies, "is that we are trying to develop a new business model that combines ethical correct production with profit, and where everybody, from workman to consumer, is being treated fair. We receive many questions of other companies who want to know how we have done it. That's overall a very positive thing. I think we are the first fashion company in the world that is asking to be copied. Our point being, if we can do it, you can do it as well."
Cynical remarks stating that all of this doesn't make much of a difference, she hasn't heared yet. Although she realises that the contribution of Edun will have a minimal effect. But she doesn't get encouraged because of that. "I follow the news, I'm being influenced by the negative broadcasts", she says." But by doing something I get the sense that the world is not such a dreadful place after all. But I do understand that people sometimes can get in a cynical mood." I fight that feeling by commiting myself for a positive cause. Doing nothing is much worse, because that adds to the negative balance. When I'm old, I'd like to be able to say that I at least did try.
Ofcourse we do this just as much for ourselves as for others. We really are no martyrs. We're enjoying our lives, we're happy people. Just because we're trying our best at least."
(They can't stand him)
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