I've been gone for a while and what do I come back to.
A roasting b/c I dropped the ""p-word."
Folks, I've been a fan since since I was 12 yrs old, in 1981. I've read just about everything there is written in English and published in America at some point, and I am well aware that the address 10 Cedarwood Lane/Drive was not from some Dickensian slum. (though today it's not in the great part of town, I can tell you that.)
I have to thank you for your pics though. I don't have a really large one of Bono's childhood home, and it'll make a nice addition to my collection!
What I should have spelled out (like for little kids in kingergarten) is: They may have been middle class growing up, but in their early careerhood, yes, they WERE "poor". If you measure poverty level by personal income, and a lot of people do, I'd say in the early 80's they weren't in the middle class. On the first couple of tours they couldn't even afford a decent bottle of wine. They may have had travel expenses paid, been well fed, borrowed someone's house for a honeymoon, but touring in the early 80's...well. They may not have flopped in flea-infested cheap motels on tour, and they may have had nice little mini-homes after '84 or so, but I'd hardly have envied them....and by the time of The Joshua Tree, Oh My God!!!! After making an album that sold millions of copies, holy cow, Larry says he actually made 20,000 dollars, enough to buy a motorcycle! Hardly middle-class riches, compared to the money they were generating!
What I meant was, the Hewson kids' childhood is MUCH different from their parents. And it's the Hewsons I was thinking of when I posted that. The band has a clause that states that their copyright ownership etc is good until 75 yrs after the death of the last band member. So the kids are set for life, barring some great change.
That is MUCH different than your typical middle class upbringing. U2 in their early years DID have to struggle to get to the top. And it was a long, brutal 9-yr (IMO) uphill struggle, and the bottom could have fallen out at any time. So I can see them telling their kids that they might have been "poor" (of course we don't know this, it's none of our business, but it helps when your formerly "posh" home is now in the bad part of town, and you don't want to hang out there.)
If Bono wanted to re-write history for his kids, history has helped in a big way. All he'd have to do is take his kids and show them Ballymun to make them motivated to do something with their lives that counts. I imagine that that "hard-working middle-class" ethic is still ingrained in him...and how his kids would think their parents were "poor." It's all relative.
As for re-writing history...Bruce was very good at spinning a "working class" myth as well...it wasn't only Jon Landau that did it.