Most first dates involve having dinner and seeing a movie.
U2 frontman Bono picked me up in a shiny black Chevy Suburban and it was nonstop talking. OK, so it wasn’t a date. Bono wasn’t actually driving, and I got in the car first.
But I ended up talking to the singer, resplendent in a denim ensemble and tinted glasses, in the backseat of his car, en route to last month’s second show by U2 at the Rogers Centre in Toronto.
The only others with us were his driver and his security man, while the car was given a police escort. Ah, the life of Bono.
We talked about the band’s current 360°tour, their latest album No Line on the Horizon, the possibility of not one but two new albums by U2, David Bowie, and the significance of space travel.
Here’s the best of what he had to say in an exclusive:
Are Canadian fans different than those in Europe?
We’ve always had a really kind of progressive audience here. They’ve allowed us to push and pull them in different directions, because over the years we have kind of swerved all over the road a little bit musically, and that’s the fun of it for us. And some people, some fans like U2 as a straight-ahead rock and roll band, some people like us as a folk mass, some people like us as a rave, some people like it as a political rally. I think in Canada, they actually like us to be all those things.
How does it feel to walk out onto the massive “space-ship” stage every night?
The scale of it was a little nerve-wracking at first. I was drawing this on napkins in restaurants, and I was building it with forks and things like that. But when you see it in front of you, I must say I did have a little bit of a knee wobble.
Did you think you were taking a risk playing so much of the new material off No Line on the Horizonoff the top of the live show, given the album hasn’t produced any real hits?
I love hits, I love 45s, they’re a thrill but our first responsibility for this album was to make an extraordinary album. We wanted to make an album as they were a dying species, a nearly instinct species. We said, “Let’s make an album with a beginning, middle and end, and take people into a world,” and so that was our first thing ... just to be challenging both of ourselves and our audience, and we succeeded with that. And maybe in that mindset you don’t write a pop song, and that’s probably what happened. But they’re great songs, they’re just not pop songs.
What’s the status on a second more ambient album, to be released from the Lanois-Eno sessions, with the working title Songs of Ascent, and then the Rick Rubin session?
We’ve got a few albums up our sleeves. We’ve got a whole album we started with Rick Rubin, which is a rocking club album with beats and big guitars. So we’re going to see where the mood takes us. But it’s not like we have to start afresh. We have five or six songs on that album. We have about 12 on the Songs of Ascent, plus The Edge and myself have written Spider Man: The Musical. It’s been an incredible time as songwriters ... If you’re going to go out on the road, you have to have songs that have the attitude and the ambition to play in a venue … because if they haven’t got it, you’re not going to play them because whilst we like people to look a little startled, we’re not going to do a crap show just to promote our new album. So they have to be great.
