Read Online Bono by Michka Assayas - Free Book Online Page B

think probably for the first year. By ’78, I think he was The Edge.
    And did he call you Bono first or Paul?
    He would have called me Paul up until, maybe ’76. I was known as Bono by my friends in Lypton Village. * Edge and Adam and Larry weren’t really a part of Lypton Village until later.
    Was it easy for them to start calling you that? Maybe a few people found it irritating and kept calling you by your given name?
    The thing about these kinds of nicknames is they’re contagious. You don’t have to ask people, they just start doing it. I can’t remember when Ali started calling me Bono. I was sixteen, I’d say. Edge had another name from Lypton Village.
    And what was that?
    â€œInchicore.” It’s the name of a small town on the outskirts of Dublin City.
    So who had this preposterous idea to call him The Edge?
    I do preposterous in this band. It had something to do with the shape of his head, his jaw, and an insane love he had for walking on the edges of very high walls, bridges, or buildings. Before Bono, I was “Steinvic von Huyseman,” and then just “Huyseman,” and then “Houseman,” then “Bon Murray,” “Bono Vox of O’Connell Street,” and then just “Bono.”
    â€œBono Vox of O’Connell Street”—now that’s an aristocrat’s name. There’s nobility in it.
    Well, yes. [laughs]
    Weren’t you a baron or a count?
    What my friends had in mind is close to count. [laughs]
    When he started the band, Larry was not even fifteen, and you were sixteen and a half. Didn’t you feel like a grown-up amused by the nerve of this kid?
    It was his band. I think, for a minute, he wanted to call it the Larry Mullen Band.
    What sort of music did he want to play?
    He loved glam rock. That was his thing. The Larry Mullen Band wasn’t really a very glam-rock kind of a name.
    It sounds like a jazz-blues band from the mid-seventies.
    He was the star. When he sat behind the kit, definitely, the room changed temperature. There was something going on. He played the drums like his life depended on it. And I think, in some very real way, that was true.
    And by the way, why didn’t Larry and Adam get a nickname, like you and Edge did?
    I think the “Junior” [Larry Mullen, Jr.] certainly added the jazz-blues band bit. I convinced him to do that. Adam Clayton just sounds black anyway. But they had unofficial names: Larry was “Jamjar,” and Adam was “Sparky.”
    So would you say Larry was the most dedicated musician of the bunch?
    Edge was pretty good—I mean, no, Edge was more than good. But Larry was really impressive, I thought. Just the drum playing, the way the sound just fills the room, and the silver and the gold of the cymbals. His kit was a bright crimson. We’d never seen anything like that. I mean, we’d been playing shitty guitars.
    And he had a perfect kit.
    I mean, his kit was like a cheap copy.
    But it looked great.
    It looked great. It was bright and shiny. And he looked great behind the kit. Adam knew all the right words. He knew what to say; he had the lingo; he was [adopting ghetto voice] “down with his big bad self.” He had all the musician talk. But what we didn’t know, until a few practices, is that he couldnot play a note. He arrived with a bass guitar and a bass amp, and he looked incredible. He had all the gear, had all the right terminology. He looked funky, he acted funky. We didn’t realize at the time he couldn’t play a note. And so big was his bluff that we looked pretty much everywhere else to why we were sounding so shit. Him!
    You mean you didn’t realize it in the first place.
    Well, he was the oldest, and he looked the most professional.
    On a more personal level, I have this feeling that the one you had to feel the closest to was Larry, because you shared some difficult experiences in your teenage years. He lost his