As U2 grapple with the split between their ideals and rock 'n' roll reality, Barney Hoskyns and the band consider the emotional withering of the record business and why it ain't the summer of love.

It is some way into U2's set at the Veteran's Coliseum in Hartford, Connecticut, two-and-a-half-hour's drive north of New York City. The place is vast, bedecked and strewn with the flags and banners that have become a permanent fixture of the U2 Experience. Some say, simply, "WE WELCOME U2," others make token reference to Martin Luther King, the civil rights leader whose assassination inspired two songs on The Unforgettable Fire. One group of girls has woven a giant tapestry proclaiming that "SNOW IS THE ULTIMATE IMAGE OF SERENITY."

The world in white is on its way...

Inevitably the moment arrives when one of these flags finds its way onto the stage, when dear Bono, wearing that glazed Calvary expression, drapes himself in it and wades about in the haze of his own aura. A sweetly prophetic look has come into his face and all eyes are focused on the meaningful point he is about to make.

"Amazing grace," he moans, "how sweet the sound..."

It is poignant with just enough of a theatrical touch, but it isn't quite enough. Suddenly, impetuously, Bono hurls the flag into the audience, whereupon...

Well, what would you do if your personal Messiah had just wrapped himself around a flag and proceeded to toss it at you? Would you sit there and it the Bono way, be serene and 'umble and let someone else have it, or would you pile in and take that flag?

It's too perfect - people FIGHTING over a PEACE FLAG. There are echoes of Altamont here, dammit: a peace flag and five security heavies dive in to stamp out the commotion!

Bono can't really see what's going on from the lofty peak of the stage, but he's aware enough of the scuffle to capitalise on it.

"There's been too much foitin' over flags," he observes in a lordly tone. "If yer wanna foit, you've come to the wrong concert." This sets him musing. "Maybe one day we'll all just share the same flag..."

Unfortunately, his words make scant impression on the security goons who, if anything, commence bashing away at their hapless targets with even greater enthusiasm.

Eventually the flare-up cools and the show proceeds. Bono has gotten away with it. But it's an incident that says a lot about U2 and their audience and the possible futility of singing in the name of Love.

A couple of days later and we find ourselves in Philadelphia. All things considered, I would rather not be in Philadelphia, since a suffocating freak heatwave is sapping my already jet-lagged stamina, but the City of Bretherly Lerve is where I'm at when I sit talking with David Evans - the Edge - about the flag incident.

"Bono'd probably deny it," he says in his eminently calm and sober way, "but my theory is that he threw it in knowing they'd fight over it, in order to make a point."

He shoots me a quick wry smile.

"I've learnt about Bono recently. I used to worry about his stage performance...there was something that used to disturb me, and I could never figure it out. I also noticed that whenever he told a story, he'd always embroider and jazz it up until it was a great story. The essence of what he was saying was true, but the actual facts were...very different!

"But I've just realised that the facts aren't that important, it's whether it's a good story or not that's important, and as long as there's some relation to the original, it's fine.

"And now I've applied that to what he's like onstage and I feel a little more happy. In some sort of intuitive way, not in a cynical way, he's very aware of performance and whether it's effective and powerful. He's not really worried about justifying it, it's always heartfelt, but he will intuitively go for the thing that works."

The thing that works: is this what upsets pop's cognoscenti about U2? Is it this notion that, underneath, the boy Bono is no less cynical a manipulator of the mass herd than any of megarock's other prime culprits? Or is it the mere fact that anyone should try to turn this addled rock machine to good and generous and positive ends that we deem distasteful?

I suspect the former protest is really cover for the latter. I suspect we are, as an in-crowd critical establishment, so jaded and confused and dispirited by our popular music culture that the only thing we feel safe doing is carping at those who would bring a little beauty into the world.

And if we can disguise our fear of beauty with the standard hip-crit contempt for U2's American audience, the great suburban shopping-mall tribes and sweatshirt rednecks who reckon the band RILLY KICK ASS, if we can pretend U2 are Led Zeppelin retrouve and that "Sunday Bloody Sunday" is this generation's "Stairway to Heaven," so much the better.

This writer won't go for it. He's taken more than a couple of potshots at the band in his time but is older and wiser today. To the extent that he can't take this rock 'n' roll business seriously anymore - and convince himself that writing about it is any more worthwhile than writing about golf or gardening - he knows that U2 do for him the most that any pop music can do, which is to fill the head with glorious noise and CELEBRATE LIFE NOW. For "I Will Follow," "Gloria," "New Year's Day" and "Pride," perhaps the four most uplifting anthems in the face of pop, he takes U2 "seriously."

And yet there is this question of the flag and whether U2's arena audience is getting the point. The kids may love U2, but are they capable of loving each other, and can a po' boy rock 'n' roll band make any difference?

An hour after a brilliantly tense show at Philly's Spectrum, Bono is somewhere at the centre of a swarm of fans outside the hotel. After he's had words with them all, we meet in the hotel restaurant, and I am straightaway struck by genuine patience and politeness. He is so concerned to put everyone at ease and not act the bigshot that he almost overdoes it.

We repair to a corner table and I put to him the Edge's suspicion over the flag debacle in Hartford. A meek look steals over his face.

"He's actually right," he half-laughs. "I knew when I threw it in what would happen, and felt that I had throw it in, because I just sensed something from the corner of the audience...something. I just threw it in, watched it, and then made the point.

"I mean, I...normally wouldn't own up to this type of thing, because it sounds too manipulative, but I just think you can make points like that...these are just things that I..."

This often happens to Bono's conversation. It's as if he's so caught up in the process of explaining himself that his train of thought evaporates in mid-sentence. "One day," he announced from the Spectrum stage tonight, "I'm gonna get much better at tellin' you about our songs and the way we're feelin'." A lot of his talk is about precisely this inarticulacy.

"I warn you, I am completely unable to explain myself at times...even to string three words together can be hard, and this is very tragic if people think you supposedly have a gift of the gab.

"These days, I feel like I've got less and less to say. Something...something's happened that's kind of changed my point of view, which is that I've really got interested in this idea of the song. This is something that U2 as such has not been very interested in. We essentially...it was like we just worked with sound, and we structured that sound like it was soundtracks, and sometimes there were beginnings, middles and ends and things, but...well, since then this idea of the song has really hit on us, and it's a very powerful thing.

"It's like, out of air, with a guitar or piano and three or four chords, you just say all you have to say, and it's incredible, because this goes on the radio all over the world, and people in traffic jams hear this song and...it's just something that never even dawned on me before.

"I remember I called the Edge to tell him all this and he said, 'Oh yeah, I think I know what you mean - wasn't 'Pride' one of those? And I realised we'd already written some songs! And something I've realised is that for me as a singer, I've got to stop trying to explain myself and start writing songs that explain myself."

Can you explain why bands continue to sing about love and change and nothing much changes? Are you not being mistaken for the Messiah you sing about?

"Yeah, you see, it's very clear for me. I think the music is much better than the musician, but also the audience is as much applauding itself as us. One of the things people forget about these large concerts is that the audience has heard the records, it knows the songs from the radio, and the music has become a part of their lives. When they hear those songs, their own selves are caught up in them, and they are in some way applauding that connection."

The Edge is a trifle more down-to-earth on this, ever the foil to Bono's idealism. "Honestly, the whole U2 phenomenon is probably going to amount to little real change. I think we're quite sanguine about that, but that's not the only reason we would be doing this. We're doing it because it's worth it and we think it's the right thing to do.

"I don't say there's 20,000 people here tonight to applaud me and my work. I don't see it as our music, we don't own the notes or the words. We've been given a gift, I suppose, of musical talent, and this is the net result. And also we're totally inept at times, musically terrible.

"I suppose you could put in the liner notes: 'Please do not mistake Bono for God.' Perhaps you have to accept it as an inherent flaw. At some stage we came to the conclusion that really there's no way you can be responsible for how people interpret what you're doing. You know what we're trying to do, what you mean when you're putting your songs together, but beyond that you have absolutely no control, and something you have no control over you can't worry about."

How do you imagine your American fans think of you?

"Um, I think we're still a cult group - this is the enigma of our situation, that we're not a mainstream act, we don't get that much radio play on the big stations - there is, I suppose, a certain underground value to being in U2, something a little more exclusive."

You attract all kinds, though, teenyboppers, headbangers...I saw R.E.M. and Hüsker Dü T-shirts in Hartford.

"We seem to have reinvented the touring strategy for breaking a band, which no one else did for a long time. Our album sales have never reflected our live business. We don't sell as many as you might expect. The diversity you see at our shows is purely that these people have heard about the shows through friends. I'm sure a lot of them don't buy U2 albums...well they don't or we'd sell more albums!

"At the same time, what we're doing must have some sort of universal appeal. It's not a hybrid thing, it's not designed for people who know all about the Velvet Underground. I think a lot of groups need that context, but there are people who wouldn't know Lou Reed if they met him on the street. Most of it is down to Bono, because he has the ability to communicate in a way that most people, be they Italian, Dutch, German or American, can understand, and that's remarkable."

For "people who know all about the Velvet Underground" read critics? Perhaps. Or maybe just the whole cooler-than-thou school, for whom liking U2 is too square, too obvious. (Aren't U2 the token rock outing for the 10-LPs-a-year-set, the naffies who buy Sade and Alison and Paul and Tina?)

Bono says that for the first time he knows he is free of garageland.

"There's a spell that's gonna have to be broken, in London, in New York, in the music business. I don't know how it's going to be broken, but I just sense that a lot of people are crippled emotionally, y'know withered...I think there's a lot of music that so wants to be made, and it's frightened and scared.

"When Eno came to us for The Unforgettable Fire, he talked about rock 'n' roll with a wink, how rock 'n' roll has become a parody of itself...and how it was only acceptable with a wink. It's white music that is the straightjacket. White people in their suits and ties - and under their torn shirts they're still wearing them - are afraid to take off their trousers in public. And somebody's got to burst the bubble, not for us coz we've burst it ourselves and we've kind of set ourselves free, but for all the people who aren't making the music they could be making because...because somebody winked and their eyes got stuck."

People seem so scared of this grandeur, this powerful beauty. This big music. (It's all over when your guitar stops sounding scratchy.) Power automatically equals Zeppelin or...

"Or Nuremberg, right? Especially in these giant arenas. And isn't it odd that we're playing better than ever in these places we ran away from for so long! I remember our first gig in America, at the Mudd Club in New York, and these people from Premier Talent coming up to us and saying, 'It's gonna be interesting when you play Madison Square Garden.'

"I mean, that was everything we were against, and we were against playing these aircraft hangars right up to the time I went to see Bruce Springsteen at Wembley Arena. Now I enjoy those places - instead of a backdrop of stained glass windows, we've got people...that's it, people! And we are making big music! When we start 'Pride,' that floats over the audience, and to confine it is like living a lie.

"But we are the antithesis of those big rock 'n' roll bands. This is not the cycle complete again, this is a garage band that has left garageland, because we are the first of that generation of bands, not the Clash and Sex Pistols generation, but the generation that was in their audience..."

To make it. What's it like being a rock star?

"Yes, what is it like? There must be people better qualified to answer that. I think I'm kind of a part-time rock 'n' roll star. We're probably the worst rock 'n' roll stars ever, we've got all the wrong equipment...these arms are stuck on the wrong way...

"Part of it with U2 is the falling over and picking ourselves up off the ground, part of it is sitting up late at night in Philadelphia and saying something that will put a noose round my neck. There's a real love/hate thing with the group, and that's simply because we are expert at shooting ourselves in the foot.

"I met Elvis Costello a few months back and he said to me, 'I'm ambivalent about U2, I love it and hate it.' He said, 'you walk this tightrope that none of your contemporaries will walk - they're afraid to walk it - and when you stay on I bow my head, but you fall off it so many times, and...' There was no answer to that. We do fall off, a lot, and onstage I'll try for something and it won't work...but it might work, and that's the point. It might work."

And so full circle: "the things that work," the rockist circus, the millions fists pumping skyward. How long to sing this song? Is that all rock is? Can't we somehow blast through all this media edifice of scenes and cults and trends and touch what U2 are straining for?

Edge, how does love change the world?

"God, that's a heavy question, innit? I really don't know, that's probably the answer. We're just following our noses, really. We've got some vague idea of a direction to go, based on our beliefs and convictions that this is sort of what we should do, and...it changes every day!

"I really don't have any long-term ideas about this. I've a feeling that what happens at a show is there is a breakdown of some of the more negative, insular feelings and inhibitions that people have...at least for the duration of the show. The nicest idea is that people might be forming groups after seeing us. One thing we've been doing on this tour is bringing kids up from the audience and teaching them 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door,' just trying to show them that there's no real mystery to it, that these are the chords and this is the song.

"We might have more of an effect on the music business itself than directly on the lives of our audience. Maybe they'll be less inclined to accept performances by crappy heavy metal bands, less easily pleased by someone like Ted Nugent.

"Actually don't say Ted Nugent, he might come after me with a sawn-off shotgun. And anyway, Ted is my hero."

© NME, 1985