Bono is sitting with a glass of beer in his hand. EastEnders is blaring from the TV screen high on a shelf in this crowded pub down by the river in October-album-cover country. The people of Dublin, another day over, are out drinking and talking at full volume all around and finally U2's main man has found time to talk to Propaganda. The conversation is casual and wanders onto the subject of records and books.

What kind of books have you been reading recently?

Bono: I've been reading American stuff this year, a lot of black poets, Robert Hayden and people like that. I read this fantastic book that Maria from Lone Justice lent me, called Now Let Us Praise Famous Men. It's an amazing book, which is an account of the Depression in the Dustbowl of the United States in the 1930s. I worked hard to get a copy of that as it's very difficult to get hold of.

I've also been reading a lot by a writer called Flannery O'Connor.

How did you come across Flannery O'Connor? Not many people read her today.

Actually, Bruce Springsteen and I had a conversation about writers. A lot of his writing has that Grapes of Wrath scenery...I though he'd have read somebody like John Steinbeck - which of course he had - but he said to me that a far more important influence was Flannery O'Connor. And he thought, considering the music we were making, that it might be something I should read. I don't think he knew what he was saying because I've never felt such sympathy with a writer in America before.

Do you feel a lot of sympathy for America?

Well, I have a kind of love-hate relationship with America. I love the place, I love the people. One of the things I hate is that such a trusting people could have put their trust in a guy like Ronald Reagan. He may be a sincere man, but he is sincerely wrong in so many cases.

For instance, in South America. There is no question in my mind that the people of America through their taxes are paying for the equipment that is used to torture people in El Salvador. In my trip to Salvador I met with mothers of children who had disappeared. They have never found where their children went or where their bodies were buried. They are presumed dead.

Actually, there's a song which may be on the new LP called "Mothers of the Disappeared." There's no question in my mind of the Reagan Administration's involvement in backing the regime that is committing these atrocities.

I doubt if the people of America are even aware of this. It's not my position to lecture them or tell them their place or to even open their eyes up to it in a very visual way, but it is affecting me and it affects the words I write and the music we make.

You're a believer, yet you've gone on record to attack religion, and talked about the dangers of establishment religion. Flannery O'Connor seems to be doing the same thing because she caricatures religious figures, not for having a faith but for just having this institution around them.

Yeah. Sadly, religion like politics attracts both the worse and the best kinds of people, often the worst.

Have you ever encountered the kind of racist attitudes she describes in her books?

I've never come up against black and white racism of that kind although I've come up against Protestant and Catholic bigotry which is the same thing. The Irish can really relate to the black people. They say the Irish are the white blacks - I mean we like to think we have the same soul. We definitely share the same spirit of "up against all odds we'll do it."

I spent some time on the Amnesty International tour with the Neville Brothers, a remarkable R&B band. Cyril Neville was on his way to vote when Martin Luther King was assassinated and he became a very angry black man in the Black Power movement, and at one stage he lost faith in voting and in trying to do anything through the proper channels. He just wanted to get back at the white man who had for so long persecuted the black man. I learnt to understand a lot of the anger and resentment that the black community has, but I've never seen it in operation.

What's your favorite Flannery O'Connor story?

The Enduring Chill. It's a very sad and pathetic portrait of a guy, a very unromantic piece of writing and it's just so powerful the way it describes his death as an enduring chill, that begins slowly.

There are few happy endings in her stories, as there are few in life generally.

But there is great hope in her books in a way, there is some hope there. Like my favorite book of hers is Wise Blood. A guy called Hazel Motes sets up a church without Christ and then his mate sets up this other rival church of God without Christ. I live in Ireland and Ireland is full of sects and weird religious cults.

Do you know, the two subjects that you just can't talk about in Ireland are religion and politics, and they're all that I do talk about!

Flannery O'Connor wrote that "The sharper the light of faith, the more glaring are apt to be the distortions the writer sees in the life around him.

An old but very wise man once said to me that you should never fight darkness with light, you should just make the light brighter. A lot of people are anti-this or anti-that, or against-this or against-that, but I find myself attracted to people who are for things rather than against things.

It's far easier to destroy than to build and words are capable of either.

Let's not get too heavy, though, because Flannery O'Connor is also a hilariously funny writer and Hazel Motes in Wise Blood is one of her funniest characters.

How is the new record going?

When people ask us if the album is going well I usually say yes, but if I do I'm probably lying!

Actually it is going better than most of our records have gone. It's funny, we're all far more positive and optimistic about it at this stage than usual. But as much as the music is going well I have to say that it has been a difficult year for U2 and that light and shade is on the record. I hope the ultimate effects will be uplifting ones, but we really have waded through the shit on this record.

One thing that really annoys me about the music business is the suffering artist cliché where you get a lot of these middle-class kids sticking needles in their arms so they can perform, so they can know what it's like, man. Anyone with their eyes or ears open in this world can see suffering.

There's two kinds of people, there's those that are asleep and those that are awake. I've used my music to wake me up and if it wakes other people up on the way that's OK. We get used to the sound of a bomb going off in Belfast and to the roll call of bad news on television, we get used to the fact that a third of the population on earth are starving. We get used to all these things and we eventually fall asleep in the comfort of our freedom.

There's a guy called Francis Schaeffer and he says that we're entering into a new era of fascism. It won't be like the fascism of Mussolini or Hitler, it'll be fascism with a smile and a warm handshake. It'll be based on personal peace and prosperity. In other words if you give someone a color television, a house, a car and two weeks' vacation a year...they'll agree to anything and stop asking questions.

So there's a need for raised voices - like the American radical students of the Sixties?

I've been very inspired by the '60s protest movements in America. Drugs may have diluted that movement, but their music played an important part in the ending of the Vietnam War and out of that movement came some very powerful people like John Lennon and poets like Jim Morrison.

A song that says so much to me, even now, is John Lennon's "Gimme Some Truth." "No short-haired yellow-bellied son-of-tricky-dicky's going to Mother-Hubbard short-soap me for a pocketful of hope." "All I want is the truth, gimme the truth."

A lot of people want to get up off their asses and get out and do some good but they don't really know what to do.

What you've got to do is get through to the heart of things and say, "Look, Mister, the money you're taking home at the end of the week, in your paypacket, is paying for instruments of torture in South America, for instance." Or, "Look, Mister, your defense budget could be used to feed the hungry."

I just read a statistic that says that for ten minutes of the world's defense budget we could cure the number one killer disease in the world, which is malaria. Ten minutes. That gets through.

You went to Africa last year, didn't you?

Look - there's a lot of people who'd love to take a month off and help out in Ethiopia. You hear these cries from different parts of the world, most people hear these cries, but they're not in a position to attend to that and check it out and see if there's anything they can do.

The only thing I can do is write songs.

Are you concerned not to lose touch now that the band has reached such a level of success?

I suppose in going to Africa and Central America I was injecting myself with a severe dose of reality, but I don't think being a pop star is any more cocooned than living in a semi-detached house with suburban lawns. I think that's just as detached from the real world. They're as good and as bad as each other. I came from that background.

I live in London and I see the Troubles in Northern Ireland every night on the news, but a few weeks ago I went to Belfast and walked the streets for myself. It frightened me and I realized how much I was numb to it, I was asleep to it...

It always gets back to this! You see all this going on out there and you think, "Well, what the hell can I do about it?" For a lot of people there's not a lot you can do about it and all I believe is that everyone in their own way has a position they have to take. If that's as a mother with snotty-nosed kids or a guy in a factory just doing the best they can or being a schoolteacher or a farmer, you just find your ground, your place and you just do the best you can to shine a light on the shit that's out there. That's all.

My position is that I write songs, I'm in a band and I just hope that when it's all over for U2 that in some way we made the light a bit brighter. Maybe just tore off a corner of the darkness. That's all I can do and everyone can do it in their own way.

What have you found most encouraging recently?

One thing this year has made me feel better. One thing has more than anything made me feel good as a performer, as a songwriter and as a member of U2. I got a letter from a U2 fan club and they told me about these clubs they were setting up, maybe once a month. They listen to U2 music and watched our videos - not just ours, but also Peter Gabriel, the Waterboys and younger groups like Cactus World News and R.E.M.

I saw this handout - they had a fee. It was sort of five dollars to join the club, and I thought, "What a rip-off, charging to listen to U2 music." But then I turned it over and discovered they were using the five dollars to support families in the Third World, and they spent their evening, as well as listening to music and watching videos, writing postcards for Amnesty International.

The biggest compliment anyone can pay U2 as performers is that they get out and do something themselves. They get out and they chip away themselves at those boulders that are in the path of progress, if you like, and they just smash them up with their own hands and they can do that whatever way they want, and if that's writing postcards for Amnesty International...that was a thrill. I just thought, "Well, that's it." I love, for instance, hearing bands come up to us after gigs and saying, "We formed a band after your concert."

That's the best thing that can ever come about for me, that somebody gets out and does it for themselves in whatever way.

I really love that phrase "a conspiracy of hope," and I really hope it could be applied to U2 and its organization. It applies to the way we do our work, our merchandizing, our magazine...(I hope!), it's whatever you do if you can just do it with a bit of dignity. I dont think U2 have walked on anybody or kicked anyone in the balls. I don't think we have...we may have kicked each other in the balls a few times - but that's another story!

How did your experience in Ethiopia affect you?

I find the time I spent in Africa a little difficult to deal with. I worked on the edge of the desert and I remember looking out at what was a very proud people, a very upright people.

What I couldn't cope with was when I came home and I saw the waste of the land in the west, and I saw little spoilt children and I saw people fat, not physically fat, but mentally...that's what I couldn't cope with. I started thinking it was us that lived in a desert, because although people are rich here physically, they're very poor spiritually, and in Africa the opposite is true.

So what kind of music do you like to listen to when you're not working?

I have Peter Case's record and I like it. That's a great song, "Three Days Straight."

My record collection started in 1976 with the punk groups and the first post-punk groups like Patti Smith and Television, that kind of thing.

Before that I grew up on reel-to-reel tapes of the Jimi Hendrix experience, the Who, the classic rock 'n' roll bands and back into the Beatles and Elvis. I missed pop music. It passed me by.

But I also missed roots music. I even disliked roots music. Around the time of October I began to get interested in traditional Irish music and those roots. Since meeting Keith Richards and people like Charlie Whisker, a painter who I paint with and a blues man, I've got interested in a lot of blues records..."Silver and Gold" was the first I wrote in that style. But since then I've been listening to a lot of black music, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, a lot of gospel music, James Cleveland, the Rev. Theophilus Someone...I can't remember his name!

B.B. King was here recently and he asked me to produce him. I don't know if we can work it out but I think he's got a remarkable voice. I think the reason that I disliked blues music and gospel music is that I saw it all done very badly by these twelve-bar blues bands which used to play in the Strip down Baggot Street, and it was just really dog-eared and boring. And then you've got this really naff and soppy soap opera gospel music that you get nowadays.

I'd like to be a soul singer - that's my aim. Of white music I've been listening to Van Morrison a lot because I think he's one of the finest white soul singers and Janis Joplin, God bless her. Her version of "Ball and Chain" really puts me on my back. Y'know - when she breaks down in the middle of the live version and starts ripping into people. I can understand that as a performer.

I'm not really aware of what's in the charts at the moment. I would like to be a little bit more aware. Sometimes when I'm driving I turn on the radio, but driving through inner city Dublin, you might as well be driving down Manhattan for all the silk-soul that dominates the radio. I like black music but I find the silk-soul aspect of it a bit hard to handle. I prefer the more raucous and raw black music.