Many Europeans - Brits and Irish, artists and intellectuals - have wrestled with America, first at the New World, then as the British colonies and then as the United States. Now you, too, are part of that same process. How does it feel?

I think the only reason we get away with our criticism of America is because people know that we love to be in America. U2's attitude doesn't come from a typical European eyes-down-the-nose look at American life or a blinkered look at American life.

Some have come over and "put down" America. You may criticize it, but you don't condescend.

No. Because what I feel is a mixture of love and anger, and love and anger do not condescend. Miles Davis and Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and the great bluesmen and the gospel singers and the wide-open spaces and the great writers like Tennessee Williams and poets like Robert Hayden and Sterling Brown would not let me - because America has given me much more than I could ever give it.

More than a complicated reality of specifics, America has always existed as a dream - both for its citizens and its outsiders.

Yes, the American dream. But we mustn't sleep in the comfort of our freedom. Rock & roll has woken a lot of us up out of a sort of big sleep and has the power to keep up awake. I think of Jimi Hendrix playing the "Star-Strangled Banner."

You said "strangled," not "spangled" - a perfect slip!

[Laughs.] When I think of Vietnam, I think of two things: Hendrix playing the "Star-Spangled Banner" and the photo of that child running after a napalm strike. The things that affect me most about Vietnam both happen to be conveyed through a creative medium. So I think rock & roll can make real the situation a country finds itself in.

You've said that when you first came over, you found Americans more honest and more innocent than the people you were used to.

I found the people open. This to me was and is an endearing quality of the American people. They want to be positive rather than negative. But this sort of openness makes Americans quite vulnerable to manipulation, vulnerable to what I call the new fascism. The new fascism will come with a warm handshake, with gold fillings and a smile. And through the media, people will be manipulated en masse. The potential is there. A nation as powerful as the United States surely must not elect a leader because of his suitability for television. Surely this is not just a sign of our times but a warning for times to come.

Do you ever feel the need to get America out of your system, almost as if it were a stage in your development?

No, because there is no end in sight for me with American music. I didn't discover John Lee Hooker until I was upstairs in the Rolling Stones' studio in New York, in 1986. That opened up a whole new world to me. I didn't discover the Miles Davis of In a Silent Way and Sketches of Spain until 1985, and now there is John Coltrane and Art Pepper and gospel music and so on. We in U2 are hearing all this for the first time - our ears are fresh. We're looking to the past to find the future.

America's music is really the world's music, at least popularly.

That's right. It's just a shame that in 1987 there are sixteen-year-olds who have never heard of Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin. Look, if Bob Dylan walked into a record company in 1987 and played them "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and told them it was a hit record, they'd show him the door. If Jimi Hendrix came along now, he wouldn't get a deal. The companies would file him under Black and Confused and Out of Tune. That is an example of the difference between now and then. Radio is so tightly formatted because this apartheid exists in the music business between black and white music.

Though you came late to black American music, you've been deeply affected by it.

As an Irishman, I feel a real closeness to the black man because we were both the underdog, because we both have soul and the spirit to spit it out, because we both are too raw to sit nicely on the stiff upper lip of the intelligentsia, wherever they may be found in art circles. The Irish have been described as white niggers, and I take that as a compliment. A lot of my heroes happen to be black artists. It would be wrong for me to imitate their actual form, but the spirit of it is something I wish to imitate and learn from. Bob Marley was a huge, huge influence on U2. To hear B.B. King sing, which I did a while back, and to hear his voice break - I mean, I wanted to give up singing. The spirit of abandonment, which I see as part of black music, is also part of U2. I must admit, I find it hard to think in terms of color, because it's not an issue for me. [Laughs] It's just a bummer - me buying all these black records and them not buying any of ours.

How do you think technology will affect the music?

I think we will all need to get back to the roots. In the Nineties, I think people will be listening to traditional Irish music or Cajun music or old soul music. I find myself being drawn away from art-school rock and toward people like Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson - people like Dylan, Van Morrison, Patti Smith. There's humanness to their work. Dehumanization is a part of life in the cities in the 1980s, and I find myself reacting against that and looking for that human movement, which I call soul. Which is not to say I want to throw stardust on the past and be a revivalist. I want to go forward.

Are you implying that there will be a rejection of technology?

It would be wrong to rule out the use of this technology, but if it doesn't have a spark of soul, let's dismantle it. It's not the machines I worry about, it's the machines who play the machines. I believe the future lies in a marriage of both acoustic and electronic, because instruments like the violin and the guitar and the saxophone are the most expressive. How the traditional and technological will cross is on my mind a lot.

How do you think the future of rock will come out of its past?

In the Fifties rock & roll had a cool haircut and a curled lip. In the Sixties it wore tie-dye and discovered distortion and electric-guitar power and ran away with that for a few years - but at least it held up a placard and exploded now and then. In the Seventies it rediscovered some of its underlying folk values and ran with that - and everyone grew their hair and ate magic mushrooms and believed in Mother Earth. But it got fat and put on lipstick.

Then it discovered minimalism in the '76, nihilism and punk, and again the idea of rock & roll as revolution. Then rhythm was rediscovered, from George Clinton into the Talking Heads, and I think now there is a rediscovery of songwriting. I also see a resurgence in jazz.

At the time you guys started in the garage, punk was considered a naïve revolution, but in retrospect, it seems as calculated as anything today.

You could say that the Sex Pistols were the ultimate designer rock & roll group. They were assembled with a view toward subversion. It wasn't like the Beatles, where John called round to Paul's house. It was more like Malcolm [McLaren, the Sex Pistols' manager] made the phone calls. But at the same time, they made a wonderful, big and nasty noise and it woke me up. There was a cynicism and a manipulation involved in some of those punk groups, and we were blind to that. For us, it was truth.

Eventually, you came to feel that punk had warped the positive potential of rock & roll, that power had corrupted the music.

I still feel power corrupts the music. I see it at the edges of U2.

So rather than identify yourself with the bands that came out of punk, what groups do you feel akin to?

The Who. Because of that three-dimensional quality: sexual, spiritual and political.

It's interesting that you pick a group that came out of the Sixties.

It's true that we rewrite history and glorify the Sixties - and I do glorify the Sixties - because rock & roll was exploring in some way. I hope what I feel is not just nostalgia for something I missed - but rock & roll is too rational right now. It waits and it watches instead of jumping right in: taking a chance is not high on the list of priorities. There is an environment in which music can live and breathe, and right now the environment is suffocating. When we look back at this decade, we'll have to say that in the Eighties rock & roll went to work for corporations and got up at 6:00 a.m. to go jogging. And it wasn't just to keep fit. It was to get ahead: to improve the prospects of the corporation.

Do you think rock & roll in the Sixties was really an engine of change, or that it merely reflected the changes going on in the culture around it?

I think those things are bound up in each other. It could be said that the lack of response in the generation now is due to the fact that the inspiration is not there - the inspiration is not there - the inspiration to be part of change.

Perhaps one reason for the difference is that the Sixties was a time of prosperity, and people had a chance to look further than material things. Perhaps the Sixties was the product of a generation of spoiled children who could afford to drop acid and set off for Peru.

Well, how do you reclaim the past triumphs of the form without being overly conservative?

In looking back at itself, rock & roll can make use of everything it has. For instance, why is it only a heavy-metal band that plays with fuzz boxes and distortion? Why is it only a funk band that uses beatbox machines and rap? Why is it that folk musicians stick together and write about fear in the big city and the rivers and hills? Why is it all so cut up and compartmentalized? Why can't we have it all! Why can't rock & roll dance like Elvis Presley, sing like Van Morrison, walk like the Supremes, talk like John Lennon, roar like the Clash, drum like Keith Moon and play guitar like Jimi Hendrix? Why?