As preparations for the recording of a new U2 record gather momentum, Bono takes time out to talk to Propaganda about the Irish in the World Cup, Edge as "a maniac" on their "abstract" latest recordings, songwriting by accident and the importance of Air India sick bags in the creation of new material. Oh, and, er, a new number presently called "Sick Puppy."

"When the Love Town Tour ran out at the beginning of the year," recalls Bono, "we all ran out as well." And the members of U2 have been seen or heard little of since then. So what have they been up to, where have they been, what are they doing and when will we see them next? These were some of the questions that Propaganda readers have been eager to get answers to as the months have passed since the Love Town Tour. Despite the fact that the band have not been doing any interviews and have rarely been in the public eye, Bono happily broke the silence - "as it's our magazine" - for an hour or two to fill fans in on some of those answers.

For a start, there was the small matter of Ireland's national football team featuring successfully in the World Cup in Italy. Not content with Larry having written the Irish team song for Italia 90, everyone in the band flew to Italy to watch the players compete. It was an unforgettable experience for Bono: "Where we were sitting at the match with Italy, the atmosphere was very Italian. There was a giant Italian mascot dressed as a sort of bullfighter with a world cup on his head and two cymbals, one on each arm, which on every Italian offensive were bashed together...I think Larry wanted to put his head between the cymbals."

For a few memorable weeks Jack Charlton, the Irish team manager, was "bigger than the Pope" and the country ground to a virtual standstill. In fact, Italy is one of the band's favourite countries to visit; they've been three times to visit this year, staying in Rome and Turin. But the year has also been a lot about staying at home, and for Bono, being a family man with Ali and young Jordan. Not that being in the family way was a novel experience for him.

"In one sense I've been a family man ever since I joined the band," he quips. "But being at home for a while would, you imagine, soften you out and lay you back but it doesn't really do that to me.

"At home 'ol Captain Paranoia won't let us sit too easy. The advantage is that there are very few distractions and it becomes a time for evaluation of what you do. But I do a lot of my writing when we're on the road, on the back of Air India sick bags and on tablecloths in restaurants, or when I come in at 6 o'clock n the morning and maybe I shouldn't have been out so late."

Coming home is a useful time to decipher the ideas written on tablecloths and to slip tapes of band soundchecks into the home cassette player to try and get some kind of objective view of how the band are doing musically. "Home is like the lab," he continues. "When we're at home, we usually focus on what has happened to us when we're away." And even when they're at home - that is off the touring road - there is still a lot of being away. In fact, he says, racking his memory to remember the diary for 1990 to date, "The day after the last concert in Amsterdam I went out on a boat and sailed away."

He "sailed" to America, family in tow, "to tie up some loose ends." This included a memorable few weeks' stay in New Orleans where the Neville Brothers, born and bred in the city, were their guides. But it was not all leisure time - there was work to be done. Bono ended up writing songs with the Nevilles, notably "Jah Love," which appears on their recent Brothers Keeper release. Another song he wrote with them is entitled "Kingdom Come."

Hiring a Cherokee van, he, Ali and Jordan set off across America for a few weeks: "The van was really a device to keep us all together and we just drove and drove and drove..." The writing continued unabated. In Los Angeles, for example, Bono continued work on a screenplay called The Million Dollar Hotel with Canadian playwright Nicholas Klein. He calls it a black comedy, a "Peyton Place on acid." In San Francisco he was scribbling bits and pieces for a play which is set there, also a prose-poem "which may or may not be a song," entitled "Ballad of New Orleans."

"These are kind of the loose ends left over by The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum, just different projects which may never see the light of day." But he is certain in their own way even these diverse projects will contribute to the overall U2 mix in the same way that Larry's continuing interest in country music or Adam's passion for the sounds of urban black America will continue.

"That's what Clockwork Orange was about, that's the reason I'm having a go at this play and this poetry - it's to experiment and bring back the results of the experiment to U2. Adam, Larry and Edge bring back their findings to U2 and the band becomes a melting pot for the four of us. That's the exciting thing about a band."

By April the Cherokee trip was over, the Family Bono had returned to Dublin again to continue writing and musical experimentation with the other members of the band. The thought on everyone's minds was of the next long-playing record, what would it be and how would it arrive. I wondered how the band goes about getting a new record together. For U2 it usually takes two forms.

"One is what we've been doing for the last few months and what we will be doing for the next few months. We come together and just improvise, just play, just see what happens, writing by accident as opposed to by numbers." He calls it "songwriting by accident."

"You wait for that special moment and you build the music around that moment and then out of the mood of the music comes the words. As a lyricist that can be difficult for me. Sometimes the words just come straight from the music but sometimes they don't, and I've got to try and listen in to the music, to what it's saying and then try to put words on it."

That's one approach. The other process is a more formal way of songwriting, where one of the band will have an idea that they've written on guitar or piano and they bring it to Bono to write words for. Or Bono has a musical idea and takes it to them to see where they can take it. "Edge would be experimenting in the studio with an atmosphere or a mood or a drumbeat and he would develop it more on his own and it would actually look more like a song - you will have a rough idea of what this piece is and the next step is to hone it down as opposed to completely develop it."

He cites "Where the Streets Have No Name" and "The Unforgettable Fire" as examples of songs that developed this way. This time around in preparation for the new album, the band have been at the first stage this past summer: "It's the earlier, more experimental approach at present. We feel that with The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum we got to grips with a certain kind of songwriting and though we enjoy that, still the most exciting way to songwrite is in improvisation, in experimenting when you create something new."

Inevitably there is a lot of wastage in this process. Bono explained that they are probably working with about 50 different ideas for new songs at the moment, ranging from sound-ideas to almost complete numbers: "It's 50 musical ideas, but that's everything from a sampled piece from Clockwork Orange to a ballad."

Sometime this autumn that number will be whittled down to about 30 different pieces from which the songs on the next record will be born. "It's the first time we're ever had that many make it through...but this is still quite early on."

Not all the ideas will necessarily require a lot of honing down in the recording studio. "We might decide to leave a piece unhoned down like we did on The Unforgettable Fire with 'Bad.' You leave it as it arrives. Or you might rewrite and rewrite."

Those decisions will be made before Christmas, after which they will look back at all the material to date and "actually start working out formally what the record is." After spending a few weeks in Berlin demo-ing, in the New Year they'll stand back and see where they think the record should go.

"Although it sounds a bit trippy to say it, oftentimes the record takes on a life of its own. We've got all the ideas about where we'd like the record to go, but rather than decide and then go out and make it, we're just following each person's vision and then we'll see."

Inevitably, of the score of songs that fail to make it to the LP, many will be recorded and put on B-sides, continuing a valuable tradition of releasing additional U2 material to their audience. But it's the album that we await with eager anticipation.

"We want to make a record that pushes out the boundaries a bit, not just for ourselves but in terms of what people are used to hearing on the radio or on records. We want to start abusing the technology that's available - this has always been an important side of U2."

So, the all-important question: what does Bono think, at this early stage, is it shaping up like, what clues to its direction? "I don't know how abstract the record will end up, but it has started quite abstract, a lot of very, very aggressive guitar playing. Edge is like a maniac at the moment. It's not going to be a laid-back record, I can tell you that."

This sounds as though there is some continuity with the sounds created for the unreleased Clockwork Orange soundtrack. "Clockwork Orange was a great springboard for our record because it was a question of us realising that the only limits you have as an artist is your imagination. You are only limited by your ability to imagine a sound structure - you are not limited by your ability to play something anymore. In the early days when we didn't play very well we would have been limited by our ability to play, but we're actually playing very well at the moment - there is no limit.

"That is both exciting and frightening - there are so many options, so many different ways you can go." He is confident that the band are starting out fresh for the '90s, refreshed by their experience of the last few years in looking through rock's back catalogue.

"We're beginning again for the Nineties. The sky's the limit and we want to be forward-looking. We've looked back and learnt so much in this period from working with the blues and gospel and jazz, and working with people like Bob Dylan, B.B. King and Roy Orbison. We've been sponging, soaking up any decent information we could get. There's a generation dying out that might not be here in 20 years' time and the whole point of Rattle and Hum was to say, 'Look, we're fans of these people.' "

Bono believes the band needed to "study under" people from B.B. King to Bob Dylan because they provide a link with the past that will soon be lost. But while Rattle and Hum paid homage to the story of rock 'n' roll music, it was only a stopping-off point for U2. And in parts it also pointed to their future direction: "The idea was to learn the information and to bring it back and synthesize it into a new direction for U2."

In his view the song from that recording which most clearly points to the next U2 is "God Part II." As usual, while the "pieces" do not have fixed titles as yet, many of them have "working titles." Some of them with a peculiar resonance, as Bono reveals. "Provisional titles," he calls them, insisting that they wouldn't make sense to anyone but the band, but, pressed, he lets slip a couple as teasers. "Well, we've got a really great soul song, in the tradition of Sly and the Family Stone, called 'Sick Puppy'...I'm not sure that'll be the title when we make the record. Another one is a full-frontal attack from the Edge called 'Ultraviolet.' "

The trick now is to take the music of U2 into the future and this is why they are not rushing the business of writing and recording. It is the success of the band to date that means they can afford to spend this time getting things right before making the record. "It's a great position for people to have put us in. I think the U2 audience wants us to make a great record and be surprised by it. They don't want us to put out another record just because we have to and we won't put it out unless it's a great record."

He is certain that the band have not yet reached their creative peak: "We're a few records away from that." If things run to schedule it is likely that the album will be in the shops by this time next year but after that it gets hazy again. The world tour, which successful bands like U2 normally embark on with the release of a new record, is not necessarily inevitable. Bono says the band have got to ask themselves some hard questions about prolonged live touring. Breaking a mammoth tour into shorter bite-sized trips with regular returns home, is not as straightforward as it appears on paper.

"We're weighing all that up at the moment. I used to think that we could come and go, but it's not proving to be that easy because, for instance, if we did a two-month tour we'd only be getting good on the last week, but if you do a six-month tour, maybe the last month is not so good."

The Love Town Tour taught the band a lot of lessons about how not to tour, not least the awkward experience of the singer losing his voice and the consequent cancelled shows. "In Australia and New Zealand particularly, I discovered what we really like and what we really don't like about playing live. We thought it would be great to go indoors and to play seven nights in a city and to almost take over a city for a week; it would become a home away from home, and everyone could see us up close unlike these big outdoor type events. But we actually realised that out of those seven dates we played, maybe only four of them would be at the level we would like. We started to realise that concerts have to be special and there is a momentum to coming into a city for a few days...and then going out again."

While Australia and New Zealand proved an enjoyable experience, he thinks other territories, under that sort of concert schedule, might have put more strain on the band. "We're not a band who just get up on stage and play the songs - the songs are either an all-out experience or they are nothing. There is no in-between U2 songs. You either perform it completely and utterly, or you should stop performing it."

In fact, in Australia he stopped singing "Bad" for the simple reason that he couldn't maintain the necessary intensity night after night: "It was taking away from the song to do that." While some fans were disappointed not to hear "Sunday Bloody Sunday," Bono believes that it would be wrong to play a song "without being able to put heart and soul into it."

"The question remains whether we are going to play any song night after night. I don't know - can we play 'Pride' every night? If you notice the song is taking a turn for the worse, you've got to stop playing it for a while."

It is a problem heightened every time a new record is released with a handful of songs demanding a live airing. Bono has toyed with the idea of simply going out on the road and performing new material and nothing from the past, maybe just for an hour or two.

"I love the idea that in the past you'd hear the Stones, the Who or Jimi Hendrix or the Beatles, all these people on the same bill and they'd all play 20 minutes. That sounds ideal to me not just because it's easier on my voice, but because I think rock 'n' roll should not be much longer than that."

A bit like the Amnesty tour? "Yeah, I loved that. It's all about the intensity of the songs. Ideally I'd love to just go out and play an hour of new songs and have three great acts on the bill."

Who else? "Let's see. I'd have Elvis to open, then Jimi Hendrix and the Beach Boys before we go on. Followed by Bob Dylan. In fact, I suppose we'd have to be the opening act!"