ALL ACROSS the U.S. this summer, it was like the second coming. U2 were back, the biggest band in the world, with a show of unprecedented proportions pulling in audiences of 55,000 a night, manipulating American sensibilities, taking the piss, moving coast to coast in the MGM private jet with 180 personnel, £2.4 million of equipment, two 248-by-80 ft. sound stages, fifty-two semitrailers, eleven hoisted Trabants, three towers of video screens, thirty-six television monitors, and a satellite dish for pulling in live cable channels during the show.

At 4 a.m. after the Saturday show at the Foxboro Stadium, all this came down to a glossy black stretch moving fast through the scant traffic of early-morning Boston, Mass., and a 32-year-old Irishman in a glittering jacket lying asleep across the seat. At Boston Common he was roused by the screaming of young women, the wallpaper of his life. He raised himself into a sitting position, scratched his blue chin and groped along the seat - "Where's my mask?" He put on the black wraparound glasses, yawning. A rock star's day is never done.

The limo stopped in the parking bay of the Four Seasons Hotel. The door opened a crack, and the screaming reached a higher pitch. The toe of a black suede shoe emerged, and a spidery leg. Bono extricated himself from the car like an insect from a chrysalis. He sidled towards the fans, shoes sliding down a glass pavement, leaning back as if he were walking down a wall, mandibles poised to strike, silver rings in his ears, white face strapped ear to ear in gloss black. He was infiltrator, plunderer, thief, evil intent. Richard III edging towards the rosy little princess...and how the fans screamed and hopped, shiny-eyed, hands clamped over their mouths!

Bono has overcome his scruples about giving interviews in dark glasses. Increasingly, he is The Fly. "The Fly is about having a lot of fun," he says. "It suits me, all this bullshit. It's a band ego, not an individual ego."

Together since 1976, U2 are the creators of eternal, emotional songs - "Pride," "One," "Where the Streets Have No Name," "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" - their forty-two million records traversing rock history between Elvis and industrial music. The band of the Eighties, they are targeted, guessed and intuited to be the band of the Nineties. The night after the show, vibes across the bar signal Bono threading his way across the floor, nodding and signing his name.

"We asked a movie star for his autograph. He wanted to charge us $10," says a grey-haird woman.

"I'll take $25," says Bono.

A little drunk, a little dangerous, he sits in a peach fauteuil and produces out of his jacket, with a flourish, a bottle of Moet et Chandon in a brown paper bag. "We got fed up today," he says. "We ran off to Hyannisport and had a swim. I fucked off!"

Zoo TV has been preying on his mind. Its electronic overload, described by production designer Peter Williams as "massively complex and surreal and silly," has complicated their performance and assumed meddlesome initiatives of its own.

To begin with, there are four on stage. "We may be Irish, but we act Italian. There's Love and Peace nights, and there's nights when they don't show up!"

Bono's expansive gesture knocks his glass to the floor. People mop and make soothing noises. He leans back in his chair, laughing, and says in the broadest of Dublin accents, "Let's face it. I'm dronk...I'm very dronk!"

"Was it Brendan Behan said, 'You will be guilty before God for the laughs you didn't have?' We don't want to be the band that was too stupid to enjoy being number one."

The seventh and latest album, Achtung Baby, released in October 1991, turns from social and political themes to sex and relationships. As opposed to Rattle and Hum's fourteen million sales, and The Joshua Tree's thirteen million, it has only sold nine million. Ellen Darst, director of Principle Management, has no doubt that it will leap the perception gap to sell as many as before.

"They are multi-dimensional, consistently ahead of their fans. They keep coming up with it at each point," she says. In 1980, when she was responsible for Warner Brothers artist development for N.E. regional, vetting another baby band from Ireland, she knew at once what she was looking at. "You couldn't miss it! They were prepared to take it all on, whatever that meant. There was Edge - a raw, different musical approach. There was Bono - incredibly bright, engaged, a dynamo of mental energy."

THERE ARE a lot of stories in the band," says Bono. "In the Nineties, people are confused about sex and love. The idea of two people giving themselves to each other is one of the most mad ideas, but it's a grand madness. As self-indulgent as we can be, a lot of us are going through that. A lot of us are trying to figure that out."

The Edge's marriage disintegrated during the making of Achtung Baby, and the reverberations come through in Bono's songs.

His lyrics repay reading. Early readers of Flannery O'Connor, Sean O"Casey and Robert Hayden, they must be the world's most literary rock band.

"People expect very little of rock 'n' roll, but Ireland's different. Poets and playwrights wrote our very constitution. The people don't discriminate against the electric guitar."

U2 did some discriminating of their own, reacting to a world where commercials were more interesting than movies, fashion livelier than features, the ephemeral more important than the issues.

"We attempted to stare down that Eighties kiss-me-quick mentality...but people didn't separate the band from the work. They just saw me standing there, wagging my finger at them."

A revered musicial and natural guitar genius, he sports his poor look: beaten-up studded jacket, kneed-out maroon cords. The Edge treasures his Gibson Explorer above all things, including his Sixties Mercedes cars. His expression, under a knitted cap lettered "Spunk," is rapt and introspective. He has the face of a mystic or priest, but urges us two miles east to Harvard's favorite pool hall, Jillian's Bar, where he intends to extract money from drummer Larry Mullen.

Tim, Bono's security man, approaches with a black velvet pouch, a gift from a fan. Bono puts his glass down and tips the silver ring, a wide twisted band with a single diamond, into the palm of his hand. A printed card reads, "This unique wedding band is a re-creation of the wedding ring Catherina von Bora gave to Martin Luther to commemorate their wedding." He slips it casually onto his little finger.

IT'S TIME to get serious. It's time to play pool. U2 is the only truly democratic top band: Bono, the Edge, Larry, Adam and their manager, Paul McGuinness, each get one fifth of the money. "It took me years," McGuinness told me, "to find out we were not doing it the same way as other bands."

U2 met the former Trinity philosophy student and film technician in 1976. McGuinness is not a frustrated musician but straight, well-grounded, a member of the Dublin Arts Council, an operator of business instincts and a tough humorous disposition. Due to his careful management, U2 own all their recordings, license and reclaim the catalogue, and refuse sponsorship.

Chris Blackwell signed them in 1980 for Island, now owned by PolyGram, and the next six years passed in a blur of gruelling, character-forming tours. In a decade of style paranoia, U2 came to be deemed the touchstone.

"The strength and durability of a four-person band is enormous," said Paul McGuinness. "This is a coherent social group, very bright, and culturally ambitious. And each member of U2 has three other members criticizing him morning, noon and night."

NEXT DAY, I ride the stretch to Foxboro with Larry Mullen Jr., the loudest kick-drummer on earth (characteristic interjection, "this conversation has left the planet") and Adam Clayton, bass player of character, the hedonist of the four ("In America you can have whatever you want, but Europe is more sophisticated"). They are both built like marines, Larry in black leather waistcoat and combat dress, Adam more theatrical, an extra from South Pacific in deafeningly fashionable yellow Casely-Hayford castaway suit and boots from Noddyland.

Larry lives with his girlfriend of fifteen years in a modern house in Howth. He likes boats and bikes. In the hospitality tent he keeps twin black cherry Harley-Davidsons for racing the MGM jet from gig to gig alongside security man and martial-arts king David Guyer. "By thirty, you've got to loosen up. After ten years saving the whale it's like, forget the whale, remember the bank account!"

This is partly unbelievable. U2 is a morality-driven rock band, whom I met only three months previously staging a protest on the radioactive beach at Sellafield. Adam gives an ironic smile. "The message, that's a bit of a fallacy. As if we sat down at a table and agreed it. The thing we do agree about is the music, and that pulls us together."

AT THE stadium, the four musicians go straight onstage for soundcheck. "We're testing out a racetrack now," says Bono. "Is the wheel going to come off when you hit the chicane?"

At the furthest end of the rock spectrum from the collected mind of Ellen Darst is the boogaloo mindset of disc jockey, guru and viber B.P. A the back of the hospitality tent, Bernard Patrick Fallon, heart of the Irish mafia collected around this sonic slice of Dublin, takes refuge in his trailer. It is his job to sit in a Trabant, show nights, and create the show's disco foreplay that lifts the audience step by step on to U2's emotional level.

B.P. is a gentle, wispy sorcerer in red shorts and cowboy boots, bone necklaces, wire specs and dangly earrings. Bono describes him like this: "Ampleforth. Expelled for having sex with a maid. A rock 'n' roll creature." B.P. also appears between the supporting bands drawing attention to the approaching American election, saying such things as, "If God had intended us to vote, he would have given us a candidate."

"I've been in this game for hundreds of years," he told me. "I know U2 to be the rarest of things. They are huge, but instead of getting diluted, they're growing, communicationary-wise. They were always the grand mountain, Arthurian music, the great fist raising the sword. Now it's 'Let's see your zip.' And they are enjoying it more than ever."

ROUND ABOUT 9 p.m. King Boogaloo flits offstage in a wizard's cape, foreplay completed, leaving East Coast America hot and ready for Casanova. Amid apocalyptic sounds, complicated by an overload of radio frequencies and distortions, the video screens blink on one by one. Electronic words march across the sky with ambiguous, challenging messages: "My eyes are open and I believe in the skies about and the shoes beneath"..."Everything you know is wrong"..."Love means always having to change the locks."

To subterranean vibrations and prolonged anthemic noises, the silhouettes of U2 are glimpes against flickering screens. We are two stops down the line. We are at Zoo Station.

"I'm ready...
Ready for the shuffle
Ready for the deal
Ready to let go
Of the steering wheel."

He strives, reaches for the bonelessly undulating belly dancer in "Mysterious Ways." He grieves, tragically divided from womankind. He carries 55,000 people with him on the mournful, moonlit plushiness of his voice, delivering anguish via its cracked upper regions. The Edge plays rhythmic layered guitar, a big sound against the driving beat, and one by one, the great emotional songs uncoil like monsters from their haunting, lyrical beginnings.

Bono brings up the weather forecast on the screens, tunes into cable TV, pesters the White House. "The President is not available for me? I cannot be as important as I thought I was. Please give him a message. It's very simple. Tell him to...WATCH MORE TV."

He sidles under floodlit Trabants, plucks a girl from the audience, sprays champagne into the air, and sets up like a busker at the end of the B stage. There, in a plain black T-shirt and with an acoustic guitar, he sings a nasal Irish chant, holding the crowd in the palm of his hand. "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and "Slow Dancing" have the sound of open country and peat fires.

Down tramp the Edge, Larry and Adam with what they can carry, and set up camp around him. Larry, all alone, very straight and blond, sings "Whisky in the Jar" and the audience of this Irish town grows very quiet. The pricking of 10,000 lighter flames spreads across the valley of the stadium. Then the universe crackles back into overload with a gabble of metallic voices, static and white sound into "Where the Streets Have No Name," and the hymnic, marching sounds of "Sunday Bloody Sunday." And suddenly U2 is gone, like Mephistopheles, leaving a puff of smoke behind. A lonely Trabant is left, cruising away through the video screens into the void.

AT ONE a.m. at the riggers' party after the show, Bono, deep into the wilder shores of his Humperdinck phase, electrifies the night in a tangerine broderie anglaise frilled evening shirt. His eyes, revealed at last, are navy blue and he's using them to scan a catalogue of old cars held up by a kneeling aide, a human lectern who slowly turns the pages for him.

"I sort of want a Cortina," says Bono, with his wolf smile. " 'Cause when I drive a Cortina, nobody bats an eye. I need a really tacky car. Might as well go the whole hog. I'm going to have leopardskin dice and the nodding dog in the back window."

The aide proffers a page. "Too Sixties. I don't want the ultimate driving machine. I want a muscle car. Something with that Starsky and Hutch look, go-faster stripes. I just want something Englebert would feel good with...Ah." His finger goes down on the page, the aide bows out, and a Toyota Hiace van is on its way.

"Everything's retrogressive, a Seventies thing," he muses. " 'Recommodification,' 'appropriation,' these are the arty buzzwords for the Nineties. With all this retro music around, when you get excited by a new group, you have to ask yourself: is this an original of the species? Or do I like it because it reminds me of something great?" He parodies himself in rock-star persona, coming out late in the show as the Las Vegas Mirror Ball Man. "The harder ideas of industrial music and post-modernism are much more interesting than nostalgia and rock 'n' roll traditionalism."

Success came to U2 in their twenties. They are as hungry as ever, but not just for the money. "You get your fancy homes and cars, then you realize what you're strung out on is the idea of making a music that has never been heard before. We're all in our thirties, and that's where we are right now."

He looks around him at the U2 carnival turning in the night. "This is like writing the play, starring in it and taking Broadway on the road with you. It's more potent than heroin and harder to come off. Or like writing a song, it wasn't there a moment ago...

"It's that moment: I just have to have it. We're junkies, strung out on that moment. All the management people, all the trucks, the stage, it's all set up for that." Outside the circle of respect, the party is getting wilder, a glorious circus of noise and technicolor. Seven-foot riggers in grass skirts boogie out of sight on the dance floor, where Sheila, of Principle Management, finds herself the soft filling between two members of support group Hiphopcrisy, and decides not to fight it.

Bono looks at all this without seeing it, and says, "You're a different person each time you come home. You just hope you'll be let back into the house. You hope you haven't turned into a complete asshole."

A few feet away, band tour bus driver Heavy Duty, a 35-year-old mountain of tattoos from Nashville, a genial genie with half-shaved head and a tail of hair down his back, raises his party hat to show off the bullet hole in his forehead, executed by the king himself, Little Vinnie of Westminister, Maryland. He takes us on a guided tour of his biceps. "See, a crocodile with a motor head. A skull with U2 on it. This is a dog chewing its way out of my arm. Here's a generic type person. He's meant to look like he has all the skin ripped off his face."

We peer into his armpit. "Awesome!" breathes Peter Williams, "...really disgusting!"

MUCH, MUCH later, Bono gives me a lift to the hotel. Drowsy in the limo's speeding dark, he is the style icon: the motherless boy from Ballymun who ran away to join the circus, the man on the flying trapeze, returning like a pendelum to the life-saving structure of a real life - to his wife Ali, their two daughters, the house on the coast and the Martello tower at Bray. He is the rock star who kept the bargain. On August 30, Bill Clinton phoned him. The accumulated power of Bono! He tips over horizontally, and falls asleep.

The story goes like this: A music fan dies and ascends to rock heaven, where he is greeted by the Angel Gabriel. He spots Elvis and John Lennon all in white, then he glimpses a figure in black leather with bug-eyed glasses, and asks excitedly, "Is that Bono?"