The Elastic Bono Band

The three non-singing members of U2 have one priceless piece of advice for newcomers to their rarefied world: "Whatever you do, don't get in a car with Bono." "Seriously," insists Larry Mullen Jr with policeman earnestness, "Bono's not great at the old driving. It's not a good look for him."

As Paul "Bono" Hewson's enormous, buffleather boat of a Mercedes weaves cavalierly through Dublin's Friday evening traffic, we discover that this is no great exaggeration. Gesticulating wildly, performing terrifying impressions of Liam Gallagher, flagging down gobsmacked drivers midstream to demand directions, he is an erratic king of the road. As a Free Man Of Dublin -- an honour bestowed on all U2's members in February this year -- Bono can gaze sheep on St. Stephen's Green (which he has) and park wherever he likes (which he does), immune from Dublin's predominantly Norwegian wheel-clamping fraternity.

Bono's car has radar, which beep-beep-beeps whenever the Bonomobile muzzles the fender of the car in front. Bono's car radar beeps an awful lot. Q and Bono are on an impromptu mission. The St. Stephen's Green Hotel is hosting a benefit to honour the birthday of Burmese/Myanmari dissident leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest since July 1989 and confined to the envious of Rangoon since her "release" in 1995. Present will be Dublin liberal arts mafiosi including Marianne Faithfull, mayor Mary Freehill (whose name Bono will forget), Chris De Burgh, U2/PJ Harvey manager Paul McGuinness and film-maker John Boorman. Bono looks like a rock star in the black, open-necked shirt, Chinese dragon sunglasses and jet-dyed, Zoo TV hair. Q looks like a pranny in a Beta Band T-shirt, while clutching Bono's ghetto blaster -- today dubbed the "Bailyman Briefcase" -- which is cued up to play an unfinished mix of "Walk On," the fourth track on what is to be U2's 10th studio album. Bono figures "Walk One" could almost be about Aung San Suu Kyi, although if you were asked to guess, you'd probably say it's about marriage. "Stay close to me," he urges as the Merc nudges the kerb outside the hotel. Then Bono and boom box roadie sweep into the function room, a sea of oohing, aahing faces part instinctively and a microphone is proffered. The tape begins and Bono sings along into a hot barrage of flashbulbs. "Home..." yearns Bono in a gritty soul tenor, "I can't say where it is but I know I'm going home/That's where the hurt is..." The look on Chris De Burgh's face is saying, "I'll get me coat."

Back at U2's Dublin wharfside studio, Friday 22 June, there are seagulls and tension in the air. U2 have been recording their new album, again with Daniel Lanois, since the 1998 end of the PopMart tour and the rumours filtering back have suggested a succession of recording and confidence crises. Nine months in, they're suspended sessions and resolved to begin all over again. In April 1999, Bono buttonholed Q at Dublin's Clarence hotel (which U2 own) and proceeded to croon a number of recently written tunes. But even that was 14 months ago. "It was tough at times," recalls Larry Mullen. "There were dark moments. We choose to record in Dublin so you have to go home, deal with that leak in your roof as well. Danny thought it was interfering with making the record."

Late '99 brought further complications, notably the birth of Elijah Bob Patricius Guggi Q Hewson in August and Levi Evans in October. An autumn deadline whistled by, but things were looking up, a situation threatened before Christmas by the theft of Bono's lyric-hoarding laptop but ameliorated by its eventual return. "In the last six months things really improved," says Mullen. "Everyone was in a better humour, we felt we were winning with the songs. Bono's voice, which he was struggling to make work the way he wanted it to, started going right. It was almost like his voice broke. All these things...synergy."

Buoyed by this creative sprint, U2 have given themselves till the end of August to finish the album and Q's visit coincides with what is hopefully the final stretch of mixing. Everyone agrees that this one will go to the wire. "What's the latest we've ever changed something?" ponders badger-bearded The Edge. "Well, we've recorded backing vocals to "Playboy Mansion" in the mastering suite."

In the living room itself, shades on, half-crouched, grasping a mic in his hairy right fist, Bono re-records a vocal to an Iggy-in-a-submarine, pumping rock/dance tune called "Elevation." He aims his character's sensual exhortations at a plastic figuring placed on the mixing desk. Arms aloft, painted helmet hair, it looks from a distance like Noel Gallagher. In fact, it's Bruce Lee. He consults with Lanois, an Elmore Leonard creation in Miami shirt and tan: "Danny, can you make this guy sound more convincing?"

It's a day of decisions. Bono's not sure if the phrase "midlife crisis" should appear in the song "New York" ("The press will crucify me," he grins). Mixes are compared and mercilessly berated, while Lanois and U2 play metaphor tennis. As the band scoff haddock and lamb chops in the dining area (gourmet tour catering provided; entertainment possibilities include Bruce Springsteen's Track collection and The Harder They Come soundtrack), Lanois brings in his latest manipulation of "Beautiful Day." If U2 get it right, it will be the first single. If they get it wrong, it will be terminated without mercy.

The mix spins Mullen begins to wince and Bono looks sick. He picks up his barely touched plate of food and shovels it into the dustbin.

"I'm afraid that's put me off my dinner."

Daniel Lanois' big eyes look forlorn.

SEVEN WEEKS LATER, Bono sits under a big umbrella in a beach bar on the Cote D'Azur, looking pleased with himself. He tucks heartily into a pizza while unposh French families frolic on the stony beach. Suddenly, a freak wave gurgles right up to the cafe's terrace and kids clamber over the wall to escape. Bono cackles lustily.

"You know it's no surprise to me how ugly the world can be, but I have to remind myself to pay attention to how beautiful it can be. To see a wave crashing in. Or a beautiful tree. Or a beach full of breasts, heh heh. [Jamaican accent] All creayshon. [Inhales deeply] Breathing in and out. Eating. Running down a road. Making love. Hitting one chord and kinda knowing what the next one is..."

The album that, shortly, U2 will decide to call All That You Can't Leave Behind, is almost finished, and U2 are piggybacking a holiday with press interviews. The other halves, Ali Hewson, former belly-dancer Morleigh Steinberg (Mrs Edge) and the Timotei-fair Ann Acheson (mother of Elvis and Ava Mullen) keep their distance, while little ones scatter about. Bachelor bassist Adam Clayton (cig brand: Silk Cut Extra Mild; home fridge contents: "chicken, potatoes, two rolls of film and some cranberry and orange juice") looks splendid in a T-Shirt depicting the Jimi Hendrix Experience embroidered with sequins. Larry Mullen augments his ageless gay pin-up/Viet vet image with two earrings: a cross on the left and a skull on the right. The Edge, who speaks slowly and has lovely hands, wears a woolly hat screwed onto his head but -- unlike everyone else -- doesn't appear to sweat.

"Beautiful Day" has survived and mix hostilities have abated, though mild controversies remain. Edge isn't sure whether they've got the right mix of "Kite" (they have). Others want to include "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" from the Million Dollar Hotel Soundtrack (in the end they do). Edge lobbies for a last-minute change to sequencing (Edge wins). But everyone is happy and, as far as U2 precedent goes, this is miraculous. No one alive remembers Larry Mullen being so garrulous.

"It's true," says Mullen, his eyes scrunching up like Cartman's. I remember after the Pop record being so gutted that "Staring At The Sun"...it should have been a fucking huge single but we didn't have time to finish it properly. And I remember having to do interviews, and being asked what the album was about and [does mean dog eyes] I had no...fucking...idea. All I knew was that if we'd had one more month we could have pulled that song through."

After Pop, a record no member of U2 will now describe as "finished," came the deluge. With the PopMart dates already booked, there was a non-negotiable cut-off point and, since PopMart was the most technologically complex tour they'd ever embarked upon, rehearsals were doubly vital. But when 25 April 1997 came around and the film stars and world press flocked to Las Vegas for the insanely anticipated first show, U2 knew in their ice cold bowels that they were in a deep dark place. They could barely play "With Or Without You," let alone "Discothèque."

"I have a very vivid memory of what it was like," shivers Adam Clayton. "I remember opening with 'Mofo' and just being so aware of...extreme fear, something I'd never experienced before. My whole body was caked with sweat. I was running with sweat to the degree where it made it difficult to play. And there was this feeling of having no strength in any part of my body.

"I have to say that the whole of the first week was like that, every night. We didn't know what was going to happen, with us, with the technology. It was like being on a magic carpet that part of you expected to fly, and part of you knew there was no way it could."

Was the PopMart concept asking a lot of American audiences anyway?

"I suppose in retrospect you kind of have to draw that conclusion. Whatever it was we were playing around with, it wasn't touching the right buttons. You have to accept that in the end."

PopMart was the crucible out of which U2 plucked All that You Can't Leave Behind. The band knew that the recovery they'd somehow achieved by PopMart's Johannesburg finale on 21 March 1998 had to be capitalised upon straightaway. Mullen's conviction that "now we should do the 'pop' album" and the general assent that recording as "four blokes in a room" would be a refreshing alternative to the sonic questing and experimentation that had characterized Achtung Baby, Zooropa, the Passenger project and Pop, provided two benchmarks. The acknowledgement that Pop was not the record that the world was waiting for in 1997 provided another.

"I'm under no illusion about the difficulty of recapturing ground that we've lost," concedes Mullen. "We haven't lost it through stupidity or ineptitude. It's because we wanted to experiment and we wanted to do other things. We followed through on our instincts and will continue to do so.

"But everything has changed. Things were pretty stable. We released records and they were relative successful. Then all of a sudden pop music has become pretty big. The whole landscape has changed and the challenges have changed."

Everyone in and around U2 is taking about pop music, how it's stone a march on rock while rock's been peering up its own rusty sheriff's badge. You can't stop them bubbling about Aaliyah, Sonique, Moloko, TLC, Craig Davis and Kelis. Only Adam Clayton is cleaving to a left-field listening agenda: to his Bent and Primal Scream, Doves and Super Furry Animals.

Appropriately, then, All That You Can't Leave Behind has a crisp, relaxed air. It is simple in its structures, soulful of vocal, reined in by producers and engineers including Steve Lillywhite, Tim Palmer (The Mission/Tin Machine), Michael Hedges (Texas/Manic Street Preachers) and "Biff" Stannard (Spice Girls). Eno's presence is less audible than theoretical, the spectres of Al Green and Dusty Springfield stroll about and Edge's guitar sounds more Edge-esque than it has since 1988. It's a synthesis of every previous U2, a mirror held up to who they have become rather than who they're pretending to be next and, if a theme has emerged, Mullen thinks that it may be as simple as "home."

"There is a song called 'Home' that we left off the album," adds Bono, "it goes, Out of jokes, out of smokes, out of punches and on the ropes/On the canvas just inches from where you used to stand/out of fear, out of rage..."

That's a funny old lyric about "home."

"Well, I get discouraged by my base emotions. I write songs about high ideas and aspirations and I admire Martin Luther King and John Hume, peaceful people, but in myself I'm capable of aggression of a really brutal kind. If that rears its head and I give in to it and thump somebody, then I feel really low."

You've thumped people?

"I'm always thumping people. I always deeply regret it. It's a natural instinct that I have to control. It's made me very polite. I have the politeness of the psychopath, ha ha! Only last week I'm in a club with some mates and someone comes over and goes. You have to leave, there's a bit of trouble...And I'm thinking, Trouble, brilliant! I loathe that in myself, but it's part of the picture. I've only occasionally hit paparazzi, I never do that 'pop star with bodyguard is hardest man in the Sunset Marquis' kind of thing. I'm talking about a deep rage."

TODAY BONO WEARS a rosary. It was give to him by the Pope last year when he and Bob Geldof -- somewhat miraculously, given the Vatican's notorious fiscal conservatism -- managed to secure the pontiff's support for the Third World debt cancellation campaign, Jubilee 2000. In return, the Pope took Bono's sunglasses.

"I wish I could live up to the idea of Christianity," shrugs Bono. "It's like I'm a fan; I'm not actually in the band."

For a rock star, he is powerful -- closer on a global level to Tony Blair than he is to, say Martin Rossiter. Powerful enough, certainly, to persuade record producer and Kennedy nephew Bobby Shiver to hassle his brother-in-law Arnold Schwarzenegger to phone House Budget Committee chairman John Kasich and arrange a hearing for the Jubilee 2000 cause. Kasich's first call to Bono began with the words: "What's best? The Bends or OK Computer...?"

"Thom Yorke was a bit freaked when I told him about that," laughs Bono. "He was like, You mean, bad guys like our music too?"

Bono talks all the time about how "rock stars" do this and when "rock stars" do that. Like the others, he refers to U2's "job" rather than their vocation or prerogative and, when he juggles with ideas, he shifts his posture, squinting behind his sunglasses as if a concept is the process of physically manifesting in front of him. Disarmingly, he undercuts his more pretentious proclamations with an extra t'ick Oirish navvy brogue.

Behind us, as we lounge on U2's waterside patio, the final mix of discursive travelogue "New York" wobbles out of a crap Sony boom box. With little Eve Hewson on his lap, Bono sings along...

"I hit an iceberg in my life/But here I am still afloat/Lose your balance, lose your wife/In the queue for the lifeboat/You've got to put the women and children first/But you've got an unquenchable thirst...for New York."

Like a few of Bono's characters on All That You Can't Leave Behind, the lyric outlines a man on a moral holiday, braving the temptations of escape and infidelity. Encouraging the theory that it's autobiographical is the fact that Bono has just bought an apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

"It's important to describe your demons in order to deal with them," says Bono. "I have a side of me that wants to run really fast away from everything that you could call home and responsibilities. But I have another side, which is stronger, that draws me towards home and those very same responsibilities. When I'm at work I play out those things...but maybe if I hadn't found Ali and this community of people, then maybe I'm just lazy enough to have surrendered"

You kept in the bit about midlife crisis...

"I was seriously wondering whether to or not. Just looking at you when we played it to you in Dublin, I could see you writing the headline [laughs]. But it's just funnier, that line. From this character, it's believable."

Bono laughs, then frowns.

"It's not autobiography. It's quite the opposite in the sense that I'm coming out of a period: I have run off, I'm back now. I'm more at home...with myself. I had a bit of fright, basically, and the song 'Kite' comes out of that too. I hadn't been around for a while and was determined to do the proper Dad thing. I took the kids to Killiney Hill in Dublin county to fly a kite. Up it went and immediately down it came, and smashed to smithereens. The kids just looked at me: [affects unimpressed child look] Come on Dad, let's go and play some video games. How cruel is that?"

In "Kite" you sing of "The last of the rock stars/When hip hop drove the big cars." Do you think rock stars have waved the white flag? Have rock bands given up on the idea of mass communication?

"A lot of them have. But we haven't. From the beginning we were excited when music met the real world, and, going into this, we reckoned that people aren't buying rock records any more because of this progressive rock lurgy, which is on the rise, where the single has been forgotten. In our heads we've written 11 singles for this record."

AT 11 PM, OUTSIDE the Grand Casino, Monte Carlo, there is little evidence of U2's appeal becoming more selective. Within seconds of the band exploding out of Jags and Space Cruisers to take up their positions in Q's photo shoot, a whirlpool of onlookers has developed around them.

"Oooo Tooo! Oooo Tooo!" yelp moneyed French people of all ages. "Thank God this isn't Italy," declares a stern U2 staffer. "They'd have been torn apart by now."

Police shepherd the mob. Fat cars driven by fat roulette victims idle and bottleneck. Bono looks delighted; Mullen looks like he'd rather be anywhere else; rock'n'roll stops the traffic all over again.

When the shoot ends, Bono and Edge pose for the odd fan photo. Mullen and Clayton, with the look of men who've done this before, vault athletically over a high stone parapet and sniff out the swiftest, least congested route back to safety.

The Q contingent are flung into the U2 Jaguar and we're off, heads spinning, through a vista of glass hotels and '70s neon to Jimmy Z's, the Principality's premier nite spot. Here, landscaped shrubs and ponds light up green and the tiled dancefloor illuminates a la Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" video. Sporadically, as if to mock the porno ambience, a long jet of water shoots out of a tube and describes an emerald jizz-arc into the ornamental lake.

It comes as no surprise to learn that Bono was introduced to this place by Michael Hutchence. The last time the U2-er was here, he claims, was for Beronado Bertolucci's birthday party, where Bertolucci's dwarf brother DJed (the house anthem is R Kelly's "I Believe I Can Fly") and a wild time (not to mention a few £48 G&Ts) was had by all. In sampling this sort of lifestyle, have U2 ever let go of terra firma?

"I'm sure, a lot of the time," replies Bono. "Fame is a bit silly, really, but I think that we've escaped some of the extremely silly bits. Even so, you can become guilty of a certain mindedness, expecting to be let into places, and that's where it can start...Then there's the spoils, the guilt [laughs], and that awful relationship between fame and envy. It's a venal human characteristic to want to be that skinny, to want to be beautiful. But when you're this skinny and this beautiful what can you do?"

Is the way you seem comfortable with fame something that protects you? "Bono Enjoys Fame Shock" wouldn't be much of a tabloid story would it?

"Well, the way the rot sneaks under your door is by telling you that the reason that you've had all this good fortune is because you are somehow special, rather than to make you aware that you have a gift. It's a gift. It's given to you in trust. If you're able to sing, or able to describe things through your voice, yes you work at it and yes, the worker is worthy of his wages, but not this much, you know what I mean?"

Other bands must seek your advice all the time...

"The most asked question is: How are you in a band? Don't people grow out of bands? Most people find it hard, as they grow up, to deal with friction. But the friction is a sign of being really alive. People going solo, sitting in dressing rooms with their employees: more cash, less fun, not a good bargain...

"They're miracles, bands," he chuckles. "If you see one, you should set up a shrine. That's what your magazine should be doing. Bands defy gravity and they defy basic human...needs. Like the need for independence, or the desire not to want to be told to fuck off over 30."

Radiohead recently threatened to split up over their album's track sequence...

"I think that's OK. Over the sequencing is fine, but not over womenfolk or the royalties."

Your best piece of advice for bands?

"Only move house on the live album."

U2 are men. They must be because they keep telling us they are. Clayton, Bono and Edge are 40 and Mullen very nearly so. They all look good on it, especially Mullen. Clayton thinks he's looking pudgy but he's wrong.

"It's something we discussed a lot," says Mullen. "We actually are men. Oh my god, we're men and what are we going to do about it? Do we dye our hair? This is serious. We're out there fighting for our lives because we don't wanna be written off. We don't want people going, Oh those old guys..."

"I don't want to get philosophical here," adds Clayton, getting philosophical, "but bands don't have long lifespans, and maybe one of the reasons why we've lasted is that people have to accept the manhood growth: the taking of responsibility, examining the bigger issues of love and loyalty..."

Clayton, central to the group's metamorphosis into a more glamorous rock'n'roll incarnation, thanks in part to his early-'90s cavortings with Naomi Campbell and his hangover-based to play a '93 Sydney show on the Zoo TV tour (his part was played by his roadie), has his own growing-up to do. He hasn't had a drink since 1996.

"It was a difficult decision to get to," he recalls, "because so much of what I thought being creative and being relevant was about, was staying up late, having a good time and living it large. But I got to the point where I realised that it didn't suit me anymore. I wasn't any good at it. I wasn't living a particularly musical life, I was living a more isolated life. I was paranoid, uncomfortable. It was very hard being in that place of really facing yourself and overcoming layers of denial. But I'm very happy with the way things turned out."

What do you do with the money you would have spent on drink?

"I buy socks."

Do you throw them away rather than wash them?

"I'm still the kind of rich that likes a familiar pair of socks. You know, when you're on that party trip socks and underwear are hard to keep together."

Would you ever pose naked on a U2 album cover again, like you did on Achtung Baby?

"Yes. Provided my bits were looking good. I'm not sure whether it's something I'd like to do past the age of...55. But I think there should be more male nudes. Men should be encouraged to look at each other bits. Penises, I'm inclined to believe -- and I'm not just talking about my own -- are good things. They needn't be hidden under a bushel."

What's the closest U2 have come to splitting up?

"I don't know if it's ever been contemplated. Maybe around the second album, October, when people decided that maybe this was too hard. And maybe around the time of Achtung Baby and the Zoo TV tour. That seemed an immense challenge at the time. But I think splitting up is something we can't imagine."

What bridged the October album crisis?

"The realisation that rock 'n' roll could be anything that you wanted it to be."

Right now, U2 are so gung ho you wonder if any minute Larry Mullen is going to stick on a US marine corps helmet, slip a packet of 20 American Spirit into the band and go charging into the Mediterranean hollering "Death or glory!" There are plans, though not finalised, to tour arenas next year with a stripped-down presentation and, if that goes well, to graduate to stadiums. It's a realistic agenda, based on altered expectations of the world's biggest rock'n'roll band -- on altered expectations for rock'n'roll itself. At the same time, there's a sly inkling that U2 think All That You Can't Leave Behind ("Its not looking good on a T-shirt," joshes Mullen) will actually be enormous.

"I hear people say it's great and it's going to be big," concludes Mullen, "but I don't know that. But if we went down in flames on this one then I'd die happy."

Everyone's using words like "direct" and "connecting" and "tunes." High-falutin' concepts such as consumerism-as-religion and the death of God are, for the moment at least, placed on the back burner in favour of things much closer to home.

"Bono's lyrics this time," ponders Adam Clayton, "in a sense they're less poetic, less romantic and more real. To me they're much more about where he's coming from and what he's dealing with. I think this record has a great tenderness. And I'm sure it addresses the way he feels about the commitment to the band and to his family, to his children and Ali."

Bono himself -- joyously wallowing in the rich intensity that his singing seems currently to impart and gabbling on about how his opera-trained voice coach is convinced he has achieved the "bel canto," i.e. the stage at which singers find their one true voice -- has one little problem. It's how he looks in the Jonas Akerlund-directed video for "Beautiful Day."

"I wanted to look more honest," he complains. "In the end I'm coming on a bit too Bono for some tastes...including my own [laughs]. You know, you forget you have to do this stuff when you're opening your arteries with a rusty blade in some fucking basement, making music. You forget how to be insincere. It's my rock star face. It's not quite sitting on me well at the moment.

"It's so important for us that we climb down from this past decade of artifice in the presentation of the material. There's never any artifice in the material itself -- it's always been the same for us. The irony is, there's no irony in those songs on Achtung Baby, Zooropa and Pop. You know, Nellee Hooper came up to me at a party recently and said, 'Irony, you're ruined it for everybody.' "

IN THE COOL of the Cote D'Azur evening, U2's extended family eat pizzas as their mouthpiece pokes unconvincingly at a salade Nicoise. A nearby villa, someone explains, once served as accommodation for Mahatma Gandhi, and the revelation somehow causes dinner conversation to left-turn sharply into Islamic fundamentalism, the policing of ecstasy and Adolf Hitler's kerazy cocaine habit.

"Do you know," lectures Larry Mullen Jr, "One of Hitler's first military acts was to carpet bomb the village of his birth? He was obsessed by obliterating his past."

"We should do that to the Q photo library," muses Edge. "Destroy all evidence of mullets!"

"Ah, but listen," counters Bono. "Have you not seen Jonas Akerlund? He's a hip guy isn't he? Well, we're waiting for him in this Dublin cafe and in he comes, cool as a breeze, with what on his head? Oh yes, they tell me its back. In Hoxton Square it's wall-to-wall mullets."

It was then that U2 really knew that it was going to be their year.