From the Sky Down Page #2

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do you wanna try a few lines on this?

Erm, I'll do some scat singing

if that's any help to you.

When Bono goes off

and does a vocal,

and you think you've heard

a whole set of lyrics,

you think, "Wow,

I was really touched by that lyric".

Then you listen later and say, "Wait

a minute, he's fudging half the words. "

Bono's singing,

and he's just channelling.

He's trying to get to the vocabulary

of the melody in sound.

Anything there?

We get the music

and then the melody,

and then we try to let the words express

the feeling that's in the song,

cos there's a feeling

in every piece of music.

It's an odd way to live your life,

as a composer,

building your house

from the sky down.

Sometimes I think I'm cleverer

than what I've just...

than the expression

that's just come out.

It's not a place for a vain man to be -

you know, intellectually vain.

I find myself listening

on little tape machines

to me singing gobbledegook -

it's like a child, it's like I'm speaking

Japanese or Italian or something.

Bonolese is like a language

It's just a made-up language.

I hear then a word,

I hear then a thought,

and I have to scribble it down.

We always had a mic ready

when Bono came into the room.

He'd hear something and say,

"Oh", and he'd start singing,

and if you didn't catch it,

it was gone.

He didn't repeat things.

Or, if he did,

he didn't repeat them

with that same oddness

that the first moment would have.

What's the chorus chords again?

So, A to...

A... D...

We'd spent the '80s

throwing stones at other people.

Now we've started throwing the stones

at ourself.

Wow!

Is this what you would do?

Yeah.

- Pretty much.

- What's different?

The only difference is we didn't,

we have songs now -

back then

we didn't really have songs.

Well, the mid '80s

we started to tour in America.

It wasn't a thing of having been prepared,

groomed, made ready for it,

it was like suddenly, boom,

you were there.

Being 22 or 23

and you have a bit of success,

it's gonna be tricky for anybody.

If you come from Dublin,

and not only do you come from Dublin,

you're still in Dublin,

it's gonna make you

a little self-conscious.

I met them in '82. I was working for

a magazine in England

called the New Musical Express.

They asked me to go to New Orleans

to shoot U2.

I'd never heard of U2.

There was certainly

a house photographic style,

we used to jokingly refer to it.

Since most of the photographs

during that time were taken by Anton,

there was a certain amount of collusion.

That was the way the band wished

to present themselves.

The work was always serious

and for me that was the same.

My photography,

if you look at my books,

is never about

the lighter moments.

We hated photo shoots.

Make sure you get

some sun on your faces.

If you all come a bit forward...

We started to be those

kind of earnest po-faced men.

I went out one night with Bono

and I said,

"There's a tree here which I really love,

it's called the Joshua Tree

"It would be a brilliant idea

to have that on the front

"and the band would be on the back,

like a continuation. "

He's Dutch

and he can't say 'Joshua'.

He would say 'Yoshua'.

So we really go off on getting him

to say Yoshua Tree Park.

The Joshua Tree sleeve

is my favourite sleeve.

Their faces were sculptured in stone.

We always felt that the photographs

should look like the material.

Anton was not photographing us,

he was photographing our songs,

and the environment of the songs.

So, those pictures of us

as stoic Irishmen,

pilgrims, in the desert -

people would say when they meet you,

you're not the same person.

This is a very dangerous place to be,

when your public image is so different

from your private reality.

And the winner is...

...The Joshua Tree, U2.

We'd arrived.

Suddenly, this was our defining moment.

I'd like to thank Jack Healey and

Amnesty International for all their work,

Desmond Tutu for his courage...

It was a very mad time.

We were guys in our mid 20s

having this amazing experience

Nothing could've prepared you for that

...John the Baptist, George Best,

Gregory Peck, Batman and Robin,

sumo wrestlers throughout the world,

and of course, Ronald Reagan.

They wanna put us on the cover

of Time Magazine.

Um, it's a comedy.

It's a comedy about the tour.

It was a great idea.

It was a really good idea.

Make a small film about the band.

And everyone went,

"Yippee, this is a great idea. "

The next thing it's like,

"We're going to invest

"all the money we made from

The Joshua Tree into this thing,

"Paramount are going to take it

"and it's going to go to cinemas

all over the place. "

I encouraged the idea of a movie.

Remember that

in the course of the tour,

we went from being an arena band

to being a stadium band,

and had to learn how to do that

kind of on the run.

This was in the days

before video reinforcement.

It was hell.

It was literally just us in a stadium.

We were so out of our depth

and not quite proficient enough

to be consistent.

It was a rollercoaster ride.

There was a white knuckle aspect

to just holding on.

We didn't have enough material

to do a stadium show.

Bono felt particularly vulnerable -

he's out there,

sticking his ass out the window,

and he expects

the band are gonna be there.

Every night we would come off the stage,

we would debrief ourselves,

and we would have this over-riding feeling

of doom and gloom,

that we just weren't good enough.

You couldn't just rely on making it up

on the night.

Sh*t happens.

The drum kit would move forward.

The sound I'd have on stage

wouldn't work.

I can't live with this.

Edge would break a guitar string

and it would happen

every night for a week.

For him, he became just wild -

pent up rage, anger, I mean,

the whole gamut of emotions,

so, and you really didn't know

what you were going to get -

it was very intense.

It was particularly difficult for Bono,

because he had to really work as a

physical performer to sell those songs.

Having to steel ourselves almost

to deal with the position

we found ourselves in,

and we'd become overly earnest,

overly intense, overly protective.

In the course of that tour,

they became fascinated,

if you like, by America

That's my wife.

The reason for making

Rattle And Hum

was actually to prove something

to ourselves and to our audience.

It was an experiment in drawing from

the American roots music canon.

I want to learn the blues

from you today.

Have I come to the right place?

The idea behind Rattle And Hum was,

wouldn't it be interesting

if we went on this journey

to discover American music,

because we had no background in it.

Let people see us as fans.

Just because something was new for us,

doesn't mean it's new for the listener.

People knew all about BB King,

they knew all about the blues,

they knew all about country music.

It looked to people

like we were going,

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