Free Killing Bono by Neil McCormick

tangled mop that passed for a haircut in Dave’s schooldays.
    Personally, I wasn’t overly keen on this pseudonymous business. The name I wanted to see up in lights was my own. That aside I was becoming an ever-more-committed member of Dublin’s small punk-rock fraternity. I went to see the Boomtown Rats perform a free concert at St. Fintan’s. Enraptured by Bob Geldof’s outrageous exhibitionism, I rushed into town to buy their single, “Looking After No. 1,” the first great Irish punk record. My album collection was expanding weekly, to include the Clash’s eponymous debut, Elvis Costello’s “My Aim Is True,” the Jam’s “In the City,” the Vibrators’ “Pure Mania” and the Sex Pistols’ “Never Mind the Bollocks.” Having become bold enough to leave the record sleeves out in the living room, I was starting to become mildly irritated by how unperturbed my parents were about the whole punk phenomenon. When I announced that I was going to cut my hair short, my dad proposed that, instead of wasting money at the hairdresser, he would do it for me. Given his lack of skill in this department, he easily achieved the requisite chop-top effect, but, still, there was something not quite right about this parental endorsement of teenage rebellion. My mum even took in my flares on her sewing machine (straight-leg trousers being an essential component of the punk look) and helped me dye various items of clothing lurid shades of green and red. When I came home one day to find my dad listening to a Ramones album and nodding his head in approval, I was silently fuming. What did a guy have to do to get a reaction around here?
    Ivan and Frank began practicing together. I would arrive home on Saturdays from drama class to find the pair hunched over Ivan’s guitar amp, both clutching guitars, with Ivan painstakingly teaching Frank the chords to “House of the Rising Sun” and “Johnny B. Goode.” Not very punk rock, I know, but Frank was still a novice and dependent upon Ivan’s repertoire of rock standards. His passionate advocacy of punk was beginning to have an effect on Ivan, however, who adopted Frank’s sartorial style and gave himself a punk name: Ivan Axe (a terrible pun revolving around rock slang for guitar). Despite the fact that there were only two of them, they began to refer to themselves as Frankie Corpse and the Undertakers. I felt a stab of envy when I heard that. But given that they needed at least another two Undertakers to make a full set, the question was broached about whether I would join. The fact that I had no musical ability was never even a consideration. This was punk rock, after all.
    I asked Adam Clayton how I could go about buying a bass guitar. “I’ll sell you mine, man!” he responded, with an undisguised delight that should have raised my suspicions.
    The reasons I chose the bass guitar were prosaic. Drums held no appeal, on the grounds that drummers tended to sit at the back of the stage, obscured by their kit. I wanted to be at the front and I wanted to sing. Keyboards seemed like too much hard work. Not only were there all those black and white keys, there were knobs and switches to consider too. The bass guitar, however, had only four strings, each of which was thick and easy to get your fingers around. And anyway, from watching Adam play, I reckoned at least two of those strings were superfluous. I chose bass because I thought I could just about get away with it.
    The Hype were becoming legends in their own lunchtime. During noon break one day they played a gig in the sixth-year common room. It seemed like every kid in the school tried to crowd in, the overspill jamming the corridors as the group hurtled through a breakneck set, including a punked-up version of a popular television superhero theme, with Bono leaping into the air to yell “Batman!” at the apposite