Free Bono by Michka Assayas

sister and then his mother in those years. Was it something that helped you get closer to him?
    We always kind of hit it off, actually. Then, as now, Larry does not let many people in. But when you’re in, he’s a very loyal and reliable friend. I’m a kind of a loyal and unreliable friend. But there’s nothing he would not do for you. The thing that stuck us together was that I had this experience of bereavement. I had lost my mother when I was fourteen and he had lost his when he was sixteen, and we both had to deal with fairly authoritarian fathers. As Larry would tell you himself, we both ran away with the circus. So, while the tent was being put up on the outskirts of Europe, we were still outside, and would look at the elephants, and talk a lot. We still do, on occasions.
    What did you discuss the most with Larry—and wouldn’t as readily with Edge or Adam?
    The moment, the now that we wouldn’t miss out on, the moment we were in, because of the place we wanted to get to in the future. Because Larry wasn’t sure about where we were going, and I wasn’t sure about where we were.
    So Larry’s the first one you really got close to?
    I’d say Larry and I were pretty close friends. We shared a room on tour. We were the odd couple, really, because he’s completely meticulous.
    And you’re not?
    I’m just not. My suitcase would just blow up, and there’d be stuff all over the floor. Larry used to bring his own sleeping bag, because he didn’t like to sleep in the sheets of these really cheap hotels. He would actually sleep in his sleeping bag up on the bed.
    So he wouldn’t catch any fleas or lice?
    I remember one time I slagged him off so much that he said: “OK.” He threw away the sleeping bag, and he left the sleeping bag at the bottom of the bed. He slept in the sheets. When he woke up, he was head to toe in this rose-colored rash. So people used to laugh at the two of us.
    Insiders have written accounts about the tacit division from the very beginning between you, Edge and Larry, the Irish Christians, and then, on the other side, Adam and Paul McGuinness, the English skeptics, with business sense and posh backgrounds, raised by military fathers. Is this real or an invention?
    Well, Adam and Edge were friends. They came from the same suburbs. They were kind of middle-class and they both had British passports. But in terms of fun and frolics, going out, drinking wine, looking sharp, and living the life, I think Paul and Adam had a lot in common. They became friends. Myself, Edge, and Larry were kind of zealots. And we were determined that the world, in all its finagling attempt to corrupt you, to take you away from where you should be going, would not get us. But it’s like thatold story of the guy who’s hiding from the world by climbing up the mountain backwards. He gets halfway up the mountain. He finds a cave. He just looks left and he looks right, he looks up and he looks down, to make sure the world hasn’t followed him. Then he looks back into the cave, that’s dark and that’s quiet. Then he hears something. What’s that? It’s the world! [laughs] There’s no escape. We just didn’t know that, then. But it turns out that that’s a much more subtle threat than sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Self-righteousness, self-flagellation, these things are as dangerous as what you might call the worship of the self. At that time, we were determined that we would never change. The music business would never change us, success would never change us. But if you think about it, that’s a terrible thing. That would be awful, not to change. And of course you should be changing. Paul and Adam just wanted to have fun, and get out there, and see what the world had to offer. We knew what the world had to offer—we didn’t want to buy it. So we went in a completely different direction. But there was a