Rock And Hard Places Part 20

U2 have pitched camp in the Delano for a couple of weeks while PopMart PopMart tours the south of the United States. The band's families are here as well-there are seven U2 children-and U2 are flying back to Miami every night on the lemon-spangled 727 after shows in other nearby cities. Various friends have flown in for the Miami show, Elvis Costello among them. George Clooney is also staying here ("Hey," says Bono, as we leave the hotel to find a bar showing the Ireland vs Belgium World Cup playoff, "there's Batman playing basketball. Cool.") and though he hasn't come as a friend of the band, he seems to leave as one. tours the south of the United States. The band's families are here as well-there are seven U2 children-and U2 are flying back to Miami every night on the lemon-spangled 727 after shows in other nearby cities. Various friends have flown in for the Miami show, Elvis Costello among them. George Clooney is also staying here ("Hey," says Bono, as we leave the hotel to find a bar showing the Ireland vs Belgium World Cup playoff, "there's Batman playing basketball. Cool.") and though he hasn't come as a friend of the band, he seems to leave as one.

Rock tours are not usually such relaxed things to visit, especially not after they've been six months on the road. Most seethe with tensions and paranoias comparable with the last weeks of the Nixon administration, and most regard an itinerant journalist as little more than a handy outlet for those pressures. U2's organisation has the feel of a large and almost suspiciously happy family. It may help that many of their closest staff have a.s.sociations with the band going back most of the twenty-odd years of U2's existence. It may also help that many of those closest staff, whether by accident or design, are women.

The four members of U2 are themselves unfailingly courteous and pleasant, certainly more so than men regularly credited with a combined wealth of 300 million really have to be.

Edge, the permanently behatted guitarist, first sees me at some distance past my best when, not long off the flight from London, I descend on his table on the Delano's back porch, jetlagged and margarita-sodden, and interrupt someone else's praise of The Spice Girls with a lengthy rant outlining their defects. Edge cheerfully puts up a case for the defence while I mutter things like "cynical," "vapid," "worse than the plague" and "the Nolan Sisters," and drink someone else's drink, becoming dimly aware that I am talking no sense at all, know n.o.body here and that everyone has gone very quiet. A hope of salvation arrives in the shape of Elvis Costello; while I don't expect him to remember the nervous nineteen-year-old who interviewed him in Sydney nine years ago, I do expect that the curmudgeonly elder rock'n'roll statesman will take my side. "I'm in the Spice movie," he grins. "I play a barman." I decide that discretion is the better part of valour, and go up to bed, my attempt at a dignified exit hampered by the way the garden furniture keeps jumping in front of me.

Larry Mullen Jr., the strangely ageless drummer whose high-school noticeboard advertis.e.m.e.nt bought U2 together, introduces himself after a few days and apologises for not wanting to speak on the record on the grounds that "I only feel comfortable sitting at my kit hitting stuff," and besides which, his young son, Elvis, has pulled a table over on himself and hurt his foot. Adam Clayton, the ba.s.s player who comes nearer than any of them to mustering the traditional hauteur of the rock'n'roll aristocrat, seems generally thoughtful and oddly shy.

Bono flits between tables in the Delano's garden, dressed all in black with silver sungla.s.ses and the leopard-print loafers Gucci made him to go with the interior of his Mercedes, chatting to those he knows, signing things for those he doesn't. He's a prolific and entertaining talker-I can imagine he gave the Blarney Stone the one kiss it still talks about. Unusually, for someone as famous as he is, little of what he says is about himself-he talks seven beats to the bar about things he's read, people he's met, places he's been. In two espressos flat, he can do Pica.s.so, the Reverend Cecil Williams' Glide church in San Francisco, Daniel Ortega and liberation theology and whether or not Ireland really stand much of a chance against the Belgians. Even more unusually, for someone as famous as he is, he's also a generous and genuinely inquisitive listener.

"I like that generosity in Americans," he says, later. "We haven't the cultural baggage that other bands in the UK would have, because we're Irish. We don't see America as the devil like the English do, so we came here early on and we spent a lot of time here. Being on the road feels like an American idea-you grow up on Kerouac, and the poetry of the place names, and what it was like being nineteen or twenty and looking out the window of a tour bus and thinking it was more like the movies, not less."

U2's love affair with America has been one of two boundlessly ambitious ent.i.ties falling hopelessly for the endless possibilities of each other. Of the seventy-seven million alb.u.ms U2 have sold, thirty million have been bought in America.

IN MIAMI, U2 are playing at the ProPlayer Stadium, home of the Florida Marlins baseball team. PopMart PopMart has come a long way, in every respect, since its inauspicious beginnings in Las Vegas. A workable tension has been located between the gleeful satire of consumer culture that flickers on the giant screen, and the songs from has come a long way, in every respect, since its inauspicious beginnings in Las Vegas. A workable tension has been located between the gleeful satire of consumer culture that flickers on the giant screen, and the songs from Pop Pop which are, beneath the beats and effects, some of the most intimate and troubled U2 have recorded. During the Miami show, just before U2 play "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," Bono makes a short speech thanking the crowd for their patience with his band's unpredictability. "If we keep it interesting for us," he says, "hopefully it won't be bulls.h.i.+t for you." which are, beneath the beats and effects, some of the most intimate and troubled U2 have recorded. During the Miami show, just before U2 play "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," Bono makes a short speech thanking the crowd for their patience with his band's unpredictability. "If we keep it interesting for us," he says, "hopefully it won't be bulls.h.i.+t for you."

After a triumphant show, in a suite somewhere in the warren of dressing rooms inside ProPlayer Stadium, Edge can just about laugh at the memory of Las Vegas; the encore, when he was forced to his knees to fossick hopelessly for his dropped plectrum in the dry ice while the other three started "Discotheque" without him and his signature riff, was, he says now, "about as Tap Tap as it's ever got." Edge is genial and amusing company, and only makes about a dozen slighting references to my inebriated performance at the Delano the previous evening, which is sweet of him. as it's ever got." Edge is genial and amusing company, and only makes about a dozen slighting references to my inebriated performance at the Delano the previous evening, which is sweet of him.

U2 have kept Edge's solo "Sunday b.l.o.o.d.y Sunday" in the set since Sarajevo. He's kind enough to let it go when I explain that I'd never liked the song much in its original, martial-drumming, foot-stomping, flag-waving incarnation, that it had seemed to sum up everything that I used to think U2 were: pompous, earnest and a whole bunch of no fun at all. Stripped down and delivered in a bare whisper, it had worked in Sarajevo, and even removed from that emotive context, it had worked in Miami.

"I thought the song would have a different resonance in Sarajevo," he says, "but not as a band version. I thought if I showcased the lyric and the melody, it might fly. What I discovered was that the song had a completely other side. That's what I find with a lot of our songs, that you can fiddle about with them, but you can't change the essence of them, and it was nice to find a song that we thought we might never play again could still do that. We dropped it on the 'Unforgettable Fire' tour, so it's been nearly ten years."

This must be the weirdest part of the musician's job. Most of us scream at pictures of ourselves a decade ago, cringe at the memory of things we thought, said or bought when we were younger. But a successful musician never escapes it. Everything ridiculous you did or wore as a youth is a matter of record, part of the fabric of other people's lives.

"Yeah . . . playing the old songs is a bit like what I imagine travelling back in time and meeting yourself would be like. We're quite lucky in that when it comes to the early embarra.s.sing moments, we have so many that it's actually just pointless even trying to defend ourselves. There's so much there that we just have to laugh at, and be thankful that we're still growing, still getting better at what we do. The first few weeks of PopMart PopMart were . . . well, we'd jumped in at the deep end and hadn't prepared as much as we should have. But now . . . on previous tours, I remember Bono being under such a cloud for hours after coming on stage, but on this tour we're just laughing so much. It's the most fun we've ever had on the road." were . . . well, we'd jumped in at the deep end and hadn't prepared as much as we should have. But now . . . on previous tours, I remember Bono being under such a cloud for hours after coming on stage, but on this tour we're just laughing so much. It's the most fun we've ever had on the road."

Adam Clayton, when he's wheeled before the tape recorder after Edge, offers a similarly sanguine view. As the only member of U2 to have racked up the traditional rock'n'roll accoutrements of court appearances, tabloid scandals, supermodel girlfriends and excess-induced absenteeism (at the end of the Zoo TV tour in Sydney, U2 had to play one show with Clayton's guitar tech on ba.s.s), Clayton has perhaps had a better view of the bottom of the abyss than the others, but he doesn't have any complaints this evening.

"You can have bad days," he allows, "and every day is a challenge, because the preconceived ideas you had, as a sixteen-year-old joining a pop group, as a twenty-year-old releasing your first alb.u.m, as a twenty-seven-year-old releasing The Joshua Tree The Joshua Tree, you have to battle against those, you have to get to the essence of what being a musician is, and you have to remember that, well, tonight I could have been playing in the Holiday Inn. By the time showtime comes around, you've got yourself centred. There is a discipline involved, and-I mean, this sounds very Californian-you have to reduce the number of stimuli in your day in order to become a sort of hollow vessel, so by the time you go on stage, you've actually got some energy to run off."

Clayton has a strange accent that isn't quite English and isn't quite Irish.

"What's fun about this now," he continues, "is that an awful lot of the uncertainties have been removed by the fact that we have a history, by now, that indicates that this is probably what we're going to be doing for the rest of our lives. We have a history that says we've done something very hard and very unnatural, for four men to grow together and live with each other for twenty years. I think everyone's a lot more rounded and settled, and I'm realising that this is the most interesting musical engagement I could be involved in."

That's the thing about great bands, though: they're always more than the sum of their parts. Lennon and McCartney's post-Beatles efforts ran the gamut from the adequate to the excruciating. The Smiths splintered into an occasionally inspired session guitarist and a risible self-parody. Even the ones where you'd think it wouldn't matter go this way, like Pixies-Black Francis wrote all those fantastic Pixies songs, but listening to his solo alb.u.ms was like wading through knee-deep mud in loose wellies.

"That chemistry," nods Clayton, "is gold dust. If we went off and tried to make solo records, I'm sure they'd be as c.r.a.p as everyone else's solo records. For some reason, each of us works best in this situation. And that's a nice thing to have figured out. We still all live within twenty minutes of each other. We spend a lot of time with each other, so we can chew a lot of ideas over. Other bands, when they get to our age, there's a couple of divorces, there's a couple of jealousies between members, there are management problems, and it's very hard. We've been lucky, or wise, and we can devote most of our energy to being in U2. We keep a full-time staff on, which a lot of people don't. We're in a unique position, and we do take those risks, and we look like fools sometimes, but other times people say 'Yes!' and that's the kind of band I always wanted to be in."

BONO IS A restless interviewee, physically and mentally, sitting up and lying down as ideas occur to him. It's the afternoon of the day after the Miami show, and we're sitting in the suns.h.i.+ne in the Delano's garden, roughly equidistant from the swimming pool, the c.o.c.ktail bar and the giant-sized lawn chess set. Things could probably be worse.

"Are you enjoying Miami? It's a very interesting city. It's kind of the crossroads between North America and South America ..."

In Bosnia, Bono had said something about his attraction to the idea of Sarajevo as a cultural crossing place, though in Sarajevo's case it had been between east and west . . . trying not to sound too much like a hack in search of an underlying theme, I wonder if he sees similarities.

"Exactly. Well, here you have the Catholicism of South America, which is the s.e.xy end of the religion, you know, carnivals ..."

I'm starting to get used to Bono's a.s.sociative monologues.

". . . which is something I'm becoming more and more interested in, the carnival, the celebration of the flesh-you know, carne meaning meat-before the denial, which is Lent, going into Easter, that kind of thing ..."

Keeping him to one theme is like trying to cage water-like a lot of people whose understanding of the world has come largely from going places and finding out for themselves, the connections he draws tend to be as individual and eccentric as his experiences, and as he's one of the most famous people on earth, it's safe to a.s.sume that his experiences are more individual and eccentric than most. When transcribed into cold hard print, Bono can occasionally read like a stereotypical cosmic rock'n'roll mooncalf, but in person, his intellectual promiscuity just feels like the vigour of a compulsive conversationalist. It's also something I've noticed in a lot of Irish and Scottish friends-a fondness for constructing elaborate, even absurd, theories out of b.u.g.g.e.r all just for the fun of seeing where the pieces land when the edifice topples over.

"... and you just get this sense that South America is coming through, you can see it in the writers and filmmakers, and this is its interface. You know, South Beach looks like lots of blocks of ice cream, Neapolitan, or ..."

I'd been thinking that earlier. The violently clas.h.i.+ng pastel paint on the beachfront apartment buildings looks ghastly and ridiculous all day, until sunset, when the sky behind them becomes daubed in the exact same colours. Then it looks like heaven, or at least like Ernest Hemingway's idea of it. Except I'd been thinking that the ice cream was more like tutti-frutti. U2 recorded some of Pop Pop in Miami. in Miami.

"Tutti-frutti, okay. Well, we came here to see if there was something here for us, but in the end our record wasn't going to be about any one location. Because sometimes there's almost a physical sense of location, Berlin for Achtung Baby Achtung Baby, the US for The Joshua Tree The Joshua Tree."

While we talk, pa.s.sers-by stop to ask Bono for an autograph, or mumble terrified h.e.l.los. Bono's lack of annoyance or condescension is startling (I mean, the interruptions are annoying me, and I've only been putting up with it for an hour). U2 started young-it feels like they've been there forever, but Bono is only thirty-seven-and they've been U2 all their adult lives. It may be that because of this they really don't know any better, but they seem remarkably free of cynicism. They still get excited-they would scarcely have sunk a tidy fortune in taking PopMart PopMart to Sarajevo otherwise. to Sarajevo otherwise.

"Well," muses Bono, "when you get what you want, what do you do? But we haven't got cynical, you're right. We're still trying to make that record that we hear in our heads, and can't quite play. I guess when we were twenty-three or twenty-four we went through that phase where groups move out of their flats, and into houses, and start wanting to put paintings up on the walls, and they don't want to look like rednecks, so they start reading up on what sort of paintings they should have in their houses, and what Chinese rugs . . . I guess we must have gone through Chinese rug phases, but we were over it coming out of our twenties. The weird thing is that you're left, in a way, with only the right motives. If the reason you joined a band was to get laid, get famous, get rich, well, they all went by the way fairly quickly, so all we're left with is . . . make that record."

U2 in general, and Bono in particular, have often been scoffed at-indeed, back in the dusty-leather-and-white-flags pre-Achtung Baby era, I had, occasionally, been party to that scoffing. Scorn is not unusual for a successful rock group. What is unusual is the equanimity with which U2 shrug it off-many are the millionaires who will, given half the chance, bitterly recite every bad review they've ever had. I once spent an afternoon in New York listening to Gavin Rossdale of Bush relate chapter and verse of the critical batterings his band had received, mostly in publications that sold a hundredth of what his records did. I suggested that a) next time, he send the journalist a statement of his net worth and a photo of his big house in the country, or vintage car collection, or whatever, and b) perhaps he could lighten up; "You don't understand," he replied, and rarely has a truer word been spoken. era, I had, occasionally, been party to that scoffing. Scorn is not unusual for a successful rock group. What is unusual is the equanimity with which U2 shrug it off-many are the millionaires who will, given half the chance, bitterly recite every bad review they've ever had. I once spent an afternoon in New York listening to Gavin Rossdale of Bush relate chapter and verse of the critical batterings his band had received, mostly in publications that sold a hundredth of what his records did. I suggested that a) next time, he send the journalist a statement of his net worth and a photo of his big house in the country, or vintage car collection, or whatever, and b) perhaps he could lighten up; "You don't understand," he replied, and rarely has a truer word been spoken.

"Oh," says Bono, with a dismissive wave of his cigarette, "bands at our level deserve to be humbled. But it was the very gauche nature of where we were at that allowed us entry into a world where much more careful and cooler acts couldn't allow themselves, or depending on your point of view, were too smart to want to visit."

The trouble is that most artists-most people, come to that-condemn themselves to mediocrity because their fear of looking like a fool outweighs their potential for greatness. Hoping that Bono will forgive the impudence, I think it'd be fair to say that this has never looked like a problem for him.

"That's right," he says. "Obviously, it's better to do it in private, but when you're growing up in public, that's hard. People who . . . people who jump off, like . . . like Jimi Hendrix trying to put Vietnam through his amplifier, or like the way Lester Bangs wrote about rock'n'roll, that takes a certain courage. I think one of things I found difficult in the 80s was this din of voices telling me, 'But you can't fly, you a.r.s.ehole.' But that's the kind of thinking that results in restrained, reasonable music-or, for that matter, restrained, reasonable writing. You must not find yourself tiptoeing."

Pop contains at least two songs, "Staring at the Sun" and "Please," that appear to address the Northern Irish peace process, and concludes with an open letter to Jesus, t.i.tled "Wake Up Dead Man." contains at least two songs, "Staring at the Sun" and "Please," that appear to address the Northern Irish peace process, and concludes with an open letter to Jesus, t.i.tled "Wake Up Dead Man."

"Well . . . look. As far as what I actually believe myself goes, I'm not up for discussing it in any detail, because some subjects are too precious for interviews. I let them come out in songs. Also, I haven't got it all figured out, so I don't want to make an a.r.s.e of myself. But yes, I do feel that there is love and logic behind the universe, and that in recent years that instinct that we all have has been written off, we're reduced to being two-dimensional. There's a heartache that goes with that, or if not a heartache, then certainly a soul-ache, that music . . . I mean, I have great admiration and respect for atheists, though. I feel G.o.d would have a lot more time for them than for most people who are part of a religion, who seem so odd, to me, or doped, or just believe because they were told to. I think atheists have a certain rigour. In the absence of G.o.d, people have promoted a lot of lesser types to the same position, which is quite confusing. Film stars, pop stars, royalty . . . are not actually heroes. Nurses are. Mothers are. Firemen are. Some things are a.r.s.e about t.i.t."

It must also be difficult trying to maintain a conventional view of religion when you've spent so long being wors.h.i.+pped yourself.

"That's . . . good," he laughs. "I'll have to have a little lie down after that one. Wow, that's great. I'll get out of bed for that. No, basically, but most musicians I know say that the great stuff they kind of stumble on, and the average stuff is what they can claim authors.h.i.+p over. I do still feel that U2 write songs by accident, and maybe that's why we keep s.h.i.+fting ground, to stay out of our depth."

The hapless metaphor is left to try untangling itself. Bono's away again.

"It all started with the Psalms of David," he continues, with a smile that indicates that he knows he's being preposterous, but is determined to see where this goes. "They were the first blues. There you had man shouting at G.o.d: 'Why have you left me? Where have you gone? Who do you think you are anyway?' That's basically what music has been doing since. I'm still a student, so I'm still knocking on Bob Dylan's door ..."

Ouch.

". . . no pun intended, and I'm still going to turn up to Al Green's church, I'm still going to invite Bob Marley's mother to our gigs, talk to Frank Sinatra, talk to Quincy Jones, just trying to figure it out."

It could be argued that this reverence for their forebears was what got U2 into trouble on Rattle & Hum Rattle & Hum, when they recorded with Dylan and B.B. King, effectively sneaking into the rock'n'roll hall of fame and hanging their own portraits on the walls. Rattle & Hum Rattle & Hum was derided, and not without reason, as work of epic humourlessness and egomania. Though it did, buried somewhere beneath the homage and piety, contain the line "I don't believe in riches but you should see where I live," which might have been the beginning of U2's rebirth, an acknowledgement that they badly needed to resolve a few contradictions. was derided, and not without reason, as work of epic humourlessness and egomania. Though it did, buried somewhere beneath the homage and piety, contain the line "I don't believe in riches but you should see where I live," which might have been the beginning of U2's rebirth, an acknowledgement that they badly needed to resolve a few contradictions.

"I think you're trying a bit hard, there, but . . . for us, revenge is getting better. I don't think John Lennon ever got over the fact that he was in a pop group, that The Beatles were the girls' group and The Rolling Stones were the boys' one. And that was the greatest gift, in a way, because he was constantly trying to recover from that. So I think that maybe when we were younger we didn't have the brains to say f.u.c.k off, what we're doing is more interesting than what you are. Today, to some degree, I can back that up. Back then, we just wondered did people hate our haircuts this much? The answer was yes, of course-and the haircuts were terrible, awful-but it was that very lack of style in this group that led us to soul."

Bono borrows another cigarette from another autograph-hunter. The sun is beginning to set now, and South Beach is enjoying its daily hour of visual harmony between ground and sky. Rankin is making wind-up gestures in the distance, worried that the light will vanish before he gets his photo session, so I ask Bono if he can imagine a life beyond being the singer in U2, the only job he's ever had.

"Yeah . . . I'd like to be alive. I'd like to chase little children across the street with a big stick. I am curious about. . . I love people like Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash, there's something about their voices as they get older. Bob Dylan's voice on his new alb.u.m is just . . . I love to write, and I think that's what I'd do if I couldn't sing, or perform. The deadlines that you have to deal with as a journalist are something I'd obviously have a problem with, but I like people who write. Where I'd be writing from, or where I'd be living I don't know, but it's something I'm getting more interested in, and you don't get to do much of it when you're in a band, because the lyrics are your attempt to put the feelings of the music into words."

As we wander down the beach to do the photos, I comment that it can hardly have escaped his notice that, back home in Ireland, there might be more exciting career opportunities awaiting someone with his credentials. After all, if Dana can give the Presidency a shake on the strength of one long-past Eurovision appearance . . .

"Naw," Bono says, and rubs one eye under his silver shades. "I wouldn't move to a smaller house."

FOUR MONTHS OR so later, after another PopMart PopMart show, I'm in a big room full of free drink and freeloading people somewhere underneath Waverley Park, an Australian Rules football stadium in an inconvenient suburb of Melbourne. I'm in Australia on holiday, reminding my parents what I look like. I'm about to get a fine demonstration of the famous law devised by another great Irish thinker, Murphy. By which I mean that if I ever take someone to a U2 concert whom I'm actually trying to impress, I just know I'll be lucky to sneak in to the one-beer-and-a-hundred-straws C-list wing-ding for local radio drones, record company deadwood and spotty compet.i.tion winners. But the night I take my mother . . . show, I'm in a big room full of free drink and freeloading people somewhere underneath Waverley Park, an Australian Rules football stadium in an inconvenient suburb of Melbourne. I'm in Australia on holiday, reminding my parents what I look like. I'm about to get a fine demonstration of the famous law devised by another great Irish thinker, Murphy. By which I mean that if I ever take someone to a U2 concert whom I'm actually trying to impress, I just know I'll be lucky to sneak in to the one-beer-and-a-hundred-straws C-list wing-ding for local radio drones, record company deadwood and spotty compet.i.tion winners. But the night I take my mother . . .

"Andrew? Bono wants to say h.e.l.lo. Follow me."

Mum, fair play to her, is very cool about the whole thing. She bows her head just slightly when Bono swoops low and kisses her hand, and when he asks her whether she liked the show, she just says she thought it was amazing how much of a racket four young men could make. Someone else I know waves at me, so I go and say h.e.l.lo to them, leaving Mum and Bono to it.

I've seen some weird stuff. But when I look over from the other side of the room at the pair of them still yammering away to each other, I wonder if it gets stranger than this.

28.

I WANNA BE YOUR ZOG.

The Blazing Zoos in Albania JULY 2006.

IT IS AXIOMATIC that all music journalists are frustrated musicians. It is also untrue. By early 2006, I had been writing about music for some or all of my living for nearly twenty years, since a Sydney street paper saw fit to print, and pay me for, a 300-word a.s.sessment of the merits of a show by Ed Kuepper & The Yard Goes On Forever at the Mosman Hotel (don't look for it-it isn't there anymore). I had also, during all that time, generally had a guitar about the place. Despite being equipped, therefore, with everything one might need to write songs-an ability to place words next to each other, and a musical instrument-the idea of doing so had never occurred to me, much less the desire to then perform such things in public. Until, for reasons outlined below, it did.

It is important, however, that my decision-or, really, in the circ.u.mstances, somewhat demented instinct-to mount a stage relatively late in proceedings should not be interpreted as an expression of any sort of inferiority complex attached to being a rock journalist. The idea that rock journalism is by definition inferior to rock music is curiously commonplace, and often expressed by the deployment of that annoyingly quotable quip, usually-though I'd prefer to be believe erroneously-attributed to Elvis Costello, to the effect that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. This a.s.sessment is wholly correct, though not for the reasons believed by the lackwitted dullards who generally cite it. Rather, it acknowledges, explicitly, that rock writing and rock music are discrete and uncomparable means of expression-as different, indeed, as ballet and building. Just because rock writing is about rock music doesn't invalidate it as an arena in which great things can be created-any more than rock music counts for anything less than whatever it was the rock musician in question was making rock music about. And, you know, like dancing about architecture would be a bad thing to do.

Great writing is great writing, whatever the subject-even a subject as dominated by mediocrities, chancers, scoundrels and buffoons as rock music. The works of the finest rock writers-an echelon, incidentally, of which I do not claim members.h.i.+p, being a dilettante in this as in all other realms of my trade-are, by any sensible measure, of greater worth than the output of 99 percent of all rock artists. This is a less provocative a.s.sertion than it might sound, once it is considered that 99 percent of all the CDs I've ever been sent have been useful only as emergency shaving mirrors-and that recent technological advances have made it easier and cheaper than ever for utterly talentless acts to inflict their hapless racket upon the commonweal.

By the time this volume appears, my own band, The Blazing Zoos, whose unlikely gestation is detailed below, will have done exactly that-our debut waxing, "I'll Leave Quietly," should be generally available for virtual or physical purchase. To those who ostentatiously sneer at the scrawlings of even the best rock writers while reflexively genuflecting to the creations of even the worst musicians, I will concede this much: that attempting, after nearly two decades of writing about other people's alb.u.ms, to make one of your own, is an instructive experience. Though it didn't cause me to regret any of the harsh-or, indeed, downright abusive-judgements I have pa.s.sed upon various recordings over the years, it did inspire some previously un-thought thoughts, which is always a useful blessing. I observed-and, during some longeurs in the final mix stages, slept through-the lonely diligence of the producer, in our case Mark Wallis, who has worked with everybody ever, but most humblingly from my perspective, had made several alb.u.ms with my favourite band of all time, The Go-Betweens. I marvelled at the process by which colossally gifted musicians-that is, everyone in the band except me-can take a half-baked, barely-composed, ill-considered notion and turn it into something with a tune you can whistle. Most importantly, I laughed quite a lot.

Whether or not what we did is any good is a decision for others to make (I remember, during my time at Melody Maker Melody Maker, how we used to groan, and subsequently mock, whenever some gormless indie wastrel mumbled, "We just do it for ourselves, and if anyone else likes it that's a bonus," but I kind of understand, now, what they meant). What I can say for certain is this. If, especially as a consequence of finding yourself unhorsed by some or other caprice of fate, you should find yourself entertaining ideas that you would normal consider unworkable, ridiculous or palpably insane, don't dismiss them instantly (as long as, of course, they don't involve taking automatic weapons to your school or workplace). Let your id run wild for a spell. You never know where you'll end up.

WE'RE BARRELLING DOWN the mountain in the dark when I start to worry that the wheels are coming off, certainly metaphorically and perhaps literally. For most of the day-long run south along the coast from Tirana, the driver piloting our minibus has, by Albanian standards, been rea.s.suringly decorous-more or less slowing down for red lights, parking at less than thirty miles an hour, that kind of thing. Not now, though. Something has spooked him, sufficiently that planting his accelerator foot seems a reasonable course of action in circ.u.mstances which are more suited to proceeding gingerly in first gear, possibly with a chap bearing a red flag and a torch walking ahead of the vehicle. There are no streetlights up here, and the only mercy of this absence is that it's impossible to gauge how far we'll fall, and onto how many jagged rocks, if we part company with the poor and unfenced road. And we're going faster and faster and faster and faster.

The driver speaks no English. I don't speak much Albanian, beyond the phrase "Nuk flas shume Shqip," which means "I don't speak much Albanian." From my perch at the back of the van, I yell towards the only duoglot aboard, an emissary of Albanian youth activist organisation Mjaft!, who is clinging to the pa.s.senger seat up front. My enquiry, the essence of which is the expression of ardent desire for some sort of explanation of our sudden and potentially fatal haste, prompts a response as uncertain as it is unwelcome.

"There are bandits. . . he thinks."

A tersely worded request for further elucidation yields little.

"There was a car..."

The narrative is punctuated by sharp intakes of breath and whimpers, some from him, others from the members of my band, The Blazing Zoos, who are all probably wondering, like me, if the bizarre and glorious pageant of rock'n'roll history contains an example of a group wiped out in a calamitous accident on the way to their first gig. If not, we may accomplish something this weekend.

". . . he thinks it might be following us."

This strikes me as unlikely, which I don't believe is just wishful thinking on my part. We're coming off the back of a vertiginous range overhanging our intended destination, the small resort town of Himare, where The Blazing Zoos are due to play at a festival on the beach. This part of Albania is generally reckoned relatively civilised (or so I'd a.s.sured my bandmates prior to embarkation). If we were negotiating the proper hillbilly country in the north, I'd concede that that driver had a case, but as things stand, it seems that the person most likely to get us all killed in the near future is in this minibus, not any of the other cars on the road-which might, after all, just be heading to the same event we are.

"He thought he saw guns."

We're in Albania, I mutter to myself. This is probably the only unarmed vehicle in a three-country radius.

"I am going to make some calls," yells our translator, shakily prodding the b.u.t.tons on his phone.

There's clearly nothing for it but to hang on, hope and direct the same sort of water-testing entreaties to the G.o.d one usually disdains that one usually pleas when on an aircraft stricken by turbulence. Against this hypocrisy I offer upward the mitigation that my prayers are all on behalf of my bandmates, decent and reasonable people who have, unlike myself, sensibly chosen lives that usually necessitate little of being chauffeured at knuckle-whitening velocity by paranoid kamikazes and/or pursued by Kalashnikov-slinging ne'er-do-wells. Take me if you must, Lord, but. . .

"They're sending some people up from Himare to meet us," informs the latest yelped bulletin.

An all but two-wheeled lurch right, another one left, another one right again and we come to a rest in an impressively thick cloud of tyre smoke in a happily brightly lit service station forecourt on the outskirts of some species of settlement. The white sedan that was either carting malevolent brigands or blameless motorists sallies blithely past. Our driver recuperates. My bandmates dismount, swig water, swat aside the mosquitoes, and engage in conversation that amounts to variations on the question "What the f.u.c.k was that about?" Heart rates are beginning to return to normal when a black car, with ominously tinted windows, roars up the hill from town, screeches to a halt in front of us and emits, with all the exuberance and none of the panache of a showgirl erupting from a cake, a sweaty, bald apparition brandis.h.i.+ng a pistol. His black t-s.h.i.+rt declares "Security," so I a.s.sume that he's nominally on our side (even in the Balkans, it would be surprising to discover that the local highwaymen have their own bodyguard service). I thank him for his concern, and make what I hope are gestures placatory enough to encourage him to holster his weapon. He misunderstands me.

"I help you!" he announces. "I here for your protection!" With that, he strides towards me, ignores my warily outstretched hand, seizes the waistband of my jeans, tucks the pistol into my trousers, steps back and salutes. I return the courtesy, hoping as I have never hoped for anything that the safety catch on the automatic is engaged. It's at times like this, when you're standing next to a van containing two former members of a platinum-selling rock group and a cultishly regarded Shetlandic chanteuse in a remote part of southern Albania with a maniac's gun barrel tickling your knackers, that one can find oneself asking: how did I get here?

IT'S A FAIR question, which merits a frank and detailed answer.

Forming a country & western band in one's late thirties is obviously something one is only going to do in the deranged extremis of heartbreak, and indeed that's why I did it. The reader may therefore wonder as to the ident.i.ty of who is to blame, may be curious to know the ident.i.ty of the spectre responsible for my decision to seize a guitar and set my sorrows to three chords. This seems an appropriate place to reveal it: Colonel Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.

I should stress that I didn't break up with Colonel Gaddafi, as such: in fact, I've never met the man (I did once interview his son, Saif, and quite liked him, but he isn't my type). Gaddafi's culpability for the existence of my country band is, at best, tangential. It is apportioned only because at the point in the tiresome drama of having one's heart torn from its moorings at which one would normally avail oneself of the recourse of drinking oneself to sleep, I was on a.s.signment in Gaddafi's capital, Tripoli, where alcohol is prohibited. This meant that I couldn't drink, and this meant that I couldn't sleep.

Native Americans believe sleep deprivation useful. Extended sleeplessness often forms part of what they call a Vision Quest-a rite of pa.s.sage during which the individual undertaking it wilfully subjects himself to decomposing hards.h.i.+ps in order to connect with a greater power, and develop an understanding of his higher purpose on this corporeal plane. The quester traditionally meanders off into the wilderness for a few days, abjuring such comforts as food, company and sleep, that he might liberate his mind of its workaday clutter and focus his consciousness on what truly matters to him (my admittedly cursory research into the subject has, sadly, failed to discern what percentage of vision questers return from the woods determined that what truly matters to them are food, company and sleep).

I do not, as a rule, have much time for traditional beliefs, or indeed any sort of empirically untested wisdom-we Sagittarians are very sceptical of such things. But there is something to be said for the potence of sleeplessness as a promoter of innovative thinking, though I don't recommend it for air traffic controllers. Unhinged from the stabilising ballast of rest, the mind does not so much wander as stagger and flail unpredictably, with often surprising consequences, much like a drunk slaloming between barstools. Which is, of course, exactly what I would rather have been, but with that option unavailable, I spent several wretchedly awake nights gazing blankly into the Mediterranean night from my 21st-floor eyrie in the Corinthia Bab Africa hotel, or huddled in foetal communion with my iPod-which is, and has always been, a veritable Fort Knox of solid country gold. At some stage, I reasoned-though "reasoned" is an overestimation of the capacities of my mental mechanics of the time, which were in a similar state to those of an engine which has just been thrown from fifth gear into reverse-that, really, the only sensible (everything's relative) response to my circ.u.mstances was to become a country singer. It is possible that I felt this course an appropriate submission to destiny. Just as the gluttonous Augustus Gloop in Roald Dahl's Charlie and The Chocolate Factory Charlie and The Chocolate Factory was punished for his chocoholism by being turned into fudge, so I'd been listening to country songs for years, and now my life had become one. was punished for his chocoholism by being turned into fudge, so I'd been listening to country songs for years, and now my life had become one.

Over the next few days, I scrawled furiously by night, or quivered by day over coffees in the cafes of Green Square and the Medina, humming to myself and frowning at my notepad: the locals steered well and sensibly clear. I returned to London with red eyes, encroaching caffeine psychosis and about half a set's worth of completed songs. I bought a beautiful new acoustic guitar, and kept writing. In between executing more prosaic techniques of processing heartbreak-sitting in dark rooms, removing hair by the fistful, boring supernaturally patient friends to the brink of self-immolation, wailing pleas, and eventually threats, at a patently indifferent G.o.d-I cultivated dreams of a country alb.u.m to file alongside George Jones' lachrymose cla.s.sic "The Grand Tour," or Gram Parsons' "Grievous Angel." I'd construct a rueful and reproachful, yet poised and dignified, meditation on love and the loss of it, possibly to be t.i.tled "Cram This In Your Pipe And Smoke It, You Demented, Ungrateful Harpy."

It's still difficult for me to account for, or quite believe, the sequence of events that subsequently unfolded. It is possibly just that the universe reacts to the endeavours of a person clearly at the edge of their wits much as a householder would upon answering the door to a burly chap clad in a hockey mask, a Homburg hat and a bloodstained ballgown revving a chainsaw, i.e. with a somewhat nervous invitation to take whatever they want. Planets lined up. Tectonic plates s.h.i.+fted. Inexorable cosmic forces brought themselves to bear. A magazine commission enabled me to make my live debut at the legendary open-mic night at Nashville's Bluebird Cafe.

As is proper prior to embarking upon any serious or entirely ridiculous undertaking, I sought expert counsel. Just before I left London for Nashville, I was asked by a magazine to interview Elvis Costello. The inexorable cosmic forces were clearly at play again: it had been Costello's 1981 alb.u.m of reverent country covers, "Almost Blue," which had sparked my long-burning pa.s.sion for the genre. I asked Costello what he'd advise a Nashville naif: "Go to Katy K," he replied, referrring to the celebrated western outfitter, "and buy a new s.h.i.+rt" (This I subsequently did, along with a complementing guitar strap from Gruhn Guitars, another Nashville inst.i.tution). I asked my friend Astrid Williamson, a songwriter of no mean genius, for tips on playing live. "Visualise the performance," said Astrid. "Imagine yourself doing everything you're going to do." I spent the flight to Nashville, via Chicago, trying, but could only imagine myself cowering beneath a hail of empties, before being compelled under armed duress to re-enact key scenes from "Deliverance."

"That's unlikely," said Amy Kurland, the Bluebird's owner, when I visited the night before my debut. "It's a polite crowd, because the crowd is mostly each other. It's 40 people showing up wanting to play, they bring a couple of friends, that's your audience."

I was, I told Amy, under few illusions about my abilities. As a guitarist, I'm a semi-competent hack, and I'm a better guitarist than singer.

"Don't worry," she laughed. "The open-mic is like Russian Roulette with a full chamber-it's spinning the barrel and hoping you'll hear one decent song all night."

I solicited further guidance from Nashville-based singer-songwriter Billy Cerveny. He struck me as a smart choice of mentor not just because I liked his current alb.u.m, "AM Radio"-a gorgeous, melancholic record in the John Prine/Steve Earle mould-but because before he was a musician, he was a journalist. Billy's elegant yet pugnacious way with words was embodied in the t-s.h.i.+rt slogan of his band, The Nashville Resistance: "Because the a.s.s ain't gonna kick itself" (a sticker bearing this excellent advice has adorned my laptop keyboard ever since). In my room at Nashville's uproariously opulent Hermitage Hotel, I played Billy the MP3 demos of my songs. To my astonishment, Billy didn't emphatically proclaim these the worst things he'd ever heard. "They're rough," he said. "But they sound real, and that's what matters." I suddenly felt calmly, possibly foolishly, confident. I remembered that when I'd asked Amy Kurland how many open-mic contenders were certifiably delusional, she'd replied, "Oh, everyone's delusional. But sometimes, delusions come true."

That Monday night at the Bluebird, I was the fourteenth of the night's wannabes summoned to the stage-and, all things considered, it seemed to go pretty well. n.o.body was thrown at me, n.o.body was injured in any unseemly stampede for the exit, and a couple of the more venomous zingers in the lyric promoted appreciate banging of bottles on table-tops. I was certain, during the climactic chorus, that I perceived an honest-to-goodness "Yeehaw!", though this may have been Billy being polite. I just wasn't sure, upon return to London, what-if anything-to do next. As it turned out, I didn't need to give it much thought. The inexorable cosmic forces were not done with me yet.

Robert Johnson famously became a blues singer after having his guitar tuned by Satan at a Mississippi crossroads. My country band owes its existence, possibly more prosaically but really not much less surreally, to being offered a gig by an Albanian politician in a London c.o.c.ktail lounge. Shortly after I returned from Nashville, I went for a drink with my friend Erion Veliaj, then leader of a youth-oriented civil activist movement called Mjaft!, who was visiting from Albania. I'd met Erion in Tirana a few years beforehand, and entirely failed to conceive a lasting and violent dislike to him despite the tiresomely apparent facts that he's exactly eleven years younger than me, a dozen times smarter, a hundred times better looking and will almost certainly be prime minister before he's 35 and Secretary-General of the United Nations by 50. I told him about my recent escapades in Nashville.

"Mjaft! are putting on a festival in July," he said. "You should come and play at it."

I demurred, voicing concerns that my guitar-picking and singing, such as they were, were not anything anyone was going to want to sit through for longer than five minutes, at most.

"No," Erion agreed. "But you could bring your band."

I explained that I didn't have one. Erion, of course, had not got where he was by listening to excuses.