Days of Heaven by Declan Lynch

Author:Declan Lynch [Lynch, Declan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780717151622
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan

I think it’s time that we called in Bono.

You may recall our living arrangements at that time, the basement flat in the old Geldof place in which I lived with Jane and the newborn Roseanne and the flat on the next floor occupied by Liam Mackey, the one that had the phone in the hall.

Jane and Roseanne and I went up there one day for coffee, just as Liam arrived along, accompanied by Bono.

Through all sorts of Hot Press-related contacts over the years, Liam had come to know Bono (a lot better than I did, to tell the truth) and on this occasion he had just bumped into him down the road in Dun Laoghaire. Now, I’m only telling you this because, by the late 1980s, most people in Ireland had sat down and chatted with Bono at some stage. So if we’re trying to convey the spirit of that time, we should observe this formality. And there is a direct relevance to our project in the sense that U2, represented by Larry Mullen, had cranked up the build-up to Italia 90 with arguably the best football record ever made, ‘Put ’Em Under Pressure’.

So it was a very Irish occasion, with Bono sitting there by the fireplace drinking his mug of coffee. He spoke movingly about the startling new direction in which the latest album was going (this would be Achtung Baby) before embarking on a series of anecdotes about various legends of Irish life and culture, especially in the showband realm.

In particular he recounted tales of a man called Jim Hand, one of the famous Hand twins from Drogheda, the other being Michael the journalist, a former Editor of the Sunday Independent — Michael indeed, got his start in journalism with The Argus newspaper in Dundalk, after a job interview for which Michael’s place was actually taken by Jim, the interviewer being unaware that the wrong twin had turned up to fool him — or if he was aware, it didn’t trouble him.

And though they would eventually conquer Dublin in their chosen fields of journalism and showbusiness, Jim would tell John Waters that he had never got on a bus in Dublin, ‘because you’d never know where they’d be going’ — an observation which, with the passing of time, seems wise in a Beckettian way.

Launching into an extraordinarily accurate rendition of the Drogheda accent, Bono shared his favourite Hand line, in which Jim Hand is introduced to someone at a social function and tells this person that he would very much like to get to know him because he seems like a very nice fellow, but that this is out of the question because unfortunately, he already knows enough people.

Bono told this story not in the superior tone of the rock star making fun of the boys of the old brigade, but with relish, admiring the fine clarity of Hand’s vision, the originality of the statement. Psychologists may feel that Bono, here, was subconsciously identifying with Jim Hand because

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.