Figuring out a new identity also is a theme that emerges in our conversation, as we range from Mandela and the marathon work on U2’s next album, still ongoing with a tentative release date of this summer, to the early influences on the band’s identity and worldview.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about this because of the new album,” Bono says. “I was drawn in by movies that fashion you and make you who you are.” He also has been revisiting music that fired U2’s first visions of new possibilities (Joy Division, Kraftwerk, the Ramones) and the DIY fan enthusiasm that made them pick up instruments and launch Feedback, as U2 briefly called itself in the very beginning.
“I don’t want to grow out of that,” says Bono (real name: Paul David Hewson). “We consider ourselves to have been the people who stepped out of the audience at those early punk rock shows onto the stage. There was no ‘them’; it was only ‘us.’ We actually took it out of the audience and onto the stage before we could quite play.”
“There is no them/There’s only us”-it’s a talismanic phrase that not only reflects U2’s founding ethic but the implications of the band’s name and its decades-long engagement with conflict and injustice, from Ireland and Nicaragua to Ethiopia, Somalia and South Africa. (It also happens to be the final chorus of the single “Invisible,” U2’s follow-up to “Ordinary Love” and the first hint of where the forthcoming album is heading.) Given U2’s close relationship with the first black leader of South Africa, which evolved from the political to the warmly personal, you sense that winning this particular Oscar would be a vindication far beyond a career accolade.