When I bring up the Academy Awards, Bono enthuses about the other category nominees and the stiff competition, saying he’s been urging the band to lower any expectations of winning. But “if the song gets to shake the hand of the little gopher,” he says, “it would give a whole other imprimatur to our audience, which would be great. I would love if it had a life outside of the film. Because we poured so much of our life into the song and, I hope, his life, the life of Mandela.”
U2 being U2, and Bono being Bono, these awards-season interludes must be reckoned alongside a blurred succession of fast-moving, high-profile activities in recent months. In June, for example, the singer and his wife took Michelle Obama and her daughters to lunch at this very pub while President Obama was attending the G8 summit in Belfast. In November, Bono presided at his collaboration with Apple designer Jony Ive and Ive’s design colleague Marc Newson in a Sotheby’s New York auction of one-off, bespoke consumer objects that raised $26 million for The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. In December, Bono attended the memorial for Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg. In early January, U2 was in California shooting a Super Bowl spot and music video for “Invisible” that raised another $3 million (from Bank of America) for Bono’s (RED) campaign and playing a benefit at the Montage hotel in Beverly Hills for Sean Penn’s Help Haiti Home fund-raiser before attending the Golden Globes, where U2 won best song.
A week later, it was announced that U2 would be the musical guest on Jimmy Fallon’s first “Tonight Show” broadcast in New York on Feb. 17, and then Bono was in Davos, Switzerland, tackling progress on extreme poverty with British Prime Minister David Cameron and warning the Masters of the Universe that “there’s an avalanche of cynicism about us just by being here, and capitalism is in the dock, and the jury is going to decide based on how we deal with these issues, not in the abstract but in the concrete.”
Clearly, any close observation of U2, whose members incessantly zag around the planet like quarks, is a complex physics problem. Nabbing Bono at his local watering hole had been a near-run thing, and by the time I track down the whole band, it’s several days later and I’m crashing a photo shoot in West London at a converted studio in an old Sunbeam auto factory.