Being Bono
Stuart Bailie | 20:39 PM, Sunday, 21 June 2009

I was looking forward to the Bono profile in today's Sunday Times. The writer Chrissie Isley had loads of access and also got insights from world leaders, band members, the wife and the entourage. I anticipated that Bono would understand the reach of the publication and that he might reveal something appropriate.

But it was like so much vapour. The energy, the restlessness and the needy side of the artist were all noted, but you wanted a new skin on the onion, an anecdote or an illustration to show where his head is currently at. Being with Bono is a very flattering thing and the context is so stimulating (noise, famous mates, massive events) that you can miss the central focus. The shades are deflecting the intrusive gaze and the personna fills in gamely. You might easily come away thinking you have cracked it when in fact you've been kindly tolerated.

The closest I've come to a Bono insight was in the air between Dusseldorf and London. The band had just made one of those exciting exits from the back of the arena, straight into the limos, to the airport and onto the jet. And the singer was utterly cleaned out. He looked ancient and impossibly fatigued. Everyone in the hall had been given a little bit of Bono and so there was an alarming vacancy at the heart of it.

Within half an hour, Bono had reconstituted himself, sucking the necessary fuel out of the molecules nearby and pinballing those dynamics once again. He started smiling and showing me his scars and war wounds - gathered in the course of some other mad parade, high on the customary hope. He was himself again.

bbc