Bob and Bono: how to play world powers
They entered an industry built on hype, where image is everything, sincerity is an embarrassment and substance means little unless it is the kind that can be abused.
They achieved a level of success and wealth where they could create their own fantasy lifestyles, nurture their own delusions and never be bothered by the real world outside.
Yet somehow Bob Geldof and Paul ‘Bono’ Hewson became confident, competent and committed individuals with a curious compulsion to pull back the curtains on the superficial stage of showbusiness and unleash a production called life and death.
It had a darkly serious theme and a hard-hitting script but it came accompanied with a rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack and all the razzmatazz that a celebrity love-in could generate.
At first it confused the critics. Was this a genuine attempt to use a musical platform to launch a crusade? Or was it just a sick joke? After all, wasn’t it that Geldof chap who declared: “All I want out of pop is to get rich, get famous and get laid”?
While the critics fretted the ambiguities, audiences took it at face value.
You could dig for hidden agendas and delve for misguided motives but this was a feelgood effort that felt good to support. And so Bono the loudmouth and Bob the foulmouthed became modern day saints.
It has been a 20-year canonisation process. Although Bono dates his involvement in African issues back only as far as 1997 when he got roped into the Jubilee 2000 Drop the Debt campaign, he was publicly displaying his political conscience even before Geldof.
U2’s 1983 album War, with songs like Sunday Bloody Sunday, lamenting the endless cycle of violence in the North, and New Year’s Day, celebrating the spirit of resistance inspired by the Solidarity movement in Poland, set a standard for U2’s recordings which would continue to mix personal stories with world affairs.
Musically, Geldof was going through a bad patch with the Boomtown Rats’ punk/ska 1970s sound out of place in the synth-ridden 1980s. The band’s last international tour had taken them to Asia, where Bob developed a grim fascination with the squalid and precarious existence forced upon Third World city dwellers.
He was already in a thoughtful, if not doleful, frame of mind when images from the 1984 Ethiopian famine flashed across his television screen and propelled him back to the world stage.
Band Aid came first, followed in 1985 by Live Aid, by which time Bob had found a brother in alms, Bono. They made for a peculiar double act, Bob with his head hanging and shoulders slouching as if trying to lessen his loping height and Bono in his high-heeled cowboy boots trying to elevate his modest stature.
They differed in approach too. When Bob was moved, he got angry and swore. Bono got philosophical and evangelised.
What they had in common, however, was that they were both in danger of becoming boring. Bob the Gob became Saint Bob and then Sir Bob and a sceptical media derided him for accepting a title reminiscent of aristocracy when he was supposed to be the hero of the underprivileged.
Bono was diagnosed as having a terminal god complex and was questioned in snide commentary about how he could speak for the poor while seeing life through the richly tinted lenses of his designer millionaire shades.
Yet again while the critics searched for incongruities, the audiences offered their loyalties. They didn’t have a huge appetite for Bob’s music, which he doggedly continues to produce as a solo artist. But they liked the frothy offerings of his light entertainment TV production company, his radio station ventures and myriad other highly profitable business ventures.
The hysteria that surrounds U2’s current world tour speaks for itself in summing up Bono’s popularity.
And then in the middle of buffing up their goldmine careers, the now middle-aged rock industry survivors go and do it again. They put Africa back on the international stage, draw in celebrities and world leaders, create a whole lot of hype and they, at first glance at least, seem to have got results.
The ambiguities surrounding their involvement in the Make Poverty History movement haven’t dissipated but Bob doesn’t care about them. Bono, disarms us by embracing them: “There is something awkward, something uneasy about a picture of a rich rock star with poor Africans. I accept that. It unsettles me.”
Bono, like Bob, also accepts that the weekend’s G8 African debt deal is only one more step on the long road to eliminating poverty.
They’ve put on a good show so far but both know that the true measure of their success will only come when they no longer have to use their celebrity status to promote the cause.
