Bono not U2’s largest member, Lola claims

HE’S the loudest, best known, most effusive and conspicuous member of U2, but Bono, it seems, is not the biggest member in the band.

Or at least his member is not the band’s biggest. That’s what Lola says anyway and she should know, she being the “sole soldier” deployed to the battleground of the dressing room where chaos akin to a Vietnamese jungle circa 1968 reigned.

While U2 were on tour, Lola felt herself on a tour of duty, tasked to knock into shape a scruffy troupe of road warriors and make them a force to be reckoned with.

She was pinned down by hostile fire from all sides - management, crew members, her own agent - but still broke through enemy lines to deliver her own explosive retorts.

Like many a veteran of the battlefield, Lola took to telling war stories when she was discharged.

One vigorous round of raconteuring took place at a dinner party in her London flat where her guests begged to be regaled with tales from the front.

Uppermost on their minds was establishing who was the best equipped. Or as Lola, not one to camouflage her commentary in metaphor, put it, which of the band members had the “biggest d***.”

Lola feigned disgust and chided her guests for their lewdness. But inside she was grinning knowingly and imagining the place cracking up if she told them: “Well, it isn’t Bono.”

It was a small mercy that the man himself was not present in Court 28 of the Dublin Circuit Civil Court yesterday or else where would one have placed one’s eyes?

Lola’s arsenal of tales and anecdotes spilled out into the courtroom thanks to a voyage through her 2004 book, Inside The Zoo With U2, which lawyers for the band used to depict her as a difficult character who had a bad attitude to her work as a stylist for U2 from the start.

Extracts were quoted where Lola vowed to make Bono understand she wouldn’t “go quietly” if she was messed around.