Killing Bono Read Free

of ten, I regarded the music business with a healthy disdain, an attitude which, had I managed to maintain it for another twenty years or so, would have spared me a great deal of personal pain.
    While my older sister, Stella, watched Top of the Pops with something akin to religious veneration, I saw myself as having much loftier tastes. I liked Frank Sinatra, a mature artist who could act as well as sing and never wore eyeliner. My younger brother, Ivan, was a willing ally in the hugely entertaining sport of tormenting my sister about whatever teenage idol currently occupied center stage in her fantasies. But I began to harbor deep suspicions about Ivan’s allegiances when he started wearing tartan trousers with turn-ups in the style of the Bay City Rollers.
    The last of the McCormick siblings was our little sister, Louise, seven years my junior, who was too young to have an opinion on the great Sinatra/pop schism (or, at least, too low down the family pecking order to have an opinion that counted). Louise listened to whatever anyone else played and seemed to like it, even tolerating the Aran-sweater-wearing, kilted folkies from the Scottish highlands whose tunes my father favored and the collections of classical highlights my mother would occasionally try to foist on us in the name of education.
    Apart from musical differences, a symptom of a sometimes unpleasantly intense sibling rivalry, ours was, by and large, a happy family. I report this with no pleasure whatsoever, for reasons that I hope will become clear. Both my parents came from staunchly working-class, British-coal-mining backgrounds but my father had (through a process of apprenticeship, night studies and endless exams) hauled us up to the comfortable plateau of middle-classness (to which my mother, in particular, had taken like one to the semidetached born). Having started on the factory floor at fifteen years old, Dad had become a qualified engineer before being fast-tracked for senior management in car manufacturer Chrysler. We relocated to Ireland for his latest promotion, moving from a bungalow in a dreary Scottish town to a five-bedroom, two-story house in Howth, a beautiful fishing village on a peninsula at the northern tip of Dublin. It was quite an idyllic place to grow up—fields and forests bordered by the sea, with a city within easy reach.
    I have to say that my parents treated us children exceptionally well, apparently wishing upon their offspring the education, opportunities, financial security and, crucially, freedom of expression and artistic fulfillment that had never been an option in their own childhoods. I have often complained about this to them.
    â€œDo you think we should have made you suffer more?” my mother tuts whenever I essay my theory that family hardship is an essential ingredient in the otherwise almost intangible metaphysics of fame, acting as a kind of psychic spur on the drive for stardom, especially in the music business. Think about it: how many well-balanced rock stars can you name? From the shared grief over the premature deaths of their mothers that united John Lennon and Paul McCartney to the divorce that rocked the childhood world of Kurt Cobain and the paternal abandonment that fired up the Gallagher brothers, the family backgrounds of rock idols are littered with misery. In particular, there is something about an absence of parental love that drives some individuals to entirely give themselves over to audiences, seeking out the approval of mass applause not just for glory but also as a balm for their tortured souls.
    Perhaps, like my mother, you think I am being melodramatic; but while I was comfortable in the bosom of my family, positively reveling in the sense of freedom and almost unlimited possibility I felt in those early years in my newly adopted country, over in another part of Dublin a boy I had yet to meet was having his world turned upside down.
    Paul Hewson—the boy who would become