• Sean O'Hagan
• The Observer, Sunday 15 February 2009
• Article history

It is the middle of January this year and Bono is at home in Killiney, County Dublin, with an hour to spare before he heads into town for an afternoon of meetings. "Things are looking good," he says. "It's a beautiful, sunny, winter's day and Edna O'Brien has just been sent me her book on Lord Byron."

He has been up "from the early hours", his working day now devoted to juggling the demands of family, rock stardom and the ongoing campaign for African aid and debt relief. U2's long-awaited new album, No Line on the Horizon, is finally finished. "It began and ended in a flash," he says. "The last 24 hours were just extraordinary. It was like Chinese calligraphy, where the monks take ages to mix the ink and then - bam! - it all happens in seconds."

In three days' time, the band will fly to Washington, where they will perform Pride, their Martin Luther King song, and City of Blinding Lights, their Barack Obama song, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. "The world is waking up again," says Bono. "It's going to be a tough transformation, but it's going to be exciting. Things are shifting in surprising ways."

Over the next hour, Bono will talk about what it means to be the world's biggest rock star and the world's most famous global campaigner, about music and faith and activism, and the tensions his high-profile tightrope walk has caused in the band. He will also talk about U2's new music, and the shift in his song-writing style away from the first person ("I'd just worn myself out as a subject matter").

No Line on the Horizon is U2's 12th studio album. It sees the world's biggest band challenging themselves - and their audience's expectations - in a way that they have not done since the 90s' experimentation of Achtung Baby and Zooropa. It was, though, a difficult and protracted birth, and I was a witness to its gestation. In the original plan, hatched almost two years ago in a casual conversation with Bono, I had been invited to Fez to track the making of the new album, stage by stage, from inception to completion. So it was that, what seems like an eternity ago, I boarded a plane to Morocco.

Fez, Morocco, June 2007

Bono, guitarist The Edge, drummer Larry Mullen and bassist Adam Clayton are gathered, with producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois in the ancient North African walled city to start recording a handful of new songs. Their "studio" is the enclosed courtyard of a riad on the edge of the medina. Moroccan carpets have been spread across the stone floor, ornate pillars and spreading palms tower over the amplifiers and sound desks, and, from time to time, small birds dart overhead, startled by the constant bursts of rough and ready music.

The mood matches the makeshift setting: a batch of new songs, tentative, half-formed, sketchy, are elaborated on or set aside for future reference. Eno, who has assumed the role of musical director, shouts out tempo changes, instructions, suggestions. "The chords sound a little too vanilla," he says of one laid-back, swampy groove. Bono, who has a couch all to himself, concurs. "We need to find that nightclub-in-Tripoli feel," he shouts back, swaying to the beat, "then move it on down to Bamako." The vibe is one of unhurried creativity, the six musicians - Eno on keyboards, Lanois on guitar and pedal steel - stretching out and enjoying themselves. It feels like the beginning of a new adventure.

"What's happening down here is beyond reason," Bono had enthused, when the idea of me shadowing them had first been broached. "Spirits are hovering. We're chasing the Joujouka drummers and different structures for pop."

The legendary Joujouka drummers drew both Brian Jones and William Burroughs to Fez in the late 60s, but this time around, other guiding spirits were also at work. Every night, as darkness fell, the haunting voices of devotional Sufi singers would rise up and drift across the rooftops, their song-prayers lasting for hours at a time. "There was definitely something in the air down there," Bono will tell me later. "And we picked up on it."

Could he describe what that something was exactly?

"Not without sounding pretentious," he says, laughing. "I mean, a lot of people have gone there, searching. There's a bit of the Mighty Boosh about it. Out in the desert, looking for the new sound. Have you seen that episode where they are out in the desert looking for the new sound? They find Chris De Burgh and he's been out looking for the new sound for 10 years [laughs]. It's probably no more profound than that."

Eighteen months later, though, sitting at a table in his home studio in Notting Hill, Brian Eno, a man not given to exaggeration, will describe a song that "was hatched almost fully formed in a breathtaking few hours" in Fez as "the most amazing studio experience I've ever had". Which is saying something. That song is called Moment of Surrender, a thing of complex rhythmic beauty and cumulative power, that, as Bono will later point out, occupies the same place on No Line on the Horizon as One did on Achtung Baby. That is to say, it is the emotional centrepiece of a big, overloaded, creatively risky record. "Apart from some editing and the addition of the short cello piece that introduces it," says Eno, "the song appears on the album exactly as it was the first and only time we played it."

Later, too, Larry Mullen, who in the past has been less than enthused by U2's more experimental work - he all but disowned the ambient album Original Soundtracks 1, released as Passengers, back in 1995 - will tell me that "the work we did in Fez was the most joyous and liberating part of the whole album process. It was what I had always imagined being in U2 would be about: just playing music for the joy of it with no real end in sight. It was chaotic at times but even the chaos was creative. You can lose sight of that sometimes with all the other stuff that now comes with being in U2."

(Later Bono will say of Morocco: "What surprised me was that Larry went with it. I was waiting for the eyes to roll. But they didn't. I mean, most of the time, it's hard enough to get Larry to come over to the south side of Dublin.")

On the second day I spend in Fez, I catch a dramatic glimpse of "all the other stuff that now comes with being in U2". In the afternoon, Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and the 41st richest man in the world, drops in on rehearsals. And he brings his band with him; four middle-aged guys in sailing gear and baseball hats. A couple of them even strap on guitars, and, for a brief moment, it looks like they might sit in on a U2 rehearsal. Then, after an impromptu burst of bar-room rock, they depart, grinning like teenagers.

That evening, Allen and his buddies reappear at a dinner that Bono is hosting on the hotel balcony for Queen Rania of Jordan, who, the following afternoon, will also drop in on a U2 rehearsal. "The elegant Jordanian Royal", as she is referred to in the tabloids, sits on a couch, looking, well, elegant and regal, while Bono sings one of the quieter songs the group have been working on. It's a long way from bottom of the bill at McGonagles and the last bus home to Ballymun Avenue, that's all I can say.

Both Queen Rania and Paul Allen are major players in the world of high-end global philanthropy, which is one of several rarefied socio-political networks that Bono now inhabits as part of his other gig: the world's most well-known campaigner for African debt relief. There were moments in Fez, though, when it was difficult to tell which one was now his day job.

After dinner, I chat with Mullen over a few cold beers. "There is a danger," he says, when I mention how strange it was to witness Bono's two worlds colliding in such a spectacular fashion, "that people start to perceive U2 as a part of the Bono show. Now, I admire and support everything he does," he continues, "but that is categorically not the case."

When U2's sojourn in Fez ends a few weeks later, Bono jets off to a Ted [Technology Entertainment Design] conference in Tanzania, while the rest of the band head back home to Dublin.

U2 have now been together for 33 years now, an eternity in pop terms. For the past 22 years, since their fifth album, The Joshua Tree, pitched them into the ether of global rock stardom, they have been the biggest rock group in the world.

In their time at the top, the band have seen several generations of contenders to their throne come and go, including the Clash, the Smiths, Nirvana, the Stone Roses and Blur. For a moment, it looked like REM, then Radiohead might steal their thunder, or even Oasis. As if... Maybe the Kings of Leon or the Killers may yet step up to the challenge, but let's just wait and see. Thus far, love them or hate them, U2 have been unassailable. No other rock band has lasted longer, nor made such consistently good, and often challenging, rock music, nor staged such epic and technologically cutting edge shows.

What is most intriguing - and, to their detractors, infuriating - about U2 is that they succeeded by ignoring, indeed breaking, most of the unwritten rules of rock stardom. They didn't - with the exception of the pre-rehab Adam Clayton - do sex or drugs and, as their critics pointed out, neither did they really do rock'n'roll. They were not rebellious, nor angst-ridden, nor did they trade on adolescent alienation or anger. Instead, they did joy. And spiritual joy, to boot. This made them unfashionable in Britain, the irony capital of the world, where sincerity, especially sincerity tinged with spirituality, is seen, at best, as uncool, at worst as downright embarrassing.

"One of the reason's for U2's longevity," says Brian Eno, "is that they are not in music for entirely selfish reasons. I don't want to make them appear as evangelists, which, of course, they were seen as by some sections of the music media in the early 80s, but I do believe that they really think that what they do serves some greater purpose than simply filling their bank accounts."

Initially, I had little time for U2, their songs, their haircuts, their Christianity. My epiphany occurred when I was sent to Rome by the NME in the summer of 1987 to interview Bono after the first gig of their European tour - The Joshua Tree tour. Put simply, it was a revelation: a rock group whose music made sense in a stadium, whose songs retained - and inspired - a kind of communal intimacy in a crowd of 60,000 people. And, boy, did Bono work that crowd. He was one part rock star, one part showbiz trouper, one part preacher man. In America, where cool is not such a reductive currency, U2 were embraced with open arms. The rest, as they say, is history.

By Achtung Baby, as Bono famously put it, they "discovered that irony was not the enemy of soul". The Zoo TV extravaganza was, and remains, the most technically innovative - touring rock show of recent times. And anyone who still thinks U2 don't have a sense of humour obviously missed the Pop Mart tour, where they emerged nightly out of a giant lemon dressed like some postmodern version of the Village People.

This is the version of U2 that I prefer, the one that challenges our preconceptions of U2. It has not been around for a while, but now it has popped out of the closet again on (most of) No Line on the Horizon, which is a world away from the two traditional sounding, good-but-not great albums that preceded it. They seem to me, at times, to be the last of something: the last rock band that insists rock music has some greater meaning at a time when the form seems dogged by a lack of cultural resonance.

Hanover Quay Studios, Dublin, June, 2008

For the past year, the group have been working in fits and starts in New York, the south of France and Dublin. Steve Lillywhite is now on board as a co-producer alongside Eno and Lanois. When I arrive, he and Lanois each are working on separate versions of a song called Sexy Boots, the title of which, after much discussion, will be changed to Get Your Boots On. It will subsequently become the first single: a Zeppelin riff welded to a bubblegum pop melody; surprising, sexy, sinuous. Later, Bono will play me three other almost finished songs: Unknown Caller, No Line on the Horizon and Chromium Chords, which will later be re-titled Fez - Being Born. The songs, on first hearing, sound dense and elusive. You can hear Lanois and Eno's presence on all of them. I try to take them in as Bono talks - and sometimes sings - me though them.

The album has developed, he says, into a kind of "fractured journey, a physical journey from Paris to Tripoli via Cadiz, but also an emotional and psychological journey". It sounds, I say, like a concept album. "Don't even mention those words," he says.

That evening, as we sit down for dinner, more songs are played on the sound system: Magnificent, the most U2-sounding song, epic and soaring; Cedars of Lebanon, a more intimate song delivered in a half-spoken style; Breathe, which sounds like a page torn out of the Dylan-on-amphetamine songbook ("Nine o nine, St John Divine on the line, my pulse is fine, but I'm running down the road like loose electricity"). He seems fired up on the possibilities of where this album is going.

"I just got tired of the first-person so I invented all these characters; a traffic cop, a junkie, a soldier serving in Afghanistan."

As Moment of Surrender starts, he jumps up and sings along to the hallucinatory lyrics. "I was speeding on the subway/ Through the stations of the cross/ Every eye looking every other way/ Counting down till the pain would stop." A spiritual epiphany? A junkie's final fall from grace?

Before I can ask, Bono has returned to the table, his laptop open, and is reciting what sounds like a Beat poem. It namechecks Keats and Shelley, St Augustus, a neon Jesus and "the gods of Apollo and Zeus", and there's a line about "tourists with bad breath" and "campaigners against bad debt". There's reams of this stuff, surreal, freeform verse that makes a certain kind of Ginsbergian sense. It does not make it on to the album, but may surface in future live shows if the spirit moves him.

Around midnight, taxis are called, and I head for the Shelbourne Hotel for a late drink with Daniel Lanois. He looks tired. "It's taking longer than we thought," he says, sipping on a beer and a brandy chaser. "They always go the extra mile. They're intense people. I'm intense myself."

Lanois is an old-school rock'n'roller who has worked with Dylan and the Neville Brothers, and who likes to keep things loose and atmospheric. He appears laid-back, but is anything but. I tell him something that Bono had said about him earlier - "Danny's attitude is, 'It's going to be a great album or somebody is going to die.'" He laughs and raises his glass. "That about covers it, Sean. I ain't here for the money, man. None of us are. It ain't about a salary, it's about making a fucking great U2 record."

Has that been difficult this time around?

"Kind of, but, then again, U2 albums have always been difficult."

A few months later, in September 2008, it is announced that the release date of the new U2 album has been put back from November to March. One nagging question hovers unanswered over the postponement: is Bono's other life as a campaigner and activist leaving him too little time to give himself fully to U2?

"When Bono's there, he's there," The Edge tells me later. "He still gives huge amounts of his time and energy, but his life is undoubtedly different now." Larry Mullen concurs. "I can tell you categorically that all the other stuff is not affecting his work. He has boxes of lyrics, great lyrics."

Have his absences impinged on the making of this album?

"Well , when you are four guys working together and one of them is away a lot, you miss that chemistry, and you miss his input. But there's no sour grapes there. We get on with it. We work, you know, U2 works."

Later, I ask Bono the same question. How does he find the time for U2 these days? He takes a deep breath.

"When I'm with U2 doing U2 work, they have me 100% or we would not be here now and we certainly would not have made an album like this one. Look, my day is long. My creative life is over at midday. But, you know, I get up very early. Plus, I don't go out and set fire to myself on a regular basis. I still do it on the odd Friday night, but not the way I used to. I give my time to my family, my band, and my interest in the wider world. It all seems to be fuel for me. My engine seems to be working better these days."

At a time when celebrity is a degraded currency, Bono has turned his fame into the ultimate calling card for his activism. It has helped opened doors from the Vatican to the White House, helped ensure unprecedented amounts of aid and debt relief for Africa, helped save and transform countless lives that would have been lost for want of retroviral drugs, and it has led to unlikely alliances, maybe even enduring friendships, with Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton, but also with George Bush, Tony Blair and Nicolas Sarkozy.

In all of this, Bono has not only rewritten the rules of rock stardom, but willed himself into a place where no other rock star has gone before. It has been a high-profile tightrope walk that has earned him much praise and much negative criticism, even scorn. "There are probably more annoying things than being hectored to about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat," thundered the travel writer Paul Theroux in a very public broadside a few years back, "but I can't think of one at the moment."

I ask Bono if he can understand why a lot of people, myself included, not to mention his drummer, found his perceived closeness to Blair and Bush hard to take? He sighs.

"I can understand that, for sure, but the results speak for themselves. I can take it on the nose from everybody, including my own band, but by the time he leaves the White House, George Bush will have trebled aid to Africa. We are into him for $50bn."

SOH So, is it part of the deal that you then don't criticise him about anything else he has done - the war in Iraq, say, or Guantanamo? Morally, that's quite a tricky trade-off.

Bono "No, it's more that I don't make a song and dance about my criticism. Everyone in the White House knows where I stood on the war. In the run up and when it was just about to happen, I had many conversations where I expressed my feelings. But I felt I had to focus on this one thing which was, don't make a deal on extreme poverty. Make it truly colourless politically. It was the power of one clear idea. And it succeeded. And it was very, very difficult, and there was a lot of hand-holding, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, meeting after meeting after meeting, trying to get people not to play politics with the world's poor. And for me to alienate people who, to be fair to them, were often sending their sons to Iraq I just felt, I don't want to be shouting my mouth off about this war when really I have a chance, along with other people, of achieving for the first time broad political consensus on this one hugely important single issue of Africa and aid."

He reaches for his drink and shakes his head.

"But you're right, you're right, you're right...I mean, you know me, and you know how difficult it is for me to shut up about anything."

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