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Bono leads the way through a maze that runs from Dublin's Clarence hotel -- owned by U2 -- to behind the bar of the Kitchen, the nightclub beneath it. "I love the fact that at the bottom of this posh hotel is this sewer of a nightclub," he says.

It is early March 2000. U2 have already been recording a new album for more than a year, and they are far from finished. Tonight Bono's going out, but his head is still full of manifestoes and overexcited abstractions: "I feel like it's always raining in our songs, that bittersweetness. I try to resist it, actually. . . . What I like about pop music is its pure joy, and in the end it's harder to make ecstatic, electrifying music. It's the hardest thing in the world. We surrender too easily to the blues. We, if we're not careful, are bleeding all over the world. What's striking about our Eighties music is, it's ecstatic a lot of the time -- as gauche as we sometimes came across then." He tries to explain how he'd like their new record to be. "Joy!" he hollers. "Happiness means nothing -- happiness means getting rid of a headache. Joy is another thing altogether. It's the hardest thing to conjure. You can't conjure it -- it's more like a spring. But when it's in music, that's the top of the pyramid."

He waves a drink in his hand, explaining how in the Nineties, U2 wandered away from joy -- "We got darker and darker, but the lights were all the brighter at our concerts" -- in an effort to communicate other things. "Joy in our group comes out of vowels, words with very few consonants, words that form when you're singing," he says. "So as a writer it can be frustrating."

And you're not going to be scared of short words with vowels on this record?

"No," he raves. "I'm trying to be embarrassable. I think that may be our job. I want to say these things that people are thinking and not saying. Things have got very constricted. I think it's the job of the singer: to fess up to the stuff. I want to make a record that does that, that's nonsense and makes sense, because that's the way we're all living. Red Bull, beats, talking about girls, the Death and Resurrection Show -- that's how we're living now. I want that feeling on the record. I think there are more colors available to us than before. Our music in the early Eighties, it might have been ecstatic, but it wasn't really sexy, was it? Now we're sexy and ecstatic." It has, he says, to do with the rhythm section, with the bass. "Now, literally, we're bringing up the rear."

Tonight there will be more drinks, and more talk of joy, but it is half a year before U2 finish their record. On its release, All That You Can't Leave Behind will be an instant success, the most welcoming record U2 have made in years, and many of its listeners may well imagine it is the joy-infused record Bono had intended. As long as they don't listen too carefully.

December 5th, 2000. U2 are in New York, toward the end of seven weeks promoting their record around the world. On their travels they have been doing things they have resisted for most of their career -- playing on TV shows, for instance -- and tomorrow night they will play a club show at Irving Plaza. U2 never fell for the romance of small clubs -- they always wanted the stage and the audience to be bigger -- and since they graduated from them in the early Eighties they have never been back.

Tonight they must rehearse. Though they know they will play the four songs from the new record that they have rehearsed for TV appearances, they must decide what else. Bono addresses his fellow band members. "I have an idea," he says. "Two ideas, which I'd like to think about. A little controversial -- two cover versions. One is the Who, 'Won't Get Fooled Again,' and the other . . ." He begins to sing: " 'I remember lying, awake at night, and thinking just of you; but things don't last forever, and somehow, baby, they never really do.' "

It's a Ramones song, "I Remember You." Bono says that U2 played it at their first rehearsal, in 1978.

"Maybe no drums," Bono suggests.

"That sounds great," drummer Larry Mullen says, dryly. "I'll put the kettle on."

The idea of covering "Won't Get Fooled Again" was planted during a recent video shoot in Rio for the song "Walk On," when the Edge, who had a Marshall stack behind him and felt inspired to play what he considered "one of the great riffs," launched into about thirty seconds of the song - "just a goof," he says -- and Larry joined in. When I arrive at Irving Plaza, U2 are on the small stage, not playing but listening to the Who's version of "Won't Get Fooled Again" through the monitors. The Edge fingers his guitar, checking the chords. After only two or three minutes he gestures for the Who to be switched off, and they launch straight into their own pared-down version. At the end, the Edge switches to the Rolling Stones' "Bitch." Bono looks unsure about this. "From a youth manifesto to a penis manifesto," he queries.

"How did the Who end it?" the Edge wonders.

"I don't know -- we didn't get that far on the album," Bono points out. "I just want to warn you, Lenny Kravitz will be out there, and he'll know all the chords."

For fun -- they won't be playing these tomorrow -- they also run through a hilarious glam-rock medley (incorporating Gary Glitter's "Rock & Roll Part I," David Essex's "Rock On" and Slade's "Gudbye T'Jane") and a messy version of Thin Lizzy's lightest moment, "Dancing in the Moonlight." "It's a Pavlov thing," says Bono, stepping offstage. "When you're in this kind of venue, you go back to these things."

The title of "All That You Can't Leave Behind" is taken from "Walk On." When Bono presented it to the band, there was some resistance. "Everyone thought it was too long and not that memorable," he says. "Larry, his reaction was, 'That'll never fit on a T-shirt.'"

Slowly, they came round. As they have taken to explaining to people who ask about such things, it just seemed to fit as the title of a record in which U2 put aside any heavy-handed sheen of technology or irony or impish perversity and perform a collection of tuneful songs. When I first bring up the subject, I get some of the same answers.

"This is the stuff that in the end makes us what we are," says the Edge. "It's the stuff that you can't leave behind, the personality of the band, the way we interact with each other."

And yet -- though perhaps it is quite understandable that they haven't broadcast the information in sound bites -- it is also a far darker title than that, and a far darker record. If the title in general refers to those things that really matter, it is also specifically about death, and about valuing whatever accompanies you when you die. "Just the essential things," says Bono. "The stuff you can take with you: friendship, laughter. Wisdom, if you've found any." If there is one theme that suffuses the record, it is a sense of mortality, of how and what you treasure in a world where death awaits. If U2 meant to write a straightforward record full of uplifting songs, real life intervened.

"You know, the record we were trying to make was quite a bit more joyful and about a certain kind of love of life and vitality," says the Edge. "And that's in there, but there's also this other side, which sort of crept into the record almost without me noticing. And if the record was about breaking things back down to essentials, I suppose in the end mortality is the ultimate inescapable fact of life."

Bassist Adam Clayton recalls how they listened back to the album's provisional running order and decided they needed to add "Wild Honey," one of the more simple, up songs from the recording sessions. "We realized, 'This is our most joyful song,' " he says. " 'We've got to put that in to stop people jumping out of the window.'"

On a freezing day, U2 are at a photo shoot on the waterfront by some derelict warehouses, the Manhattan skyline behind them. In their trailer, the Edge and Bono arrive at the coffee machine at the same time and try to cooperate, with disastrous consequences. Coffee is spilled. "You can tell we're in a band together," the Edge mutters.

During a break, outside, Adam wanders over. He reminisces about his earliest exposure to rock music, overhearing the older boys at boarding school play their records. Elton John, for instance. "I remember being transformed, as a teenager, by the . . . Yellow Brick Road record," he says. "I started to take an interest in choosing my own underwear. I wouldn't let my mum buy it anymore." Another key album was Creedence Clearwater Revival's Cosmo's Factory. "I thought it was all about freedom, and blue jeans, and herbs, and Californian women," he says. He is quiet for a moment. "Cowboy boots as well," he adds. "A lot of cowboy boots."

They step back out of the cold, photos finished. "It's hard work, saving rock," says the Edge, deadpan. He seems slightly concerned that I'll think he's serious; the saving, or rebirth, of rock is a notion that is being connected with U2's name on a regular basis at the moment. But he does say, "I think this album is going to make a difference. Like any good album, it changes the temperature." We talk about Radiohead's Kid A. "It seems to me Radiohead ducked a certain expectation," says the Edge. "I love what they're doing, and I'm willing to forgive any of their indulgence in making this last record, because I'm into it. But it is a shame that they're not either able to or prepared to try and appeal to a wider audience. I'd love to see them at Number One in America in the singles charts." Later, Larry will talk about how both Radiohead and Pearl Jam seem to have sidestepped the big fight to be part of pop music. U2 would like their company. "We don't want to be the only band out here doing this kind of thing," he says. "I mean, there's a beautiful voice, Thom Yorke's voice," says Bono. "I just want to hear it on the radio. I want rock to chase pop down the road, but I understand that some people couldn't be bothered. I really do understand that."

By Chris Heath
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