The Frontman

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Harry Browne. The Frontman

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About the Author

HARRY BROWNE is a lecturer in the School of Creative Arts and Media at Dublin Institute of Technology. His journalism has appeared in CounterPunch, the Dublin Review and many Irish newspapers. Born in Italy and raised in the United States, he has lived in Ireland since the mid-1980s. His previous book is Hammered by the Irish: How the Pitstop Ploughshares Disabled a US War-Plane – With Ireland’s Blessing.

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It was striking that Bono made his watery political declaration sound such a false and borrowed note. But he had more to say. In an extraordinary bout of self-pity, he turned part of the long and winding final section of ‘Bad’ into an apparent tribute to himself. Singing over the repeating guitar figure to the tune of Elton John’s terrible, maudlin song about Marilyn Monroe, ‘Candle in the Wind’, Bono achingly intoned: ‘You have the grace to hold yourself, while those around you crawl. They crawl out of the woodwork, on to pages of cheap Dublin magazines. I have the grace to hold myself. I refuse to crawl.’44

Refuse to crawl he might, but even today the effect of viewing this outburst via YouTube may make the viewer’s skin crawl. It was clear that the attack on ‘cheap Dublin magazines’ was aimed at McCann and Waters, but to whom on earth was he directing his refusal to crawl? Was he really just declaring himself satisfied with his display of courage in belittling his critics? And this grace – then as now among his favourite words – did it come direct from God? U2 biographer Eamon Dunphy, critical by the standards of Dublin journalists but still inclined to cut Bono slack on this incident, wrote that it showed that ‘Dublin still got to them’ – that their hometown’s mode of badmouthing had a knack for getting under their skin – but also that, ‘this being Dublin’, Bono and McCann had chatted and cleared up any ‘misunderstandings’ at a party after the gig.45 What could hardly be misunderstood was that this young man had a disproportionate sense of his own righteousness.

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