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My only real brush with the band was in the spring of 1985, when they were a mere eight years old and desperately striving to outgrow the callow anthemics ("I Will Follow," "Gloria," "New Year's Day," "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" et seq.) of their first four albums. I was there and I did witness first-hand the power and the glory, the angelic majesty of U2 as canny manager Paul McGuinness plotted their charm-offensive assault on the USA. This was my report for NME.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

It is some way into a U2 set at the vast Veterans' Coliseum in Hartford, Connecticut, and the place is strewn and bedecked with the flags and banners which have become a permanent feature of the U2 experience. Some say, simply, WE WELCOME U2; others make token reference to Martin Luther King, the Civil rights leader whose assassination has inspired two songs on The Unforgettable Fire. One group of girls has woven a giant tapestry proclaiming that SNOW IS THE ULTIMATE IMAGE OF SERENITY.

The world in white is on its way...

Inevitably the moment arrives when one of these flags finds its way onto the stage, when dear Bono, wearing that glazed Calvary expression only he can produce, drapes himself in it and wades about in the haze of his own aura. A sweetly prophetic look has come into his face, and all eyes are focused on the hugely meaningful point he is about to make.

"Amazing grace," he moans, "how sweet the sound..."

It is poignant with just enough of a theatrical touch, but it isn't quite enough. Suddenly, impetuously, Bono hurls the flag into the audience, whereupon...

Well, what would you do if your very own personal Messiah had just wrapped himself in a flag and then proceeded to toss it at you? Would you do it the Bono way, be all serene and let somebody else have it, or would you pile in and grab that m*****f***ing flag?

It's too perfect: people fighting over a peace flag, man. I mean, there are echoes of Altamont here, dammit: a peace flag and five security goons dive in to stamp out the commotion!

Bono can't really see what's going on from the lofty peak of the stage, but he's aware enough of the scuffle to capitalise on it. "There's been too much foitin' over flags," he observes in a lordly tone. "If yer wanna foit, you've come to the wrong concert." This sets him musing. "Maybe won day we'll all just share the same flag..."

Unfortunately his words make scant impression on the security heavies who, if anything, bash away at their hapless targets with even greater enthusiasm. Eventually the flare-up cools and the show proceeds. Bono has gotten away with it. But it's an incident that says a lot about U2 and their audience and the possible futility of singing in the name of Love.

A couple of days later and we find ourselves in Philadelphia. All things considered I would rather not be in Philadelphia, since a freak heatwave is sapping my already jetlagged stamina, but the City of Brotherly Love is where I'm sitting asking David Evans, The Edge, about the flag incident.

"Bono'd probably deny it," he says in an eminently calm and sober voice, "but my theory is that he threw the flag into the audience knowing they'd fight over it. He wanted to make a point." He shoots me a wry smile. "I've learned about Bono recently. I used to get a little worried about his stage performances...there was something that used to disturb me slightly, and I could never figure it out. I also noticed that whenever he told a story he never stuck to the facts, he'd always embroider and jazz it up until it was a great story. The essence of what he was saying was still true, but the actual facts were...very different!

"And this used to bother me, but I've just realized that the facts aren't that important, it's whether it's a good story or not that's important. And now I've applied that to what he's like onstage and I feel a little more happy. In some sort of intuitive way, not in a cynical way, he's very aware of performance and whether it's powerful and effective. He's not really worried about justifying it, it's always heartfelt, but he will always intuitively go for the thing that works."

The thing that works: is this what so upsets pop's cognoscenti about U2? Is it this notion that, underneath, the boy Bono is no less cynical a manipulator of the mass herd than any of megarock's other prime culprits? Or is it the mere fact that anyone should try to turn this addled rock machine to good and generous and positive ends that we deem so distasteful?

I suspect the former protest is really a cover for the latter. I suspect that we are, as an in-crowd critical establishment, so jaded and confused and dispirited by our popular music culture that the only thing we feel safe going is carping at those who would bring a little beauty into the world. And if we can disguise our fear of beauty with the standard hip-crit contempt for U2's American audience, for the great suburban shopping-mall tribes and sweatshirt rednecks who reckon the band REALLY KICK A**, if we can pretend that U2 are Led Zeppelin retrouvé and that "Sunday Bloody Sunday" is this generation's "Stairway To Heaven," well, so much the better.

This writer won't buy it. He's taken more than a couple of potshots at the band in his time but is an older and wiser creature today. To the extent that he can take this rock 'n' roll business seriously anymore--or convince himself that writing about it is any more worthwhile than writing about golf or gardening--he knows that U2 do for him the most that any pop music can do, which is to fill the head with glorious noise and CELEBRATE LIFE NOW. For "I Will Follow," "Gloria," "New Year's Day," and "Pride," perhaps the four most ingenuously uplifting anthems in the history of pop, he takes U2 "seriously."

An hour after a brilliantly tense show at Philly's Spectrum, Bono is somewhere at the centre of a swarm of fans outside his hotel. After he's had words with almost all of them, we meet in the hotel restaurant, and I am straightway struck by his honest-to-goodness patience and politeness. He is so concerned to put everyone at ease and not act the bigshot that he almost overdoes it.

We repair to a corner table and I put to him The Edge's suspicions over the flag incident in Hartford. A meek look steals over his face. "He's actually right," he half-laughs. "I knew when I threw it in what would happen, but I felt that I had to throw it in, because I just sensed something from that section of the audience...something. I just threw it in, watched it, and then made the point. I mean, I...normally I wouldn't own up to this type of thing, because it sounds so manipulative, but I just think you can make points like that...these are just things that I..."

This often happens in Bono's conversation. It's as if he's so caught up in the process of explaining himself that his train of thought runs away with itself. "One day,"he announced from the Spectrum stage tonight, "I'm gonna get moch better at tellin' you about our songs and the way we're feelin'."

A lot of his talk is about precisely this inarticulateness. "I warn you, I am completely unable to explain myself at times...even to string three words together can be hard, and this is very tragic if people think you supposedly have the gift of the gab. These days, I feel like I've got less and less to say. Something...something's happened that's kind of changed my point of view, which is that I've really got interested in this idea of the song. It's like, out of the air, with a guitar or piano and three or four chords, you just say all you have to say, and it's incredible, because this goes on the radio all over the world, and people in traffic jams hear this song and...it's just something that never dawned on me before. One of the things people forget about our audience is that they know our songs from the radio, and the music has become a part of their lives. When they hear those songs, their own selves are caught up in them, and they are in some way applauding that connection."

The Edge is a trifle more down-to-earth, ever the foil to Bono's messianic idealism. "Honestly, the whole U2 phenomenon is probably going to amount to little real change. I think we're quite sanguine about that. But that's not the only reason we would be doing this, we're doing it because it's worth doing and because we think it's the right thing to do. I suppose we could put in our liner-notes: please do not mistake Bono for God. Perhaps you have to accept it as an inherent flaw. At some stage we came to the conclusion that really there's no way you can be responsible for how people interpret what you're doing. You know what you're trying to do, what you mean when you're putting your songs together, but beyond that you have absolutely no control, and something you have no control over you can't worry about."

How do your American fans think of you?

"Um, I think because we're still a bit of a cult group--this is the enigma of our situation, that we're not a mainstream act, we don't get that much radio play on the big stations--there is, I suppose, a certain underground value to being into U2, something a little more exclusive."

You attract all kinds, through--teenyboppers, headbangers. I saw REM and Hüsker Dü T-shirts in Hartford.

"We seem to have reinvented the touring strategy for breaking a band, which no-one else did for a long time. Our album sales have never reflected our live business. We don't sell as many records as you might expect. The diversity you see at our shows is purely that these people have heard about the shows through friends. At the same time, what we're doing must have some sort of universal appeal. It's not a hybrid thing, it's not designed for people who know all about the Velvet Underground."

For "people who know all about the Velvet Underground," read critics? Perhaps. Or maybe just the whole cooler-than-thou school, for whom liking U2 is too square, too obvious. (Aren't U2 the token rock outing for the ten-albums-a-year set, the naffies who buy Sade and Alison Moyet, Paul Young and Tina Turner?)

Bono says that for the first time he knows he is free of garageland. "There's a spell that's gonna have to be broken, in London, in New York, in the music business. I don't know how it's gonna be broken, but I just sense that a lot of people are crippled emotionally, y'know, withered...I think there's a lot of music that so wants to be made, but it's so frightened and scared. When Eno came to us for The Unforgettable Fire, he talked to us about "rock 'n 'roll with a wink"--how rock had become a parody of itself, how it was only acceptable with a wink. It's white music that's the problem, it's white music that is the straitjacket. White people in their suits and ties--and under their torn shirts they're still wearing them--are afraid to take their trousers off in public. And somebody's got to burst the bubble, not for us because we've burst it ourselves and we've kind of set ourselves free, but for all the people who aren't making the music they could be making because...because somebody winked and their eyes got stuck."

People seem so scared of this grandeur, this big music. (It's all over when your guitar stops sounding scratchy.) Power automatically equals Zeppelin or...

"Or Nuremberg, right? Especially in these giant arenas. And isn't it odd that we're playing better than ever in these we ran away from for so long! I remember our first gig in America, at the Mudd Club in New York, and these people from Premier Talent coming up to us and saying, 'It's gonna be interesting when you guys play Madison Square Garden.' I mean, that was everything we were against, and we were against playing these aircraft hangars right up to the time I went to see Bruce Springsteen at Wembley Arena. Now I enjoy these places. Instead of a backdrop of stained glass windows we've got people. And we are making big music. When we start 'Pride' it floats over the audience, and to confine it would be a lie.

"And yet at the same time we're the antithesis of those big stadium bands. This is not the cycle complete again, this is a garageband that has left garageland. We're the first of that generation of bands, not the Clash and Pistols generation, but the generation that was in their audience..."

...to make it. What's it like being a rock star?

"There are people better qualified to answer that. I think I'm a kind of part-time rock 'n 'roll star. We're probably the worst rock stars ever, we've got all the wrong equipment...these arms are stuck on the wrong way. Part of it with U2 is the falling over and picking ourselves up off the ground, part of it is sitting up late at night in Philadelphia and saying something that will put a noose round my neck. I met Elvis Costello a few months ago and he said to me, 'I'm ambivalent about U2, I love it and I hate it.' He said, 'You walk this tightrope that none of your contemporaries will walk--they're afraid to walk it--and when you stay on it I bow my head. But you fall off it so many times.' He's right. We do fall off, a lot, and onstage I'll try for something and it won't work and...but it might work, and that's the point. It might work."

And so full circle: "the things that work," the rockist circus, the million fists pumping skyward. How long to sing this song? Is that all rock is? Can't we somehow blast through this media edifice of scenes and cults and trends and touch what U2 are straining for?

David Evans, how does love change the world?

"God, that's a heavy question, isn't it? I really don't have any long-term ideas about this. I've a feeling that what happens at a show is that there is a breakdown of some of the more negative, insular feelings and inhibitions that people have...at least for the duration of the show. The nicest idea is that people might be forming groups after seeing us. One thing we've been doing on this tour is bringing kids up from the audience and teaching them 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door,' just trying to show them there's no mystery to it, that these are the chords and this is the song.

"We might have more of an effect on the music business itself than directly on the lives of our audience. Maybe they'll be less inclined to accept some crappy heavy metal band, less easily satisfied by someone like Ted Nugent. Actually, don't say Ted Nugent, he might come after me with a sawn-off shotgun. And anyway, Ted Nugent is my hero."