Bono, surgery, and other forms of showbiz
U2 at a new stage: the operating theatre
I was knifed last week in north Kent.
One minute I was joking with a friendly stranger; the next, I was out for the count. There’s at least an hour of which I have no recollection.
With clinical coldness the official report of the incident reads ‘minimal blood loss’.
Two things in mitigation:
The person wielding the knife was a qualified surgeon, and
The friendly stranger, a young woman called Sapna, was one of three anaethesthetists
It counts as major surgery, but it’s also relatively routine – a ‘hernia repair with mesh’. That said, I know I was a medical priority because I got the first slot – or slit? – of the day: 8.00am.
Famous last words?
I must have been relaxed before I went under because, after confirming my name and other details with Sapna, who had the sunniest of smiles, I said, ‘Aren’t you going to ask me about my career in showbiz?’
At which point one of her male colleagues, whose name I forget, but whose delightfully psychedelic bandana I’ll always remember, asked me if I could get him a job in the industry.
There wasn’t time to find out exactly which branch of the biz he wanted to be in. I want to believe I came back, quick as a flash, with ‘You’re already in theatre, darling.’
But that’s where it all goes a bit hazy.
Sapna gave me the face mask and encouraged me to breathe deeply. She also asked me to tell her about my favourite time in the business.
But if you’ve ever tried to talk with a face mask on – something more solid than the average anti-Covid mask, mind – while you’re being infused with mind-altering substances, you’ll know it’s not straightforward.
Something told me that presenting the breakfast show on BBC Radio Shropshire was not necessarily the high point of my entire existence, but that little voice quickly dwindled into unconsciousness.
I’d long since signed the consent form which, in the worst case, implicitly warned me those deep breaths could actually be my last. But if Sapna’s smile was the final thing I ever saw that would have been a pleasant full stop to an interesting life.
Bono’s eccentricity
Bono’s memoir, Surrender, begins with the arresting line (pun intentional) ‘I was born with an eccentric heart’, and moves straight into the tale of how ‘the magic that is medicine’ was needed by the singer in New York City in 2016 to correct it.
My excellent neighbour, known as Shrill – a less shrill person I have yet to meet – ran around my flat after my discharge gathering things for my mini convalescence with other friends. Because I couldn’t make the stairs fresh out of hospital, I was guiding her over the phone from my car, which she’d been driving for me, as to which additional books I’d like to have with me.
I already had Charles Dickens’ Hard Times which I’m more than halfway through. I asked her to pick up a work-related book, historian Anthony Beevor’s The Battle for Spain, as I wanted to continue to write my second, Spanish Civil War-related novel, My Nights with George Orwell.
So you can imagine a bit of lighter reading wouldn’t go amiss.
It doesn’t take a psychology major to construct an argument for showbiz and the adulation of the audience to be a proxy for lost parental love.
I suddenly remembered I’d dipped into Bono’s Surrender for an amuse-bouche before getting ill. I steered Shrill to that on the coffee table.
The book is subtitled 40 Songs, One Story. It’s not a conventional beginning-middle-end memoir; instead, like Paul McCartney’s fulsome two-volume The Lyrics – bought for me by my ex-girlfriend Alison or Ali with characteristic generosity – it approaches the songwriter’s life via the songs themselves.
The irony is I can’t now lift The Lyrics without assistance, otherwise I’d get another hernia.
Bono’s tome is less weighty, but then he’s 64 to McCartney’s 82, so hold your breath for Surrender II in 20 years.
If only McCartney had written a song about being 64.
Back when U2 was fab
My U2 journey began, somewhat bizarrely, not with liking their music but catching the infectious passion for them from my musical friends. In my teens, when U2 first hit, I was involved in the evangelical branch of the Christian church – as were and, it seems still are, the band themselves, with the seeming exception of bassist Adam Clayton.
When my church friend Paul played me early U2 single ‘11 O’Clock Tick Tock’ in 1980 off vinyl on his little Dansette-type record player, frankly I was non-plussed. I didn’t like its bare-boned punky production, and the guitarist Edge, aka Dave Evans, played riffs which seemed repetitive and unimaginative, and they fell flat on me.
And what the hell did ‘11 O’Clock Tick Tock’ mean anyway?!
45 years later the answer to that last question is now in chapter eight of Surrender.
I took on Paul’s enthusiasm for the group, and others’ around him, as some kind of mantle – or maybe a comfort blanket. In the book Bono directly links being propelled on to the stage by his mother’s death when he was 14; I had lost my mother two years before at 15.
And, lest we forget, McCartney lost his mum at 14, too, and John Lennon’s mother died when he was 17, although Julia Lennon had already given him up to her sister Mimi’s care when Lennon was a young child.
It doesn’t take a psychology major to make an argument for showbiz and the (hoped-for) adulation of the audience to be a proxy for lost parental love.
U2 and hospitals
There’s something about Bono – real name Paul Hewson – and hospitals and me. While Hewson junior after his mother’s death flew into a rage with his dad Bob Hewson, and then managed to exorcise his demons onstage as a teenager, my anger and grief was ingrowing and drove me literally mad.
Another church friend and U2 worshipper Dave would visit me in my local hospital’s psychiatric unit, where I was recovering in 1983, to tell me how the Dublin quartet were doing. Again his excitement was infectious; ‘Two Hearts Beat As One’ was roaring up the charts, he’d say breathlessly, and they’d been buoyed by appearances on TV when the medium was as powerful as a medieval monarch. U2 performed ‘Two Hearts’ on The Kenny Everett Television Show, which I was later to work on.
But you’re missing a piece of the jigsaw: mates Dave and Paul were on talking terms with the other Dave and Paul and Adam and Larry, aka U2, and would visit them backstage on a number of occasions as their star was rising. And when the duo came to see the quartet at Nottingham’s Rock City in October 1981, while I was at Nottingham University, Dave and Paul – my mates – invited me to come and chat to the band when they were soundchecking in the afternoon.
Guess who politely declined to meet young upstarts U2 so he could do his maths homework?
Perhaps the madness had set in months before I was hospitalised in August ’82!
Lessons learned
They say politics is showbusiness for ugly people (unkind to the many photogenic politicians), but in the early days surgery was showbiz to pioneering people. And the idea went full circle in an excellent West End show I saw about surgeon Dr Semmelweis played by Mark Rylance.
Pretty or not, Bono once suggested Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were the Lennon and McCartney of global development. Those not in their fan club may have thought they were more politics’ answer to Laurel and Hardy.
But I think I may lift McCartney’s The Lyrics heavy twin volume after all.
Because the advantage of getting another hernia is I can say to the surgeon after my next op, ‘That’s another fine mesh you’ve got into me.’
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Further reading:
NHS advice on gut health here
NHS information about hernias here