BY TONY PARIS

“If you want an easy ‘Baby I love you’ tune, you won’t like U2,” lead singer of U2, Bono Vox, explains. “If you think music is important to you, you’ll respond to what we’re saying, to what we’re doing.” It’s three hours before showtime and he’s trying to get in a few words about the band against the constant, “CHECK, CHECK,” booming over the Agora P.A., as well as the screeching from guitarist, The Edge, and rumblings from bass player Adam Clayton. Drummer Larry Mullin is wandering around somewhere.

It’s been a long day for the band, from one record store appearance to the next, with barely a stop to rest in between. As he’s talking, the twenty year-old Bono is eating his first meal of the day - a hamburger and french fries from around the corner. One place the U2 entourage did not visit today was Burkhart-Abrams and Associates, consulting firm for the Superstars Radio Network, a network that has stayed away from programming new music. It’s a place Bono would have very much liked to have visited.

“Radio here is in a bad way,” he says, leading into a discussion of the group’s lack of radio air play in the states. “I’d like to think it’s going to change. If the past becomes present, after a while, it becomes meaningless. Even for the older bands there needs to be new blood to make music exciting. If they (radio) kill off the new blood, radio is going to go out of fashion. Music needs a shot in the arm. But radio has killed off the new rock acts here and record sales, apart from the biggies like Bruce (Springsteen), have declined. Radio has got to give the public a chance to make up their own mind.

“I’ve talked to program directors about it. Basically it’s the whole consumerism thing over here. They (radio stations) depend on the lowest common denominator to get the advertising they need to support the station. They don’t want to upset anybody,” Bono says. He continues, maintaining the way radio does not upset listeners is to play simple, depth-less music like the Knack. “(Music like the Knack) just wears off. A song is like a person. It takes a while to get to know a person. It takes a while to get to know U2. What’s scaring radio people from playing (U2) is the fact that it is not a tra-la-la-la-la record.”

According to Bono, U2 is nothing more that rock and roll; real, sweating music like the Beatles and the Stones. Unfortunately, he sees the British punk rock movement as having left a bad taste in America’s mouth, even though it never really surfaced over here. “Punk rock was five years ago. New wave is a ridiculous term. U2 is not a part of it.” Equally ridiculous is even bringing up those terms, but they represent the obstacles the band faces. He equates the terms with fads as well. “We don’t want to be put in with everyone else. We don’t want to be in fashion because that implies going out of fashion.”

While Bono sees a reason for the obstacles his band and others face with commercial radio, he still has questions. “I would like to talk with Mr. Lee Abrams. I would like to talk to these people. I won’t attack them, I’ll just talk to find out. They’re trying to stay afloat financially, I can understand that. But they have to realize if music does not change, it becomes stale, it becomes stagnant and it loses its flavor.

“The sound we were looking tor was a cinema sound, a big-screened textured feel with a big drum and bass sound, yet textured melodic vocals,” he says with an air of confidence of having achieved that. As well, the lyrics are more than just a story, but rather a heavily pictorial insight into feelings and emotions. “Some of the songs take a while to sink in, but they took a while to come out,” the band’s chief lyricist claims. “I was one of those kids who went through a very rough and violent adolescence, asking questions that I couldn’t find answers to. A lot of the emotions I was trying to convey in Boy were very abstract.”

As for whether the LP has a theme to it, it does only because it’s about things that concerned him at that time. “Just looking at it I saw linking images and I said, ‘Yeah, there is a theme, it’s the way I feel and a lot of other people feel.’ It’s an album full of questions - very positive, not depressing. I’m celebrating those emotions.”

Through his lyrics it is obvious Bono is more interested in the politics of the individual rather than on the national level, yet since the band has been touring, a wider awareness has grown. The day of this interview was May 6, one day after IRA activist Bobby Sands succumbed to his hunger strike. How does the son of a Protestant mother and Catholic father view the situation in Ireland?

“The effect it had on me,” says the Dublin native, “was that it didn’t affect me. I realized that and it hurt. I realized that fifty miles up the road there were British soldiers who didn’t want to be there themselves and a community torn in two with ‘be religious’ ignorance and I realized it didn’t affect me. I thought it should. Here were people throwing petrol bombs at each other in the name of God; God wasn’t interested in their cause, ‘cause surely He wouldn’t have anything to do with it.”