What Makes U2 Run?

U2 / Photograph by Takay

If complacency has been the undoing of so many other artists, U2 have used their own triumphs as motivation -- Bono's ever-increasing profile as statesman, activist, captain of industry, burgeoning Broadway-show tunesmith, op-ed columnist, and healer of the blind is as effective a dangling carrot as any commercial or critical benchmark. "The more successful various members become outside of U2, the higher the stakes," Mullen says. "It's important to me that my legacy not be as a great humanitarian."

Bono is characteristically confident that Horizon feels like a challenge met: "Bruce Springsteen told us, 'The hardest thing to do is surprise people.' The album doesn't sound like U2; it doesn't sound like anyone else. Surely that's evidence of life."

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In 2006, U2's collective halo was tarnished when the band moved their publishing company to the Netherlands, thus avoiding a tax hike. But Ireland can't hold a grudge against its favorite sons, even during an economic crisis.

"People complained at the time," says Owen Durgan of the Ministry of Finance. "But we have companies moving here from the rest of the EU, so it all evens out. We wouldn't make an issue of it."

Thanks to rampant real estate development that revitalized the city starting in the '90s, Dublin has been something of a canary in a coal mine with regard to the global financial meltdown -- the credit crunch hit here early and hard. A project along Hanover Quay would have forced U2 to leave their longtime home, while plans were made for a gleaming, 400-foot-tall U2 Tower that would have provided swanky replacement digs; both projects have been delayed indefinitely.

It is very much in U2's nature to view the crisis as another opportunity to establish themselves as vital, to remain the people's champs. Where their last two tours were arena affairs engineered to reconnect the band with their audience and, to a certain degree, with each other, this summer's in-the-round stadium outing will attempt to transpose that intimacy into a more affordable setting, without skimping on the LEDs. Bassist Adam Clayton, 49, who in his fitted shirt and slacks more closely resembles an art dealer than the band's resident ex-hellion, sees music's relationship to outside economic forces as a constantly mutating cycle.

"Think about the big bands, the big orchestras that used to tour," he says. "Then the stock market crash came and they slimmed down to quartets, because that was cheaper."

Initially, U2's interest in business was a matter of self-preservation. "I always want to know the forces that are going to fuck with me," Bono says. "I didn't want to be someone who was given a little label to run. I wanted to be sitting at the table deciding the fate of my and other musicians' lives." Since then, it's become an increasingly personal and politically driven pursuit for him; he teamed up with Grateful Dead advisor and entrepreneur Roger McNamee to form the venture-capital firm Elevation Partners. Bono bristles against the notion that he's less audacious or credible an artist just because he has a rooting financial interest in, say, the new Palm Pre phone. To his mind, his musical and nonmusical ventures are part of the same body of work, and audiences have grown to understand that.