The most intimate and appreciative biography of  the mega rock band U2 to date--by the author to  whom the band gave complete access.  

When U2 took the stage for their three-year Zoo TV  world tour in 1991, Bill Flanagan was there--in  the bus, on the plane, in the recording studio and  well after hours with the biggest rock band in the  world. A tour that began to support the hugely  successful Achtung Baby record and ended with a  second, even more successful record, Zooropa, took U2  to the far reaches of the world, playing to over a  hundred sold-out arenas in over forty  cities.

U2 At The End Of The World  takes you on the world tour and drops you off at  the cultural intersection where rock stars meet  politicians; where writers, directors, and models all  wind up backstage with U2. You're there when the  band meets Bill Clinton in a Chicago hotel room;  when Salman Rushdie comes out of hiding to join the  band onstage at Wembley Arena in London; when  Frank Sinatra and Bono record their famous duet,  "I've Got You Under My Skin." And finally,  when the band performs their last Zoo TV concert in  Tokyo in 1993 and nearly collapses from physical  and mental exhaustion, you are there with them  waiting for the end of the world. Augmented with  sleek photos by renowned photographer Anton Corbijn,  U2 At The End Of The World is the  most definitive book on the band to  date.

"Rarely has a rock biography been as insightful or as much fun. It reads like a James Joyce-meets-Hunter Thompson novel. It's the literary equivalent of the Zoo TV tour--a brash, ambitious marathon with a momentum all its own."--Boston Globe

Bill Flanagan is the author of Written in My Soul, a collection of conversations with songwriters, and U2 at the End of the World. He is Senior Vice President and Editorial Director of VH1. Flanagan has written for Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, GQ, Esquire, Spy, and many other publications. He lives in New York City with his wife and three children.

I Brezhnev's Bed
 
BONO WAKES up in Brezhnev's bed. He can't remember where he is. When he opens his eyes the daylight shocks his dilated brain. He tries to organize his thoughts. He is in Brezhnev's bed, in East Berlin, in the communist diplomatic guest house rented to him for a good price because the communist diplomats have fled the country. In fact, the country has fled after them. He may have gone to bed in a Soviet satellite state, but he's waking in a reunited Germany. The Cold War is over! The Wall has fallen! It's safe for Bono to go back to sleep.
 
He thought he heard somebody downstairs, but he must have been dreaming. He is here alone, Bono pulls himself upright, his latitude out of whack from last night's celebrating, U2 arrived in Berlin yesterday, to seek inspiration and renewal at the celebration of the end of the world they grew up in. The Berlin Wall was raised as the four members of U2 were being born. Seeing it come down shook their assumptions about the way things were and would always be. Bono told the Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen that this was the great moment to leap into. Now was the time to go to Berlin and begin making music for the new world! They arrived on the last flight into East Germany before East Germany ceased to exist. They had the whole sky to themselves. The British pilot was so giddy with historical moment that he announced they would buzz Berlin, fly down the Strasse des Juni where the revelers were gathering, and swing over the broken wall on which the free people of eastern Europe were dancing. O n your left you see the Brandenburg Gate," the pilot announced with pip-pip and tally-ho delight as he swung his airship around. Why not? They were the only plane in the sky, the final flight to East Berlin before East Berlin was sucked into history.
 
As soon as they got their feet on the ground, U2 rushed to join the festivities. They leaped into the first parade they saw and waited for the contact high of liberation to intoxicate them. It was a long wait. These marchers were grim, dragging themselves along wearing dour faces and holding placards. Bono tried to muster some good Irish parading gusto, to no avail. He whispered to Adam, "These Germans really don't know how to party/' Maybe, U2 thought, weVe misjudged the sentiment here. Maybe the proper reaction to the end of a half-century of oppression is not celebration for what is newly won but grief for all that can never be regained. U2 looked at each other and looked at the bitter marchers and tried to fit in as they tramped along to the Wall. It was only when they got there and saw the joy everyone else was exhibiting compared with the morbidity of their company that U2 realized they were marching in an antiunification demonstration. They had hooked up with a phalanx of angry old communists, gathering one last time to show solidarity with the workers of the world and protest the fall of their Evil Empire. Ό h , this will make a great headline/' Bono said. "U2 ARRIVES IN WEST BERLIN TO PROTEST THE PULLING DOWN OF THE WALL/'
 
In the West U2 wandered familiar streets filled with people walking as if through their dreams. The citizens of the East—not just East Germany but the newly freed Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia— were still anxious, afraid that this was only a brief opening, a momentary aberration, and that if they did not find refuge quickly they would be dragged back when the communists regained their senses. For almost thirty years West Berlin had been held up to the East as a sort of capitalist Disneyland, shining with unattainable promise just over the barbed wire and gun towers. It was not just a symbol of freedom, it was the closest thing the oppressed peoples had to Oz. Their belief in its magic was not stifled by their own leaders warning them to pay no attention to that world behind the iron curtain. But in the year since people from the East began moving West, first as a trickle through Hungary and Czechoslovakia and then in a flood right through the falling Wall, the free people of West Germany have become a little less tickled with the family reunion. As Easterners looked to share in the prosperity of the west, the Westerners began to fear being saddled with the poverty of the East. Great to see you, Cousin, seems to be the prevailing sentiment. When are you leaving
 
Now that U2 could walk back and forth from the East to the West, they realized that the sense of West Berlin as illuminated was not an illusion. The lights were literally brighter. The streetlamps of the East were dull, dirty yellow. The streetlights of the West were golden and white, and of higher wattage. The West had better generators. Bono was especially struck by the glow of ultraviolet lights in the windows of Eastern buildings so crowded together that little sunlight got through. Bono had associated the purple glow of UV lighting with nightclubs and raves, but to the East Germans it represented an attempt to grow flowers in the shadows.
 
By the sides of the streets in the West were the abandoned, burnedout carcasses of Trabants, the comically cheap automobiles manufactured in East Germany. Refugees had driven the Trabants as far as they'd go, and then left them where they died to continue their migrations on foot. Big trucks full of East German currency were rolling up to West Berlin banks to exchange bales of useless money for deutsche marks to pay the soldiers of the disintegrating communist army. The spirit of Berlin felt less rapturous, more mundane, than U2 had thought it would. They passed the one subway terminal where heavily patrolled trains had been allowed to move from East to West, and where East Germans trying to sneak aboard had been killed. They took note of its name: Zoo Station.
 
At 7 in the morning exhaustion dropped on their history-happy heads and U2 were led to the accommodations Dennis Sheehan, their road manager, had arranged. For Bono it was this private house where Soviet officials had lodged, and the special comfort of Brezhnev's bed.
 
So this morning Bono, full of emotion and alcohol, should be sleeping like Lenin but something has awakened him. He crawls out of bed hoping for a glass of water and, in his hungover state, wanders down into the basement. While standing there, naked from the waist down, dressed only in a dirty T-shirt, he thinks he hears low voices and the rattling of doorknobs. Someone is trying to get into the house. He creeps up the stairs and sees that the intruders are inside already! Bono is suddenly aware, like Adam in the Garden, that he has no pants on and his cock is hanging out. As the intruders enter the hallway where Bono is crouching he tries to cover his nuts with one hand while with the other waving and in his hoarse voice declaring, "This is my house! You do not belong here!"
 
Bono is unprepared for the response he gets from the ringleader, an elderly German man, who shouts back, "This is not your house! This is my house! You get out!" Bono, bent over with his balls in his hand, surveys the gang of home invaders, a middle-aged to elderly family of six filing in cautiously behind the firm father, who seems prepared to jump on Bono and wrestle him to the floor, Bono is disoriented. He feels like a kid caught trespassing by his elders, not a wealthy international figure whose accommodations have been intruded upon. "This is my house!" the old man repeats. And as Bono stumbles to try to find his German and sort out the confusion, it becomes apparent that the old walrus is not misdirected. This is their house. They were visiting the western side of town in 1961 when the Wall went up. Now they are home, and they want their house back.
 
And so it comes to pass that Bono and the rest of U2 end up checking into a particularly ugly East Berlin hotel (no rooms in the West!) while bellhops disconnect the KGB security cameras and unscrew the bedposts to check for Stasi bugs. There are prostitutes in the lobby trying to organize some currency exchanges. Bono knows well the unspoken meaning of the doleful looks he gets from Adam, Edge, and Larry. He's been getting them since they started their schoolboy band fourteen years ago. The looks say, "Another of your great ideas, Bono, another inspiration."
 
It is the autumn of 1990 and U2 has spent the year out of the public eye. Playing an emotional concert at home in Dublin on the last night of the 1980s, Bono told the audience, "We won't see you for a while, we have to go away and dream it all up again." It was widely speculated in the press that this meant U2 was breaking up. In fact it just meant that the band knew that the musical line they had been following had run out of track. On tour in Australia in the autumn of '89 Larry had told Bono that if this is what it meant for U2 to be superstars, he didn't like it. They were turning into the world's most expensive jukebox. They became so bored playing U2's greatest hits that one night they went out and played the whole set backward—and it didn't seem to make any difference.