Bono should be dead. At 9.01pm last Monday night at the San Diego Sports Arena when he took to the stage in front of thousands of fans the adrenaline rushing through his body - according to medical experts - would have been enough to kill a normal person stone dead, writes Brian Boyd
And he wouldn't have returned from this state of what could be termed "Acute Rock Star Disorder" until hours after the end of the show. No surprise then there was a minor security alert backstage later that night when reports came in that there was a semi-naked man wearing sunglasses and talking in tongues acting suspiciously in the vicinity of U2's dressing room.
It's because of this sort of thing that when the Vertigo tour crawls to a finish in late December, Bono will take himself off to a hotel for a few weeks. It's a sort of five-star decompression chamber treatment which will help him "normal up". Rock stars usually bounce off the walls for a few weeks after a major tour - it's standard behaviour. The "normal up" process is to stop them going straight home and jumping up on the kitchen table at 9pm every night, shouting "Hello Cleveland". It's also to stop them picking up their home telephone and ordering room service, or expecting a round of applause whenever they enter the livingroom. The stretch limo is gone, there isn't a wardrobe assistant in sight and there is no one on "lights" to pick out their every movement. And people might actually say "No" to them - which is the first time they will have heard the word since the beginning of the tour.
Bono's wife, Ali Hewson, has spoken about the post-tour recuperation period. "Bono comes off tour and goes: 'I'm normal', but he's not," she says.
"He wants to climb on the table and perform. Sometimes there are arguments and I have to shout: 'I am not 60,000 people, get off that table.'" It's the rock'n'roll equivalent of the bends. Guitarist The Edge also suffers from this sudden return to normality. "When you come off tour you are certifiable. You spend about two months of cold turkey trying to pick up the threads of your life that you had before you left," he says. "It's hard, because you spend a long time finding normal life very weird. The first few mornings you wake up and reach for the telephone to order room service and you wonder why there is no CNN on the television and then you realise you are in your house. And people say weird things to you - 'Pass the salt' and stuff like that - and at around 9pm you start getting fidgety and then you realise there is no show.
"Strange things happen - we used to use a certain piece of music before we went on stage and then you hear the same music at home and it's like a Pavlovian reaction, you suddenly start crawling the walls." Drummer Larry Mullen Jr talks about a situation at the end of the "Popmart" tour when, after the last show in Japan, he and The Edge, both suffering from immediate post-tour dementia, had decided, and they were serious about it, that they were going to hire a minibus and continue the tour as a duo.
It's not so much the two hours of work (plus encore) that cause the physical and mental disruptions - it's what happens before and after the show that does the damage. In no other line of work do people finish their job only to be handed a bottle of Jack Daniels and be surrounded by people telling then how absolutely, fantastically, wonderfully brilliant their performance has just been. The adoration levels - at every step of the way over a six-month tour - can cause irreparable ego damage. As the joke has it: the reason rock stars wear sunglasses in heaven is in case God recognises them and asks for an autograph.
It's a world where you travel to work in a private jet, dress in leather trousers and get a standing ovation even before you start. If something as mundane as a drop of sweat dares to surface on your forehead, an employee will be there to wipe your brow. If you don't like the colour scheme of your penthouse suite, painters will come and change it for you.
Some have got it down to an art form: there is a household-name female singer who has now managed to dispense with the need to actually ask for a drink while on tour. Her staff are trained to know that if the singer tilts her head slightly to the left, they should approach her with a tray of various drinks, all with straws in them, and place the tray in a direct line with her mouth.
WITH TOUR MANAGERS, personal assistants, assistants to personal assistants and a supporting crew of flunkies and gophers, everything is done for you before you even begin to ask. The levels of dependence this engenders can be hilariously alarming. At the height of his cocaine addiction, Elton John was on tour in New York. Back in his hotel room after the show, it was a stormy night and his windows were rattling. He phoned his management team in London and asked them to do something about the wind.
They call it "the road" - the excess all areas, parallel universe that is touring. In theory, touring is a promotional device for your album. You play the new songs every night in a different city, picking up new fans at every turn. The beauty of touring for bands is that the nasty record company can't get their hands on any of the money you make from concerts the way they do with your album sales. And touring does significantly boost record sales. The current U2 album has now dropped out of the Irish top 10, but come June, when the band return to play Croke Park, it will reappear in the top 10, probably at No 1, in the week after their shows. And this happens in every country they visit on their tour. People go to the shows, get buzzed by the music, and buy the album the next day.
In practice, touring is a bunch of (usually) young men, with a free "sex, drugs and rock'n'roll" pass. "the road" stories are legion. That combustible combination of constant travelling, mass adoration, interviews, reviews, photo shoots, drink, drugs, groupies, etc makes good people turn bad and bad people turn worse. It begins with driving a car into a swimming pool and ends with a rock band, a hotel suite and a freshly caught red snapper fish (you don't want to know the details).
That last incident, which has been well documented over the years, is the proud property of Led Zeppelin. It's one of the reasons, but by no means the only one, that the surviving members of the band are still banned from an international chain of hotels - in perpetuity. Put it this way: the phrase "sudden arrival of a SWAT team" features heavily in the Led Zeppelin/hotel chain stories.
And still "the road" opens up to swallow new touring casualties. Pete Doherty of the best new British band of the last few years, The Libertines, was so regularly drugged-up on tour, the band decided to sack their tour manager "for being too strict" - as in, he would try and get him to wipe the tell-tale white powder from under Doherty's nose before he appeared on a children's TV programme.
YOU SEE THINGS you shouldn't see on tour. Or rather, you see things you wished you had camcorded and then put up for sale on the internet. And you're constantly surprised. Looking at U2 now on stage, you see four long-time friends. They're peaceable chaps - renowned for it throughout the rock world. But not always. Go back to one of their first US tours in the early 1980s. They've been travelling for hours and hours together, cramped up in an overheated van. They arrive to play a show to a disinterested audience. "The road" is getting to them and that night in New Haven, if you had been one of the few in the crowd, you would have witnessed an on-stage fist fight between The Edge and Bono. Something to do with a chord sequence - it happens. Bono learnt a valuable lesson that night, as he recounts: "Do not pick a fight with somebody who makes a living from hand-to-eye co-ordination."
The things you see. Thethings you hear. The people you see smiling and singing on Top of the Pops and the things you know about them. The guests on Parkinson lying through their teeth and you know because you were in the room one door down.
Little wonder, then, that there is that rock music omertà: "What goes on the road, stays on the road." Anything that remains can be treated with penicillin.