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More Bono bashing (never enough IMO)
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IanB
IanB
6761 posts

Edited Oct 12, 2010, 16:19
Re: More Bono bashing (never enough IMO)
Oct 12, 2010, 16:01
drewbhoy wrote:
IanB wrote:
keith a wrote:
I can only think you're taking the piss, Sanshees. I've said what I didn't understand. I copied and pasted it and put it in inverted comma's lest there be any misunderstanding. However...there clearly was!

It really doesn't matter. And what you do with your money is your concern. Differing sources say he has helped between two and four million people. They're huge numbers but that's not the point. If he's helped one person that he didn't have when he could have been getting off his tits like many other musicians we like, then I take my hat off to him.


Me too.

Anyone who doesn't think rock n roll is a competetive sport at anything above semi-pro level doesn't know rock n roll. Charity is the same way. Some of the most gifted and driven business people I have met have been in the charitable sector and they get off on the big numbers as much as anyone with a string of number one records. Point being that the instinct that makes Bono the biggest star of his generation is the same instinct that makes it possible for him to make 2m lives a bit less horrible.

As an aside people forget how neck-and-neck it was between U2, Simple Minds and the Bunnymen for world domination in the early 80s. Up to Joshua Tree it could have gone either way but Bono worked harder than his competitors, they had the best manager, the best plan, the most unversally appealing record when it mattered and no snobbery whatsoever about laying out their stall for the parts of the US between the coasts. If Simple Minds had released a decent studio album in 87 or the Bunnymen's eponymous album had sounded anywhere near as good on the radio as the Joshua Tree then we might not even be having this conversation.


Simple Minds didn't try to be the world's biggest band and more accurately they didn't want to be. (best band in the world, maybe) What they did want to be was a vehicle to highlight various campaigns as in South Africa, Amnesty, peace in Northern Ireland etc etc. Street Fighting Years is the album you refer to.


I had lost interest in all three bands by 1987 but I don't think SFY came out until long after Joshua Tree. I loved Simple Minds until they started making records that sounded like they were built to reach the back row of a hockey arena in the mid west somewhere. The songs were still there but the production was fairly horrible to my ears.
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