Adam Clayton: ‘It is the worst moment of my life, and it’s still difficult to talk about…’
‘Where are you?” Adam Clayton asks over Zoom. “What part of the city?”
tell him I’m southside, around Stillorgan. Ah yes, he says. “I think there used to be gigs at the Merrion Inn many years ago. I remember, on the southside, they were good-paying gigs,” he recalls, adding, “but we never got in there. Too rough around the edges…”
‘We’, of course, is U2, with whom Adam has been bass player for a remarkable 40-plus years now.
But he doesn’t look rough around the edges. Gone is the Adam of the severe buzz cut, the bleach blond, the halo of yellow curls. In fact, I reckon he could walk happily through the streets of Dublin and scarcely be recognised. A mop of snowy hair and a neat silvery beard means he looks, now, far more the intellectual than the rock star.
For my money, he always was the most stylish of the four. And the new look suits him. He looks, sounds, seems, very happy with his lot.
Adam is the oldest member of the band – and often seemed, for all his ‘wild’ years (of which more later), the most level-headed.
In their very early days, he acted as manager, before Paul McGuinness came on the scene. He was the last of the band to be married – after years during which he dated a series of high-profile women, including supermodel Naomi Campbell.
Since 2013, he has been married to Mariana Teixeira de Carvalho, a human rights lawyer turned art gallery director. The couple announced the birth of their daughter, Alba, in 2017, and Adam also has a son from a previous relationship.
The bassist divides his time between London and Dublin, and in recent years has shown a willingness to be involved in artistic projects beyond U2, including working with Sharon Shannon and Maria McKee. As we chat, he mentions the upcoming launch of “a guitar, a bass combo that I developed with Fender”, and judging the design award at “the watch fair in Geneva”.
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Age and wisdom – Adam Clayton now looks more the intellectual than the rock star
We’re here to talk about a new documentary he has been greatly involved in, going out on RTÉ on Thursday, about artist Francis Bacon. It’s an exploration of Bacon’s life – specifically a few months during 1927 he spent in Ireland with a friend, Eric Allden, a former intelligence officer and civil servant, many years older, who Bacon met by chance on the ferry to France.
Allden was immediately struck by Bacon’s looks (“too pretty for a boy”, he writes in his diaries) but also his talent, and his ferocious creative energy.
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At the time, Bacon was essaying furniture design, heavily influenced by the modernism of Eileen Gray. Painting was still years in his future. Or so it has been believed.
In fact, as this documentary makes clear – drawing heavily on Allden’s diaries, which prove far more reliable than Bacon’s own mythologising accounts of his early life – he started painting while in Ireland, specifically at Renvyle in Connemara, with Allden.
The very fact of Bacon’s being here at that time is fascinating. His own story was that he left Ireland aged 16 – thrown out of home by his military father, who caught him dressing up in his mother’s clothes – and never went back.
Allden’s diaries offer clear proof that he did, and call into question other Bacon stories, about the savage cruelty of his father and the total estrangement between them.
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Adam Clayton, U2 with Dr Margarita Cappock in Monaco with Francis Bacon’s ‘Trees by the Sea’, courtesy of MB Art Foundation, © The Estate of Francis Bacon. Picture by John Fay
The documentary is a vital piece of retrospective detective work, beautifully shot, and Clayton is both engaging and confident as presenter and guide. I tell him how much I enjoyed it. “I think it’s really special,” he agrees.
How did it come about?
“It was a case of very fortuitous luck. I had been pitching a few ideas for art documentaries to Netflix, Amazon, Apple, all prior to lockdown. I had gone in that direction, because there are periods of time in my other job where I’m not necessarily needed to be around for a while.”
I love he calls being in U2 ‘my other job’.
“I like to be productive. I like to be doing something, because twiddling my thumbs doesn’t really suit me.
“To cut a long story short, I was open to doing documentaries on arts – and Karen McGrath [documentary maker and founder of Mount Venus productions] just reached out to me.”
Clayton talks enthusiastically about the small crew, the closeness between them, the trust that was established.
The results bear that out. It certainly looks like a labour of love and it brings something truly new to our understanding of Bacon as an artist and a man.
One thing that struck me was the similarities between Bacon’s early life and Adam’s own. Both came from military families – Bacon’s father, Captain Anthony Edward Mortimer Bacon, was a veteran of the Boer War, Adam’s father an RAF pilot.
Both did a lot of moving in their early years – Bacon was born on Baggot Street, moved back and forth between Ireland and the UK many times. Adam, meanwhile, was born in England, the family moved to Nairobi and then to Dublin when he was four.
It was amazing to see these wild men with beards and brown clothing – The Dubliners – making this uproar
He went to Castle Park boarding school at eight, then St Columba’s College at 13, before starting in Mount Temple – where of course he met the friends who would later become his bandmates.
Was he conscious of the similarities? Did they help him make sense of Bacon’s life?
“I think fundamentally, yes. There was a brutalising he obviously experienced in his background – and whilst I wouldn’t say that was in any way similar for me, the culture that produced it was similar, whether it’s through that UK military prism, or a boarding school system I came through. So I understood that.”
There’s a brilliant line from Allden’s diaries in which he gives his impressions of Ireland shortly after arriving here.
He describes it as “a land where English people have been relegated as far as possible to the background”. Remember this was 1929 – as Clayton points out, “seven years after the Civil War, after the War of Independence. It’s really nothing at all.”
Did he feel the same sense of being Other, when he came here?
“I arrived in about 1965 and went to the national school on the Howth Road. Our first digs when we arrived, waiting to find a house, was in the Royal Hotel in Howth.
“I like to say that was where I first met The Dubliners,” he says with a laugh, “because they used to play a residency every weekend. It was amazing to see these wild men with beards and brown clothing making this uproar.”
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U2 at the IRMA Milk Music Awards in the National Concert Hall in 1988. Picture part of the Independent Newspapers Ireland/NLI Collection.
At school, “nobody explained to me that most of the instructions would be issued in Irish. Up to that point, I had never heard Irish. I had heard Swahili, in Kenya, and spoke a wee bit, but this was different. There was lots of ‘Dún an doras’, ‘put your hand up’ – all of that stuff. I think there was a bit of trouser-wetting,” he laughs, “but I survived it.
“In my experience,” he adds, “it wasn’t so much that people were suspicious of me because I was English, it was much more that people were suspicious of me because it implied some kind of different social background.”
The equation, certainly back then, was a simple one: English equals posh.
“Exactly,” he agrees. “It’s a bit of a stereotype, and you have to get over it and you have to get round it – and eventually, if you stay long enough in the pub, people forget.
“I would have to say,” he continues, “that I feel very accepted in Ireland and I think I’m culturally Irish. Maybe being in a significant musical group – that allows many doors to be opened that perhaps wouldn’t…”
I would hope so, I say.
“Yes,” he smiles. “I absolutely identify with Ireland being my home. I absolutely play Irish. I can pass myself off in the UK as a local as well, but I never really feel a local. In the UK, it’s actually more difficult for me to fit in and be accepted.”
He talks eloquently about the remarkable ‘raw power’ of Bacon’s work – that blend of savagery and humanity that is unique to him, and fits it into a personal context that connects the energy of the teenage years and the emergence of punk rock.
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Francis Bacon. Picture by Michael Ward
“I think what happens in those teenage years,” he says, “is that you develop that sense of self – that ‘body-consciousness’, for lack of a better word – and the product of that tends to be an extreme loneliness that you try and fill, as you try and find your place in the world.
“For me, I was in this very odd situation – where my parents, because they didn’t fully understand the Irish educational system, had placed me in a boarding school environment that was their version of: ‘We’re doing the best for you, this will give you the best chance in life.’
“Really what happened was I felt very uncomfortable in that environment of privilege, and I kind of reacted against it.
“It didn’t feel like it represented me, because I was – on a good day – a middle-class kid from the suburbs of Dublin. I wasn’t part of any establishment. I wasn’t part of any professional community, which is what the other children would have been. So I very quickly detected a distancing from those people, and a dislike for all that they represented.
“And I think that was why, when punk came along, for me it was: ‘Oh my goodness, I fit into this! There is no history, and you can invent yourself, you can invent your own history, and you have a chance to do whatever you want.’
“That was exciting,” he continues. “And because nobody knew what was going to happen with punk, if it was still going to be around a year later. We thought: ‘Maybe we’ll get a single out, maybe we’ll get an album out, and then you know, we’ll end up having to go and do something else…’
“So to bring this back to Francis Bacon, not only did he have this lifestyle where he was part of the English ascendency in Ireland just after Independence and the Civil War, he was also homosexual as well. Which was something he must have been figuring out at that time.
“If ever there was something that was bound to have produced extreme melancholy and loneliness…”
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Adam Clayton in his blond ambition phase with U2
We talk about the artist’s life – artists, he points out in the documentary, “invented rock ‘n’ roll before the musicians ever got there” – and come round to the possibility of a U2 tour next year. What does he think, when he contemplates the idea now?
“I think one always has a degree of anxiety as to whether you can do it again. There is that questioning. But it does come back. It is a little bit like riding a bicycle. And I’m grateful that it does come back.”
What if – if the stories of Larry Mullen’s injuries are founded – that tour were to happen without one band member?
“It’s very hard to face,” he says. “If it were something we had to face, I imagine you would do what needs to be done, but it wouldn’t be a decision we would take easily or comfortably. But I don’t think that’s the decision we’re facing at the moment.
“I think Larry has some significant injuries from a repetitive motion – something that drummers are susceptible to, and sportspeople – so I think he wants to mind himself and take some advice and find out what’s the best thing to do.”
The day after our conversation, Clayton flew out to Washington where U2 received the Kennedy Center Honours, along with George Clooney and Gladys Knight. What does he feel about that, I ask? Is it still something wonderful, or have the many years of success and accolades dimmed the excitement?
“I have to admit that really, the great thing about the longer you’re around in this business, is you seem to develop more gratitude,” he says. “It becomes more precious, these moments. Because you really do understand how rare one’s situation is.
“I mean, we’ve been around for 40 years, and in those 40 years we’ve hit a few different marks – and when you look back at them you go: ‘Gosh, that was a significant moment.’ Things like, we may be the only non-American band that played at a presidential inauguration.
“When Obama asked us to do that, that was a humbling moment, because it actually connected with what we had been doing in our song-writing, when we’d written the song about Martin Luther King.
“And when we wrote that song, I don’t think we fully grasped that there would be an American president who was an African-American in our time. And what a great president he was.”
Then he corrects himself thoughtfully, “certainly a great presidential candidate”.
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Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen Jr., The Edge, and Bono pose for a group photo at the US State Department following the Kennedy Center Honors gala dinner on Saturday, December 3 in Washington. Picture by Kevin Wolf/AP Photo
America, he says, is where the band have always looked.
“The Irish sensibility was always that Irish culture looked to America,” he says. “Instead of RTÉ getting programming from the BBC when it went on air, American programmes were brought in – cowboy shows and the like. So the American Dream of the 1950s was actually an Irish dream.
“By going to America, we felt we would be more accessible and more accepted than if we went to the UK, where it was hard to get lodgings, and certainly hard to get decent work.”
Meaning there was still a lot of anti-Irish sentiment in the UK in U2’s early days?
“If you think back to the 1950s and 1960s – ‘no blacks, Irish, dogs’ – I think that gives you a little bit of a clue.”
So did the band get him to make the phone calls, I ask? Offering the reassurance of a more familiar accent?
“Fortunately I wasn’t booking gigs or being manager at that time,” he says with a laugh. “Our very good friend Paul McGuinness was in the seat at that point.”
He moves on to the energy of the 1970s, the brusque wind of change that blew through stale prejudices.
“That was the whole point of the social change of the 1970s,” he says. “That was a great time for feminism and a great time for women – being able to stand up and say we’re not going to dress like secretaries and be beholden to men.”
Does he miss that energy? That sense of possibility? Or does he see it still?
“I think it is still there. I think society has been changing. I certainly think Ireland has changed incredibly in the last 50 years. It is unrecognisable to the country we grew up in as teenagers. And I’m very proud of that. That has travelled all over the world, and it’s great to see.
“There is this concept of gender fluidity, which may not necessarily be very clear or obvious to people of my generation – but I certainly encourage it and think it’s wonderful that people don’t really have to make these sorts of decisions in a categorical way. They can see how their life changes and develops.”
But back to the Kennedy Center.
“Those sorts of things,” he says, “you do pinch yourself. I think it’s the highest award the US nation can give an artist.
I don’t know what the comparison would be here – maybe the Freedom of the City of Dublin?”
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Adam Clayton and Bono. Picture by Stefano Rellandini
Which, I remind him, his band has.
“Which we have,” he agrees. “And I don’t know, in the UK, maybe it’s one of those ‘initially’ things they give you – OBEs or whatever.
“But either way, to be honoured and rewarded for 40 years of work is real recognition, and we are incredibly proud of that, and I take it very, very seriously.”
It must be nice, I say, to have swapped out the striving of the early years for an acknowledgment of the wonder of it all.
“When you’re younger and when you are, as you say, striving, you don’t look at it in that way – but certainly when you can see a point that’s getting bigger ahead of you somewhere, you kind of go: ‘Well, this is something unique.’
“We came from the suburbs of Dublin – two ostensibly English and two ostensibly Irish, which was symbolic and a metaphor for this nation – and we didn’t take no for an answer. We said: ‘We want to be the biggest band on the northside of Dublin, we want to be the biggest band in Dublin, we want to be the biggest band in Ireland…’ and it kind of went from there.”
What was the magic formula?
“The simple answer is, the reason we succeeded is that we stuck together. We could see very clearly that our destiny was best served by sticking together and being together, and that served us well.”
I’m doubly grateful that when Bono talks about it in his book, it’s with huge compassion and sensitivity
There is a story in Bono’s book, Surrender, about Clayton missing the taping of a TV show after being found unconscious in his hotel room, having “overshot” with drink and drugs. Did he mind that being included, I ask?
“This is a moment of gratitude for me,” he says, “because that would have broken up many bands. It would have totally destroyed the trust and the faith, and I’m extremely lucky that my colleagues, and friends, and collaborators, recognised the extent of my difficulties and problems and they supported me.
“They did what they had to do, which was, they performed the gig. I really…” he pauses for a moment, then continues, “it is the worst moment in my life and it’s actually still quite difficult to talk about, so I’m doubly grateful that when Bono talks about it in his book, it’s with huge compassion and sensitivity.
“It could have taken everything from my life that I loved and fought for and worked for, and I’m glad I learned from it.”
He is visibly emotional now, it’s in his voice and in his face.
“I wish I hadn’t had to experience that,” he continues, “but I only did it once, so I’m grateful for that.”
That incident started him on his journey to sobriety, something he has described as “the best thing I’ve ever done”.
“Some people don’t always hear the message the first time,” he says now. “I was incredibly lucky to be supported through it. And for having the innate, I suppose, horse sense – of knowing that if I lost U2 and I lost all that that was, that I would regret it for the rest of my life.
“Somebody was watching over me – and definitely Larry, Bono, Edge and Paul McGuinness at the time, were there.”
It is so clear when he talks about the band, that this is friendship, first and foremost, a network of relationships that has sustained a remarkable musical and creative career for all four; with more – happily – to come.
Finally, back to Bacon. Could he live with one on the walls – the ‘raw power’ of rage and intensity?
“I could certainly live with Francis in my room – but I’m afraid I don’t have that kind of cash.”
‘Francis Bacon: The Outsider’ airs on RTÉ One on December 15 at 10.15pm
https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/music/music-news/adam-clayton-it-is-the-worst-moment-of-my-life-and-its-still-difficult-to-talk-about-42207982.html Adam Clayton: ‘It is the worst moment of my life, and it’s still difficult to talk about…’