Adam Clayton gives an interview to Brendan O'Connor in his hotel in Barcelona.
"It's now midnight in a beautiful duplex suite in the Hotel Arts with a stunning view over Barcelona. Adam Clayton is radiating calm and content. "Actually, I quite like being here. In this world again. Doing shows and being in hotels again. You can be home looking after yourself and being normal and thinking you don't want it but then it comes around again and you go, 'maybe, you know'." It's nice to know that Clayton appreciates his life. And he does.
Once perhaps the most troubled member of the band, and perhaps the least appreciative of their success, Adam Clayton seems to have found extraordinary stillness and peace as he's got older. It is actually calming to be in the same room as him, being lulled by his deliciously timbered cut-glass speaking voice.
Clayton enjoys the rhythm of life on the road: days spent trying to declutter his head before the gig, gym, shower, travel to gig, playing the gig and then coming back to his room to maybe watch a box set of The Sopranos or Curb Your Enthusiasm (that's the last tour; this time it's likely to be Mistresses, which Clayton is getting into. He's also a big fan of Shameless). Clayton doesn't find the fact that he doesn't drink is any problem on tour. But then, he says, after 11 years he is "very easy" about his sobriety now. He does, however avoid late-night drunkenness. Done that.
Like the others, Clayton seems to have found a new lease of life in making No Line On The Horizon. "It's funny with this record and where we're at as a band," he says, "I think the spirit that we made this record in was such a spirit of 'we're only doing it because we want to'. Somewhere in it we've got to find something that we believe in. And, in the course of making it, we found our truths, we found some values that don't exist in regular life. The fact that four guys have been together for 30 years and they dreamed it up and they went after it. There's a point where I'm proud of it and I'm proud of the integrity behind what we do. If you have created any catalogue of material you're entitled to go out and play it if people want to hear it. There are people who want to hear it; we are relevant. And we still get on and we're not fighting. There are so many bad things that happen to musicians and businesses that have been going on this long. So much infighting, and we don't come with that baggage. You know, it's amazing."
Bono had mentioned to me that Adam Clayton is a joy to be around these days. It seems with the new album, Clayton has managed to finally and fully put to bed his issues with U2's success.
"I wrestled a lot with U2", Clayton says, "and I wrestled with the success of it and what I thought it meant and what I thought it had done. And, in the end, a lot of it was kind of nonsense. Suffice to say, I thought having to manage and deal with the difficulties of being successful got in the way of creating. And, in reality, I realised with maturity that it's what you make it. You choose. It's not making you do anything."
Clayton's disillusionment began, not surprisingly, when the incredible success of The Joshua Tree turned the lives of everyone involved in it upside down.
"I think it knocked the wind out of everyone", he says, "I think it took everybody a good 10 years to adjust to it and to make changes. It was sort of after 10 years that I'd gone a little bit too far down a road of rejecting it and feeling disenfranchised by it and feeling I couldn't walk down the road and I couldn't go to gigs and feeling I couldn't do the things that I enjoyed doing and I couldn't go to a club to hear some music without someone in my ear. Bono was able to adjust to it very quickly. He was able to take the good stuff and ignore the s*** that went with it. It took me a bit longer. Maybe I was more arrogant. And now I'm able to accept the good stuff and the bad stuff."
Clayton also thinks that not having a family to come home to, the way the others did, perhaps threw him a bit as well. Coming back from tours, he would find he couldn't remember what he had done before in Dublin, whom he had hung out with or where he had gone. He was also very insecure about his own abilities and his place within the band -- "It's hard to find your place with three strong characters."
But on this album he truly learnt, he says, to get out of his own way, "and when someone tries to give you a hand, thank them, don't say, 'No I can do this, leave me alone.'"
Clayton takes pop music seriously. Ask him about being nearly 50 and single and he will say that while this isn't how he saw things panning out for him, while he thought his life would work out more like the others, and while he still wouldn't rule out settling down and having kids, being on his own does give him the time to pursue his interests -- pop music being chief among them, along with art, the growing passion in his life.
But then Clayton owes pop music. He has said that music saved him when he was a troubled youngster. "I think what happened," he says of his childhood, "was we travelled quite a lot." Born in England, Clayton moved as a young child to Kenya and then to Ireland (his father was an airline pilot). Shortly after arriving in Ireland he was sent to boarding school, which didn't suit him. He is keen to stress that he doesn't want to "Do A Sinead O'Connor" and that his parents thought they were doing the right thing. Unsporty, uncompetitive, chubby and with glasses, Clayton says he wasn't bullied but if anyone was going to get bullied it would have been him. And then along came that one cool teacher who can save someone's life and played Adam Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell on an old top loader tape-recorder and began the relationship that would ultimately bring Adam Clayton to the happy place he is today.
So maybe the devil doesn't have the best tunes. Maybe Adam Clayton and his band mates are proof that you don't need to keep your demons in order to be a great band. Maybe, in fact, it's not the demons that give you the tunes, but the angels."
Brendan O'Connor
source:www.independent.ie
"It's now midnight in a beautiful duplex suite in the Hotel Arts with a stunning view over Barcelona. Adam Clayton is radiating calm and content. "Actually, I quite like being here. In this world again. Doing shows and being in hotels again. You can be home looking after yourself and being normal and thinking you don't want it but then it comes around again and you go, 'maybe, you know'." It's nice to know that Clayton appreciates his life. And he does.
Once perhaps the most troubled member of the band, and perhaps the least appreciative of their success, Adam Clayton seems to have found extraordinary stillness and peace as he's got older. It is actually calming to be in the same room as him, being lulled by his deliciously timbered cut-glass speaking voice.
Clayton enjoys the rhythm of life on the road: days spent trying to declutter his head before the gig, gym, shower, travel to gig, playing the gig and then coming back to his room to maybe watch a box set of The Sopranos or Curb Your Enthusiasm (that's the last tour; this time it's likely to be Mistresses, which Clayton is getting into. He's also a big fan of Shameless). Clayton doesn't find the fact that he doesn't drink is any problem on tour. But then, he says, after 11 years he is "very easy" about his sobriety now. He does, however avoid late-night drunkenness. Done that.
Like the others, Clayton seems to have found a new lease of life in making No Line On The Horizon. "It's funny with this record and where we're at as a band," he says, "I think the spirit that we made this record in was such a spirit of 'we're only doing it because we want to'. Somewhere in it we've got to find something that we believe in. And, in the course of making it, we found our truths, we found some values that don't exist in regular life. The fact that four guys have been together for 30 years and they dreamed it up and they went after it. There's a point where I'm proud of it and I'm proud of the integrity behind what we do. If you have created any catalogue of material you're entitled to go out and play it if people want to hear it. There are people who want to hear it; we are relevant. And we still get on and we're not fighting. There are so many bad things that happen to musicians and businesses that have been going on this long. So much infighting, and we don't come with that baggage. You know, it's amazing."
Bono had mentioned to me that Adam Clayton is a joy to be around these days. It seems with the new album, Clayton has managed to finally and fully put to bed his issues with U2's success.
"I wrestled a lot with U2", Clayton says, "and I wrestled with the success of it and what I thought it meant and what I thought it had done. And, in the end, a lot of it was kind of nonsense. Suffice to say, I thought having to manage and deal with the difficulties of being successful got in the way of creating. And, in reality, I realised with maturity that it's what you make it. You choose. It's not making you do anything."
Clayton's disillusionment began, not surprisingly, when the incredible success of The Joshua Tree turned the lives of everyone involved in it upside down.
"I think it knocked the wind out of everyone", he says, "I think it took everybody a good 10 years to adjust to it and to make changes. It was sort of after 10 years that I'd gone a little bit too far down a road of rejecting it and feeling disenfranchised by it and feeling I couldn't walk down the road and I couldn't go to gigs and feeling I couldn't do the things that I enjoyed doing and I couldn't go to a club to hear some music without someone in my ear. Bono was able to adjust to it very quickly. He was able to take the good stuff and ignore the s*** that went with it. It took me a bit longer. Maybe I was more arrogant. And now I'm able to accept the good stuff and the bad stuff."
Clayton also thinks that not having a family to come home to, the way the others did, perhaps threw him a bit as well. Coming back from tours, he would find he couldn't remember what he had done before in Dublin, whom he had hung out with or where he had gone. He was also very insecure about his own abilities and his place within the band -- "It's hard to find your place with three strong characters."
But on this album he truly learnt, he says, to get out of his own way, "and when someone tries to give you a hand, thank them, don't say, 'No I can do this, leave me alone.'"
Clayton takes pop music seriously. Ask him about being nearly 50 and single and he will say that while this isn't how he saw things panning out for him, while he thought his life would work out more like the others, and while he still wouldn't rule out settling down and having kids, being on his own does give him the time to pursue his interests -- pop music being chief among them, along with art, the growing passion in his life.
But then Clayton owes pop music. He has said that music saved him when he was a troubled youngster. "I think what happened," he says of his childhood, "was we travelled quite a lot." Born in England, Clayton moved as a young child to Kenya and then to Ireland (his father was an airline pilot). Shortly after arriving in Ireland he was sent to boarding school, which didn't suit him. He is keen to stress that he doesn't want to "Do A Sinead O'Connor" and that his parents thought they were doing the right thing. Unsporty, uncompetitive, chubby and with glasses, Clayton says he wasn't bullied but if anyone was going to get bullied it would have been him. And then along came that one cool teacher who can save someone's life and played Adam Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell on an old top loader tape-recorder and began the relationship that would ultimately bring Adam Clayton to the happy place he is today.
So maybe the devil doesn't have the best tunes. Maybe Adam Clayton and his band mates are proof that you don't need to keep your demons in order to be a great band. Maybe, in fact, it's not the demons that give you the tunes, but the angels."
Brendan O'Connor
source:www.independent.ie
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