U2: A Diary: The Matt McGee Interview

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Matt McGee, founder of @U2 and author of U2: A Diary, answering five questions about his new book.

1. Once you committed to making U2: A Diary happen, what sort of adjustments took place in your daily schedule? (In other words, where did writing a book "fit" into your life?)


I remember chatting with my wife (and the kids to a lesser degree) before committing to do the book, and saying, "If I'm gonna do this right, I'll be at my computer every waking moment of every day." We generally share the parenting duties -- we both cook, clean, help with homework, etc. So I had to ask her to handle all that stuff whenever she could, so that I had time to write and research. I also had to explain to the kids that Dad may not be spending as much fun time with them until the book was done. God bless Cari -- she basically ran the house just so I could fit the book into my life. And God bless the kids for letting me be an almost absentee Dad for a while.

And I should mention, too, that I basically stepped away from @U2, too. The staff ran the show so I could focus on the book, and they did a better job running things than I do when I'm around. That's both cool and scary. Cool that I'm not needed ... and scary that I'm not needed. :-)

2. What were some of the reactions you got when you told people you know--fan and non-fan--"Hey, not only am I running this U2 fan website, but I'm writing a book about the band, too"?

"You must REALLY like U2!" was a common reaction. And then I also heard a lot of, "I tried writing a book once" or "My best friend/cousin/brother/sister is writing a book, too." It's amazing how many people are either writing a book or know someone very close to them who's writing a book. Those were probably the most common reactions from non-fans. The U2 fans just about always reacted with things like "Awesome!" and "Let me know how I can help," which was really awesome. Everyone was really supportive that way.

3. One of the aims of this book, as I understand it, is to provide a corrective for some of the lazier reporting out there about U2. Is there any particular U2 myth you would hope would be mythbusted by this book, and if so, which one?


I don't know if myth is the right word, but I'm really proud of how the narrative of the early Christianity/Shalom/band disruption era turned out. For years, there was very little written about that time period, and the band seemed to avoid it or play it down when the subject came up. Then, within the last 4-5 years, they've talked about it more in various magazine interviews, books, and so forth. But the stories didn't always fit with what we'd heard before. So it was really tough to get the story right, to get the timing right, and I wanted to make sure the wording was right, too. Thankfully, I had great help from friends like you, Scott [Editor's note: Scott is organizing an academic conference on U2--check it out], and Beth [co-editor of Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog], and I think the book will have the most accurate version of those events possible.

4. If there was more than one version of events which changed up the timeline, how did you decide which one to go with, or did you provide all the "alternate histories"?

On some occasions, you'll see words in the narrative like "reportedly" ... "possibly" ... "believed to be" ... "other reports" ... and things like that. Without going through the band's personal diaries (if they even have such things), it's impossible to tie some things down definitively. So when necessary, I try to offer the alternate histories, as you say.

In other situations, it's just a matter of deciding what source to trust. For example, Paul McGuinness was recently talking about the death of Greg Carroll, and he said the whole band was in a bar in Dublin when it happened. But back in 1987, Bono gave a quote to a New Zealand magazine about how he had just landed in Texas when he heard the news that Greg Carroll had died. Bono was due to appear the next day at Farm Aid II, but had to get on a plane and go right back to Dublin. In the book, I decided to believe Bono's version of events given one year later over Paul McGuinness's version of events given 20 years later.


5. Was there any particular time period which was harder to research, and if so, for what reason?

Anything pre-1980 was very tough, because you can't find many online news archives that go back that far, and many of the people who were involved back then are impossible to track down. I was lucky enough to have a quick email exchange with Meiert Avis, who was part of the Windmill Lane crew in the late '70s and 1980 when U2 was there, as well as Chas de Whalley, who produced U2's first studio sessions and recordings. Chas, in particular, gave me a great interview. He also helped me track down some other people on the scene who helped flesh out some of what was going on then. That helped a lot with the early days.