ADAM QUOTES

Men should be encouraged to look at each other's penises. They needn't be hidden under a bushel. - Q magazine, November 2000 (I think)

You know, if you're just another arsehole from the suburbs, I think it's pretty understandable if one was offered a chance to take on the world and win, you'd go for it. I wasn't destined for greatness in any other area. I'd have ended up being some kind of bad landscape gardener or something. So I much prefer this. - 2001

I think one of the great things about bands is that they allow you to be irresponsible for longer. Whether or not in the end that's a really healthy position to take ... I guess I've been lucky in that I fucked about until my mid-thirties and now I can have more of a balanced outlook. I think not having a family and kids, I know what I need. It's not very much actually, which is a nice place to be. Part of it's just opening your eyes and realising that there are practical ways that people live and that's OK. There's nothing wrong with catching the subway in New York - you don't have to get a stretch limo. - 2001

I'm famous 'cos I know Bono. That's pretty much it. - 2001

Not so much now. Occasionally I have fantasised about it, but it's kind of pointless to think a life beyond U2 could in any way measure up to a life with U2. You can't get out
of this club. It's like the guys in The Beatles. They're still in The Beatles. - 2001, when asked whether he's wondered about life beyond U2

Nobody knows how it works. You turn the music up as loud as you can and hope people like it.

I think women are the stronger sex. I don't think it's necessarily putting women on a pedestal, but I think it's acknowledging that women are stronger and you need their support and companionship to help you realise your potential as a man. That's an unusual theme in rock & roll. Rock & Roll is usually [very macho]...yeah. - 1992

We try to find manageable numbers of people to talk to, outside of record shops or a few hours after a gig. It's just if you've got like 5,000 people outside a venue, you can't go out and talk to them. It's a pointless thing. - 1987

If you want to bring it down to categories. I think U2 is, in that way, slightly subversive because the whole structure of radio and music these days is to 'pin them down, get a name there, then we know where they're at, they're safe.' I think that because we, as U2, transcend those barriers, it upsets people because they can't pigeonhole us in any particular place. That's a great place to be - to have the range to go from one side of the spectrum to the other. - 1983, when asked if U2 is first and foremost a rock and roll band

It's not adapting to the times. It's kind of reacting to the times. In the eighties, our stance was very much the music. We wanted a clean stage and didn't want anything in the way, anything to clutter our relatinship with the audience. But we did that for ten years, and when it came to this tour and trying to present this album in a live context, we said, 'Let's forget what we've done in the past. We want to change from that. That has become boring for us.' - 1992

I didn't really enjoy it very much. I'm quite happy to be away from all of that. I definitely prefer to live my life in a more private way. I understand both sides: I know people in the press have to make a living and supply copy. But I do think there is a feeding frenzy that takes place and people are judged on things that they're not really putting themselves up to be judged on. It's a morality that's better applied to political life than artistic life. I don't think it's fair to say that if you put yourself in the spotlight you have to expect this kind of invasion. I do think there are decent people in the press who concentrate on the quality of people's work rather than trying to make stories out of something [else]. But at the end of the day, those tabloid stories are hurtful. - 1996, about the way the media followed he and former fiancee Naomi Campbell around

Making love involves two people, having sex only involves one. - 1989

With that tour, I feel we really pushed ourselves to the limit. I know that we regained a lot of critical credibility; that's nice but to be honest that wasn't something that I really thought about very much. - June 1994, about Zoo TV's success

I think the important thing to retain through life is optimism. It doesn't have to be something that you necessarily get from Christianity. You just have to feel that way about life. - 1983

Rock 'n' roll is a term that's been heavily abused. It's not something you can buy in a record shop. It's an attitude.

When you start out, you make one or two records that put you solidly in debt with the record company. Then, if your third record makes some money, you have to pay back at the record company, and if you're lucky, you have enough money to live for a year. Then, after that, the band is bigger, you have to expand your organization and do more professional shows, so you're sort of back in debt again. You never really catch up; for those first five years you're probably better off on the dole.

We tend to spend 90 percent of the time on 30 percent of the material and the rest happens incredibly quickly. (U2 At the End of the World 19)

People get into rock & roll for the right reasons and then end up getting out for all the wrong reasons. They get into it out of naïveté, and then when the naïveté runs out they think, 'This isn't what I expected,' and they want to quit. I was just thinking how lucky I am to be in a band, to be one of four and not alone. No matter what happens, at least I always know that I have three friends. (U2 At the End of the World 70)

Joshua Tree was a pop album. This is rock [referring to Achtung Baby]. (U2 At the End of the World 143)

I don't have a problem with awards of merit going to whomever they are deeming whatever it is worthy of recognition. But there is so much puffing up of the chest that the Grammys are in some way a significant artistic achievement, which I find offensive. It's stupid to deny the effect of a good performance at the Grammys, but you're not really going along as an artist - you're going along as a performer, as a press item, as a piece of television. And that's really the worst way in which to receive something that is about the merit of your work. For us the balance is the wrong way. (U2 At the End of the World 178)

Everyone understood what had happened over the movie. I don't think deep down it really hurt Larry, myself, and Edge that much. I think we felt 'Okay, fair enough.' But the band made a lot of effort to make new music for the soundtrack album and worked very hard to make it sound good in the movie and to make the sound good on the record. Edge was doing all sorts of different mixes: there was one for the movie in stereo, one for the video cassette in mono, a third for the album, and on top of this, producing some great new tracks, some good quality work. Everyone was pretty pissed off at being kicked after going through a lot of effort to make something we were all proud of and was good value for our fans. (U2 At the End of the World 211) - [about Rattle and Hum]

When Edge gets on a roll he gets on a roll. He's always been happy to keep going. I think his process of keeping going, although damaging on a personal front, has allowed him to make great strides, has been the right thing for his career. He's made tremendous progress, he's a great guitar player. (U2 At the End of the World 212)

We've been luck to have been a young band. I'm the eldest and I'm thirty-two. A lot of our contemporaries were still struggling at this age. By the time they're in their forties maybe it's just a little too late for them to be able to go back to the drawing board. The early mistakes we made - not understanding cool, understanding attitude, clothes, and haircuts - were because we were seventeen and eighteen and our idols like the Clash and the Jam and the Police, who had all that shit down, were making their first records at twenty-seven or twenty-eight. We were making our first record when were twenty! So, yeah, they had their image together. It's taken us fifteen years to get an image together, or indeed to realize that image is important. And not important. (U2 At the End of the World 213)

Recording The Joshua Tree was relaxed, great fun. Then it all exploded. That tour was a piece of shit. Rattle and Hum was a piece of shit. Making Achtung Baby was a piece of shit. [about its working atmosphere, not the actual work.] (U2 At the End of the World 214)

October was a bit of a slog, waiting for the lyrics. For War we had all the songs and it was easy. Unforgettable Fire was touch. Same black holes, waiting for lyrics on that one. We had six songs, then Brian came up with 'Elvis Presley and America' and '4th of July' and gave us something to tie it together. (U2 At the End of the World 214)

I'll tell you. You learn a lot about women from dressing up in women's clothes! You learn that when a woman asks you, 'Do I look all right?' what she's really saying is, 'I have just spent a lot of time making myself uncomfortable. If I go out in this condition will I look foolish, or is it worth it?' When you ask a woman to go out to dinner it's not like asking one of your mates. She has to stop and think, 'Hmm, dinner. That will be four hours of being uncomfortable.' And if she says yes and then after four hours you say, 'Let's go dancing, let's go to a club,' and she says, 'No, I want to go home,' it's because she has figured on four hours and now those four hours are up and she can only think of getting home and out of those clothes! (U2 At the End of the World 281)

If you believe in a cause you must be willing to put yourself on the line for that cause. (U2 At the End of the World 285)

I feel like we have really got something out of our system. I think we have become the group that we always wanted to become. That in itself inevitably brings you to yet another border in your life and I suppose it means that we really are free to let our imaginations run wild in terms of what we could be now. We've got to the point where we may well be the greatest group in the world. Now what do you do with it? (U2 At the End of the World 441)

I personally feel it would be very hard to beat Zoo TV, and I wouldn't want to do another two-year tour. What is more rewarding is actually creating the music. Playing concerts is great to a certain point. Although getting big is a challenge and being successful is nice, it doesn't really give you the fuel that you need. (U2 At the End of the World 441)

Larry's always been noticed 'cause he's the pretty one. He's honed that character down in a way that he can feel comfortable in public as he didn't used to. And that's enough. His very silence speaks louder than anything else. (U2 At the End of the World 441)

It is going to be especially different for Larry and myself. Bono and Edge have a different mindset which allows them to work at a fairly manic pace and they like that...I like the anonymity of being able to seek out things and reel them back to my life and then be able to create from that. I don't like the culture where you are reacting and that is a large part of the way the culture has become. As communication speeds up, art becomes much more a reaction than an intellectual process, and I prefer it as an intellectual process. I feel celebrity-dom, being a personality, a Hollywoodization. (U2 At the End of the World 442)

It was a moment where I had to face a lot of things I hadn't really been facing and realize if I was going to be able to go on and be a useful member of this band - and indeed a husband - I had to beat alcohol. I had to realize that every fuckup of mine, every problem over the last ten years that hasn't been quite so serious as that night, has been related to alcohol abuse. So I'm kind of glad I finally had to confront it. (U2 At the End of the World 443)

Men should not be forced to wear pants when it's not cold.

It was like, throw out technology. Give us a microphone and a bit of tape and you do the bit in between. - 1989

It was a pretty special couple of years. I mean it was a pretty mad couple of years where reality and fantasy and everything got kinda mixed up big time. - 1993, about Zoo TV

Individually we probably wouldn't have gone anywhere musically. Without any one of us, the fragile uniqueness and special quality of U2 would be gone forever.

How many people really have friendships that have survived 20 years. I value it and think it's an amazing achievement.

Be careful what you set your sights upon because it just might happen.

You know, one or two members of the band could've said, 'Look, guys, I'm happy to do the record, but I don't wanna tour. I wanna stay home and get on with my stamp collection' or whatever, and then we'd have had to look at the record in a different way.

We're a bunch of noisy, rough Irishmen that are arrogant enough to drag their tails all the way around the world, and I think that's something to be proud of.

What happens is like you get so big that you can't write a diary. So you hire a film-crew to remind you of where you've been and what you've done.

Y’know, we go to night clubs, we’re always hearing and seeing the best everywhere around the world and you kind of bring that home with you and we just sorta felt that y’know we could do a club that was exciting and interesting to people and had a--had a broad music policy. I suppose it’s just because we want to go to our own place rather than roam around the city.

I had to be talked into it, I have to say. I was very nervous and apprehensive about revealing myself in such a way. But I got into the spirit of wickedness, I suppose. I really objected to the censorship that happened in certain countries, like I think in America they put a nasty black X over it or something. I think nude photography is absolutely appropriate and it shouldn't embarrass anyone. I think the pictures that Robert Mapplethorpe took of male nudes - those portraits - helped me look at myself as a man and to get used to looking at penises. It's a hard thing to overcome to begin with but I think it's good. I only wish I'd had an erection at the time.

I think it's kind the scheme of things. Although in the outside world it's inevitable that Bono should have all the attention thrust upon him, among the four of us there's an equality there which is still respected.

We wanted a multi-media experience where the audience weren't just responding in a Pavlovian way to a band getting on stage at one end of a football field. - about Zoo TV

I don't think it's [touring's] real at all. I think it's great fun, it's a little bit like when you were a kid and you played at dressing up, it still has that quality to it. MInd you, it does have a reality of its own because you move in a world that you're familiar and comfortable with but it's still different to when you go home and water your cabbages.

I think it [touring] is becoming normal for me and if it's normal for me then that's normal. From someone tyring to figure it out from the outside it could well be abnormal but I'm accepting it as a normal now.

I think there's a quality to the band's playing now that needs a lot less support from technology', Clayton, 36, says. 'It's a big sound, but with a lot of space there. Musically we're all playing 100 times better than last time; we've really grown in the last couple of years. We're really pushing Edge to play some way-out there stuff. That's the way it's sounding at the moment, at least. By the time it's mixed and finished up, we could well have added in some digital treatments, some samples and loops. There's still no title for the album, but a world tour is scheduled to start around May of 1997. - 1996, about the album to be known as 'Pop'

That project was originally pitched to U2 as a band, but since work had begun on the new album, it seemed prudent to pass... I sort of thought about it and said, 'Well, it's a rhythm section thing. It's an instrumental. It actually doesn't need a whole band. - 1996, about recording the 'Mission Impossible' Theme

What's interesting about this tour is the amount of very large shows we've sold out. I mean, we're really getting to see an awful lot of people... think it's probably something to do with Under a Blood Red Sky and the whole video, the live record -- I think that stimulated it. - 1985, on the Unforgettable Fire tour

You look at George Michael and Wham! and that whole thing -- OK, the songs are fairly trivial, but he's a great singer. And it's quite difficult to come up with songs like that that everyone likes. I mean, we certainly couldn't do it. - 1985

I think we needed that break to get away from each other for a while and explore music without worrying about what U2 should be doing. I went to New York and spent some time studying music, getting to know more about the technical side of the bass. At the end of that period, we started to realize that we were actually all listening to the same music. I was listening to a band called Leftfield and Massive Attack and Underworld. Bono and Edge were listening to the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers as well as Oasis and some others. We all kind of went, 'Well, isn't this interesting?' You could sense that we were going to incorporate some of that sonic terrain into our own music. - 1996

Aesthetically, I love the video. The problem is that the whole AIDS-awareness campaign is having difficulty getting across the everyday risk to everyone. So for use to make a statement on AIDS while dressed up in drag was narrowing down the perception of the disease as just a gay or cross-dressing thing. We realized that the video could have been perceived as very negative imagery. - on a 'One' video

We still live within 2O minutes of each other in Dublin. We spend a lot of time together. Other bands, when they get to our age, there's a couple of jealousies, there are management problems. We've been lucky, or wise, and we can devote our energy to being in U2. We keep a full-time staff, which a lot of people don't. We take risks, and we look like fools sometimes, and other times people say... `yes. and that's the kind of band I want to be in.' We're very lucky and I tell you, it's only on this tour I've started to realise that on a daily basis. - 1997

I think pop music satisfies a demand -- which is, it's a beat for people to live their life by. When they go through a shopping mall, they wanna hear music, for whatever reasons. I don't think you can talk about pop music and U2 in the same breath. I think that's fine -- there's a need for that kind of music to be around. - 1985

They are people in the business who have opinions, and whether or not those opinions agree with my opinions is really irrelevant. I accept that that's their job, and they're either going to like it or hate it. But I don't lose any sleep over it either way. - 1985

We definitely went in saying we're not going to make heavy weather out of this. If a song is happening, we're not goin to mess with it too much and we're goint to try to get it down on tape as fast as possible. If we were having trouble with a song, rather than keep working on it till it ogo painfull, we'd say, no, fuck it, let's just work on stuff that we like. Each song is a song that every member of the band enjoyed playing. - on recording the Joshua Tree

Ultimately, I hope people will remember 'Pride' for what it was about. It was important for us to haave a single that said something, rather than just make a nice noise on the radio.

We want to get the moviegoer into a concert as we experience it from the stage looking out. - on RATTLE AND HUM

Adam's actually a really down-to-earth, homey guy. That's his main fight or disadvantage. He loves rock & roll and living the whole rock star thing, but then again he likes planting an oak tree by himself on a sunny Sunday morning. He's been trying really hard to come to terms with that contradiction. Especially in the last year or two, I think he finds it really hard. (U2 At the End of the World 150) - SEBASTIAN CLAYTON