I've Been Immortalised As An Idiot

Killing Bono is a rock movie with a difference. Rather than celebrating success, it centres on the idea of failure, with Neil McCormick and his brother Ivan – played by Ben Barnes and Robert Sheehan respectively – as the fall guys in a kind of tragi-comic tale of one band’s bizarre and often heroic misadventures. The twist is that Neil and Ivan were school mates of U2’s in Mount Temple and every step they take, and every stumble they make, is in the shadow of a band that is in the process of becoming the biggest rock band in the world.

In the film he may wear the garb of a chronic loser (who just happens to get lucky with the girl!), but in life Neil McCormick is anything but. Having started out with Hot Press in the late 1970s, he is currently the chief rock writer with the Daily Telegraph. The movie is based on his memoir I Was Bono’s Doppelgänger and he has other successful writing projects under his belt, most notably the enormous tome U2 on U2. But, inevitably, there is an extent to which Neil hankers after the success as a songwriter and a rock star that eluded him. Well, so far...
Chatty, gregarious and quick to laugh, the former Hot Press writer is pleased to tell me that the magazine wasn’t always the incredibly glamorous machine it is today… Okay, glamorous might be pushing it, but at least we don’t use the office as a farmyard...
“I was very young and very cocky and I read Hot Press because I was in a band and it was the only thing that was there,” he says. “And there was an ad looking for an art assistant and I applied, not knowing what to expect. And you know, before you actually work in journalism, you assume from the outside that magazines are all produced in these wonderfully sophisticated, glamorous locations. But it was just a house on Mount Street. What really threw me, though, was that there was a goat in the hall tethered to a stairs. That was the first and only time I encountered that at a job interview!”
Indeed – though there have been rumours that the goat story has an element of the apocryphal about it! Either way, all that McCormick needed to secure a job was a certain amount of bullshi…er, chutzpah.
“I’d brought in my art portfolio that had some pictures of naked women and one or two posters, and I was given the job after that interview, even though I couldn’t really do the job,” he says. “Years later I said to Niall ‘Why on earth did you hire me? I was 17, I knew nothing’. And he told me that I was so full of bullshit he thought I must have something going on. Also, I was a punk, and he thought they should have a punk on the staff.”
Hot Press’s unique take on affirmative action right there. But McCormick is quick to point out that – contrary to what’s portrayed in Killing Bono – he never had any sort of cut-throat rivalry with anyone on the staff.
“No,” he laughs, “that was just a dramatic construct, as so much of the film is. There were no rivalries. Hot Press was a fantastic place to be. But I wrote my memoir, as a sort of chart of rock and roll failure, and they made it into a film – so of course things got changed and made up. That’s what happens with adaptations.
“When they told me they were going to make it into a film, I said ‘I don’t know how you’re going to do this’, because it’s spread over thirty years and it’s quite an anecdotal story. And now I know. They just conflate things and invent more, and characters get collapsed from two people into one, and because of that, events are suddenly born! But my story was the story of being a loser – knowingly hoping that the story itself would become a success. I was trying to turn failure into success. Secretly that’s the drive there.
“And they just ran with that theme,” he guffaws good-naturedly, “while showing a complete and utter disregard for the truth! But the director Nick Hamm said to me: ‘The problem with your life, darling, is that there’s no third act’. And I said ‘Nick, that’s because it’s life’. And he promised he’d give me one. And he did.”
Thus, if Killing Bono is a major success, Neil McCormick will finally have turned the tables on the cruel hand of fate that saw him go so near – and yet remain so far – from rock success.
“What did I learn, being in a band, is this. I thought that just because we wanted it, and we got quite good at it, that we would have it. I was arrogant enough to be convinced that I deserved to be successful and so I would be. But nothing works out like that, and you have to deal with the way life is, and not how you want it to be. That was a big lesson for me.”
His youthful arrogance led McCormick to make some questionable decisions along the road to musical perdition. “Oh, we were convinced that playing on same day the Pope came to Ireland wouldn’t affect our audience at all,” he recalls, “so we played a gig, and of course no-one showed up, including our bass-player who was acting as an altar boy.”
There were other times when being a shade more diplomatic might have made all the difference. “Billy Gaff, Rod Stewart’s manager wanted us to record a song,” Neil says. “He was convinced was going to be an American No.1. I told him the song was shit, and it wasn’t as good as our own songs.”
The film charts these and other faux pas with a loving attention to period detail, with Ben Barnes and Robert Sheehan turning in excellent performances as Neil and Ivan. And while Neil’s bumbling, dishonest, dissembling and ultimately borderline psychotic character on screen bears scant resemblance to the real life model, the film is by turn amusing, hilarious and – on occasion – surprisingly moving.
In Killing Bono, the U2 frontman is a kind of nemesis for Neil, but in real life they have remained in touch and on good terms. From his Hot Press days on, Neil has written extensively about the band – and after all this time observing them, he thinks he’s got the fame and success thing figured out. Sort of.
“People who make it generally think that they were destined for fame, whereas people who aren’t successful – like me! – know that’s not true,” he says. “No-one was born to be famous, it takes a hell of a confluence of events and accidents to make it happen – and in the end the public chooses you, depending on what it needs at that moment in time. If you have great talent and persistence and drive, you’ll be ready if your luck goes right. And the truth of it is that U2 had it all, and they connected. Whereas we had the persistence and the drive. As for the talent? The jury’s still out.”
In general, U2 were supportive of the project, allowing two of their songs to be used, as well as the familiar U2 iconography. But while Bono wasn’t involved in the making of the film, he did come up with the title.
“The name is great, seeing as it’s really all about slaying your own dragons,” Neil says. “But it was his idea. He left a message on my answering machine saying ‘Neil, you have to kill me! A lot of people will wear that t-shirt!’ Because a lot of people just hate him now. As much as his fans love him for the idea of what he is, people hate him for the idea of what he is.
“But we were friends in school and so I know him a bit better than most people: he’s a real, complex and really good person and I wanted that to come over in the book and in the film.”
Bono has not only supported the film, he has said that he was McCormick’s fan in school. “He was much cooler than me,” Bono has said, “a much better writer and I thought he’d make a much better rock star. I was wrong on one count.”
McCormick laughs. “It’s such a double-edged compliment isn’t it? He’s just asserting that really he was the rock star!”
But though he may not have made it as a rock star, McCormick can now boast that he’s forever immortalised in literature and on film.
“Yeah, immortalised as an idiot! Such is life.”

Killing Bono is released on April 1.