From the Baggot Inn to "The Simpsons," from "Sunday Bloody Sunday" to Trimble and Hume, from "I Will Follow" to follow that, from boys to men, from the end of the '70s to the end of the millennium -- this is how 20 years of U2 looks through the eyes of Adam Clayton, a man who has experienced his own share of highs and lows and lived to tell the tale.

"Do you think maybe that's a bit too loud? I'll get them to turn it down a little." Mega-rich rock star or not, Adam Clayton is a real gentleman, make no mistake. Not only does he helpfully ask a member of staff to turn down the music playing in the front lounge of the Clarence Hotel in order to facilitate a clearer recording of this interview, but he also accepts the small gift I've brought him with far more politeness and grace than the gesture probably deserves.

"Gosh!" he exclaims, examining it closely through his trademark spectacles (today's are sharkskin grey). "Er, I really don't know what to say..."

"It's for your collection," I explain helpfully.

"Yes, I figured that," he deadpans in his distinctively pronounced not-quite-Dublin accent. "Thanks!"

The gift in question is a small silver (plated) coffee spoon, liberated 20 minutes earlier from a trendy George's Street bar in a moment of journalistic inspiration. So why am I giving one of the world's most famous bass players a coffee spoon as a gift? Well, regular viewers of Matt Groening's The Simpsons can answer that one. In the satirical cult cartoon show's 200th episode, Adam and his bandmates make a guest appearance, bringing their PopMart Tour to Springfield and getting stage-crashed by one Homer J. Simpson in the process.

For some strange reason, the animated Adam is portrayed as the U2 geek, a spoon-collecting nerd who's only just barely tolerated by his bandmates. Not only do Larry and Edge refuse to allow him to accompany them to Moe's Tavern for a pint but, during the show's hilarious end-credit sequence, Bono delights in torturing the beleaguered bassist by stealing his Springfield spoon (thus reducing his collection's size to eight!). "I don't know why they decided to pick on me," the real life Adam smiles, carefully placing the plundered piece of cutlery down beside his car keys on the table. "But it was quite funny the things they picked up on. It was actually quite hard to do -- you know, being a voice actor. I thought it would've been easy but it wasn't."

Even so, it was definitely worth the effort. An appearance on The Simpsons isn't like an appearance on just any old TV programme. It's a cultural moment, a zeitgeist seal of approval. When Adam, Bono, Edge and Larry made their second ever animated appearance (their first being in the "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" video), their images were permanently engraved onto the Mount Rushmore cliff-face of popular culture. It was a final confirmation, the ultimate acknowledgment of their superstar status. Fuck being on the cover of Time magazine -- The Simpsons is where it's at these days! Their cartoon cameo meant U2 were huge, huger than huge. Even bigger in the '90s than they ever were in the '80s.

But then, you probably already knew that. To those of us who were adolescents in Ireland during the '70s and '80s, U2 and their music were as culturally significant as Gay Byrne and Bobby Sands. More even. We grew up with them and they grew up with us. Love them or loathe them -- let's face it, there's never been much middle-ground when it comes to this particular band -- U2 have had a serious impact on Irish youth consciousness than almost anyone else, playing a constantly evolving soundtrack to the dramas of our lives, threading together those difficult teenage years with memorable gigs, albums and occasionally bombastic statements.

We all have our U2 moments, whether we want them or not. Maybe you had your first kiss to "Bad." Or had the crap kicked out of you at one of their gigs. Or listened to The Joshua Tree endlessly on your headphones when you were supposed to be studying for your Leaving Cert. For my own part, I lost my virginity to the strains of The Unforgettable Fire. (that's the whole album, incidentally, not just the song!). And given that band have sold more than 7 million albums over the 20 years since they first formed in Dublin's Mount Temple High School, chances are that as you're reading this, somebody, somewhere, is losing theirs in exactly the same way.

You see, U2 are part of what we are. We all have a little U2 DNA inside of us.

Now aged 38, Adam Clayton has been a member of U2 for more than half his life. It shows. He looks like a rock star. His hair has turned a sci-fi shade of slivery grey and he wears the distinctive flashbulb-tanned face of a man who's been living in the glare of varying publicity for over two decades. The expensive casuals, heavy silver chain around his neck and massive gold Claddagh ring on his finger offer further clues to his celebrity status.

We're here to talk about the band's latest release -- the long overdue The Best of U2 1980-1990 -- their first ever such compilation.

"It's a great shot, isn't it?" Adam remarks, picking up the CD sleeve and smiling at the cover picture of a young Peter Rowan (brother of Guggi from the Virgin Prunes and now a successful photographer in his own right) wearing a WW2 soldiers helmet. "We were actually going to use it as the cover for the War album but we didn't go with it in the end -- we went for the straight shot which was very similar to the Boy cover. But it's a beautiful photograph."

"Did he get paid in chocolate for that one as well?" I enquire (a full box of Mars Bars having been the payment for young Peter's first photo shoot for the band).

"No that was for the first session with him," he laughs. "This was taken during the third session. "There was "Out of Control," then Boy and then this one. So I think there was what would have been termed in those days a substantial payment."

As its title would suggest, U2 The Best of 1980-1990 is, well, exactly that -- 30 of the band's best singles and B-sides from that decade. All of their big hits are here -- from "Pride" and "New Year's Day" to "With or Without You" and "The Sweetest Thing" (old and new versions). Advance sales of 100,000 copies in Ireland alone have already made the album platinum seven times over and broken all records. Next year will see the release of The Best of 1990-1999. A U2 Greatest Hits album has been a long time coming. The question, however, is why now?

"Well, this is sort of a case of us clearing out the cupboard," he smiles. "And already it's got a great feel about it. A lot of people are excited about it, which we weren't really sure about to begin with. But there's never really a right time to do something like this. But it seemed like a good time to do it now. And doing something like this is always really, really hard -- particularly when you call it a 'Best Of' or a 'Greatest Hits' or whatever, because, in fact, it's kind of a compilation and it's subjective whether it's the best material or whatever.

"From the point of view of what was the best material of those ten years of U2, from 1980-1990, the singles were the obvious tracks to start with. We started to look at them and, you know, when we put them all together it was a surprisingly impressive body of work.

"Some things have been left off and some people will have opinions on that. But to some extent when you do something like this the rules are a bit different because it's not something that essentially is a 'fan item.' Because the fans already have all these tracks. It's really, in a sense, a convenience item for people who maybe don't wanna buy the five or six records that it comes off. So it's a bit of a sidestep."

How did you choose the final list of songs?

"There was a bit of list-making," he says. "I mean, there was a bit of research done in terms of trawling through the website of what tracks people would like to hear. And there was a bit of research as regards what were popular tracks on radio and stuff like that. But really, because it in a way had to reflect the best work of those years, we sort of started with the singles. And there's a couple of things on there maybe weren't singles directly, for example 'Bad' wasn't actually a single but we felt it needed to be in there. And 'Sweetest Thing' wasn't a single but it is now. But the record's pretty much the singles from that period. And things that would be left off would be..."

" '40'?" I suggest.

"Well, '40' wasn't really a single you see," he explains. "But you're right -- it would work really well on this compilation. There's a few others that we left off -- 'Gloria' is not in there, '11 O'Clock Tick Tock' is not in there, 'Out of Control' is not in there. But there'll be something else. They'll get caught yet!"

A boxed-set perhaps?

"Yeah, something like that."

Which tracks are your own personal favourites?

"In many ways, these ones which are the most well-known tend to be my least favourite, just because so many feelings were invested in them," he laughs, picking up the CD case and scrutinizing the track list. "But of my least favourite...em, they're all still pretty high. 'Pride,' 'New Year's Day,' 'With or Without You,' 'I Still Haven't Found' all have a magic. 'Where the Streets Have No Name' was always a very troublesome song to record and to play live but it's still an extraordinary piece of music. 'I Will Follow' I'm always gonna be really fond of. 'Sweetest Thing' -- I'm really blown away by the new version of it. I'm always fond of 'When Love Comes to Town,' and 'Angel of Harlem' just makes me laugh because it's so kind of happy.

"As for the B-sides, I like a lot of them. 'Three Sunrises' is such an odd thing for us to do but it's so powerful. 'Love Comes Tumbling' has got a great mood. Bono's guitar solo in 'Dancin' Barefoot' is great. Em, 'Walk to the Water' had great potential but I don't think we ever fully realized it. 'Luminous Times' was a good piece though.

What's interesting about the '80s compilation is that it reminds you of just how different U2 sounded back then. Younger fans who may only be familiar with post-re-invention U2 probably won't even recognize the band. Certainly, hard-edged punky political tracks like "New Year's Day" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday" don't sound at all like the work of the same group who've given us tracks like "Mofo" and "The Fly" in recent years.

"Um...yeah, I guess," he avers. "There's a lot of memories in there when you listen to that '80s period. I kinda know now that we can't repeat that because that is a kind of energy and a naivete there that you can only have in your youth. I mean, a lot of it was our early 20s -- Joshua Tree was our mid-20s. But, you know, maybe it was something that we weren't even aware of, just how important that energy and those years are, because nowadays there are some young bands but generally people don't get signed until their mid-20s or even early 30s. It's a different kind of perspective and, you know, the criticisms of that period of U2 as being earnest or naive or whatever -- well, it's kind of inevitable that you have this, coming from where we were coming from, which was idealistic.

"I mean, we'd have been inspired by the Clash and the Stranglers and the Sex Pistols although we didn't understand that those bands were actually taking the piss to some extent. To us it was liberating to actually feel that, as suburban misfit kids, you could actually produce your own energy and your own value system and your own attitude and...You know, you still weren't gonna get served in the pubs but at least you were gonna have a good time in the Coffee Inn or wherever. You'd end up in McGonagles (laughs)."

Maybe it was because he was the least successful academically but, in the earliest (school) days of U2, Adam Clayton was always the member who was most convinced that U2 could eventually make it big. He was the most enthusiastic of them all, the one who made that fateful pleading phone call to Bill Graham that led to the band's first meeting with Paul McGuinness.

"Yeah, I probably had more blind faith and ignorance as regards music than anyone else in the band and I guess I rally did latch on to the idea that just by committing yourself to it and pushing hard enough, you could get a record deal, that you could get records released on the radio," he smiles. "I probably didn't think much beyond a couple of singles or an album at the time, so to be sitting here now talking about is just...whew!"

Well, you've now been in U2 longer than you haven't.

"Yeah, it's weird," he laughs. "And the body of work covers pretty much twenty years. I think we released U2-3 in 1978 so that's about right. And the time that we've been together really started in '76 -- that was when we started rehearsing one day a week and managed to get through about half a song (laughs). So it's a very long relationship and it's a very different thing now.

"I mean, maybe it was always something like this. Maybe the friendship and the generosity of spirit and the curiosity that seems to galvanize the four of us, maybe that was always there. Bono refers to us sometimes as a bit of a long-necked horse -- you know, we weren't necessarily in the scene. The people who were in the scene were in the Bailey and we were kinda outside the Bailey, knockin' on the door trying to get in (chuckles)."

Are the four of you still as good friends as you were at the beginning?

"Em...it's probably better in a way because there's less of that kind of youthful competition. I think there's much more acceptance and understanding of people's positive things. And by and large the negative aspects of anyone have actually kind of disappeared as people matured. All of us are much better people than maybe we were twenty years go. Or we're certainly much more secure people than were then."

Why is "October" only featured as a secret track on the album?

"Really, that was why," he says. "We kind of realized that we'd missed out on October and it just seemed like a slightly eccentric thing to do. But in a way there is a spirit in that short piece that captures the serenity that maybe wasn't exactly a part of that period. And it's a nice way to finish the compilation.

"Actually, in many ways this compilation grew out of the idea that we wanted to do the B-sides. We'd been talking about the B-sides thing for ages and, again, there's quite a lot of material left off the B-sides. But the B-sides thing had been something that we put together ages ago and just couldn't figure out when was the right time to release it. And then this period, it just seemed right to do it before we sort of nailed our colours to the mast of what the next record's gonna be."

And what is the next record going to be?

"Well we've just begun working on it and it's still early days for the next record but it will be yet another U2 change," he says. "I don't think we're gonna radically change what we do but I think it'll be enough of a change to signify the beginning of whatever the next period is. It's probably the next decade, if you like."

Well, what's the feeling at the moment?

"It's really hard to predict but, in some ways, the songwriting will be more direct. Em, I think Pop was the last record in the journey of the '90s which started with Achtung Baby. I think this new one will be going back to some of the directness and some of the universality of the '80s work. I think we'll be returning to that but without the naivete."

So do U2 now have a new or more defined message after 20 years of being together?

"I think the universality of it has become more personal. I think the values of love and honour and family and all that stuff that you question as a teenager has come round full circle for us, in a way. You know, if you risk things, if you risk what you believe to be right and what you believe to be interesting, it will shine through. And if anything, what U2 has always stood for, or tried to do, is to not be confined by what popular culture or rock & roll can be. Because although we didn't necessarily come from that thing to start with, I think we were very aware that the conservatism of traditional rock & roll, the tribalism of traditional rock & roll and, in later years, the marketing of these different types of music was actually confining what that music could be.

"And I think Bono has always tried to take things from different art forms that are still a part of the culture and just mix the whole thing up. And certainly our forays into the political arena - people have always been somewhat suspicious and cynical about that. But our attitude has always been that we don't have to have a political agenda but we can still be a part of the politics of what's going on -- the things that affect everyone."

Certainly U2 are a band who've never been shy about taking risks and nailing their colours to the political mast. While most of their contemporaries were peddling banal rock & roll cliches and steering clear of anything even vaguely controversial, Bono was singing about everything from the Northern situation to the war in Nicaragua. Even as far back as the War album they were receiving visits from the likes of Garrett Fitzgerald in the studio and, since the mid-'80s, they've been heavily involved with organisations like Amnesty and Greenpeace. In the years since they've become globally famous and artistic ambassadors for Ireland, they've met nearly as many world leaders as Mary Robinson. At this stage, Bill Clinton's practically a buddy.

"Yeah, we've met him several times," Adam nods. "He'd heard that we were ringing George Bush at the White House every night during the Zoo Tour and we were doing a live radio interview that was taking in calls and he phoned in. And that was the beginning of the relationship. And he has been the most extraordinary President. I don't know how big an issue this sexual thing is, but it seems to me that if that's the only thing that they can find to reprimand him over then it's all quite ridiculous. It's a personal family issue, it's not a political issue.

Politically, U2 were also one of the first Irish rock bands to tackle the Northern situation, breaking new ground in 1983 with the impassioned "Sunday Bloody Sunday." Earlier this year, they brought David Trimble and John Hume together on stage in Belfast, an undeniably important moment that transcended music and had a very real effect on many people's real lives. But the North has always been important to them.

"That's something we could never ignore," he says. "I think Southern people through the '70s and really up to the mid-'80s really didn't want to be involved in what was going on there. And we were very badly educated about what was going on up there, I mean, we all knew what we'd grown up with but, really, going to America and being confused as a pro-Republican band just because you were Irish, and people wanting to believe that you were pro-IRA, made us re-evaluate our stance and decide whether or not we were prepared to stand up and be counted. I guess 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' was our first way of acknowledging the North and trying to put it in some kind of context with the Republic.

"I mean, certainly, being able to play Belfast on the Pop tour in the Botanical Gardens, to be able to play a concert like that just wouldn't have been possible ten years ago. And it's been interesting to watch the various people, particularly David Trimble, emerge as a bit of a statesman. It's probably gonna take a lot longer before all forms of sectarianism and terror of some sort or another are a thing of the past. But it is a start. And it was good to be able to turn up and do that thing with Ash and John Hume and David Trimble and to be face to face with them. It was very interesting to spend a few hours with them. It's a dirty job."

Hume and Trimble may have a dirty job on their hands but Adam Clayton certainly doesn't. Living the life of an internationally successful rock star may have its pressures and hassles but, one thing's for sure, it beats flipping burgers for a living! I ask him what's the best thing about being in U2?

"Em...that's a really, really tricky one," he sighs, lighting up a Silk Cut. "I guess the best thing about it is that it's not boring. There's always something new that you could never have imagined, a situation occurring that you never thought you would be involved in to that extent. You know, in many ways things like spending time with Clinton or being part of that John Hume/David Trimble meeting. Those are the sort of things that you go 'well, that's amazing.' I never thought 20 years ago when I was really just looking forward to playing a gig in the pub that 20 years on those things would be happening. Or that we'd be sitting doing an interview in a place like this. I think they're all pretty mindboggling things."

And the worst thing about being in the band?

"God, I don't know. I've never really thought about it in those terms."

Well, what was the worst moment?

"Gosh, I'm sure there were worst moments but they were always kind of...overcome," he says. "I must say, I can't think of anything that would be a worst moment..."

How about the Achtung Baby album sessions in Berlin in 1992, where the band apparently hit a creative deadlock and came close to breaking up?

"Yeah, but that's kind of faded," he insists. "You know, Berlin was very bleak to begin with and the beginning of any record or any new venture is always strange. The beginning of anything, be it the Popmart Tour or the Achtung Baby album sessions -- in many ways what those moments are about is recommitting to each other, to the music. And there are always those bleak moments of going, 'well, can we still do it? Are we completely off our trolleys trying to scale this particular peak?' But, as I say, with time, it all falls back into perspective. And, yeah, those early days in Berlin; not only was Berlin a pretty inhospitable place at that time but musically it was very hard to find something that we were excited about. That doesn't mean that we weren't able to be creative. It just meant that the standards that we were looking for, the breakthrough that we were looking for was very, very slow in coming.

"I mean, real low points would've been times like the October tour. We finished the tour in America during a very difficult period in the band's career, because we'd fallen into a situation where we weren't getting much support for the record from radio and there was a transition between record companies. It was one of those buy-out things, the end of a deal. I can't remember the exact circumstances but it was the end of a Warner's deal that distributed Island at that time, and we kind of ran out of money on that tour. I think the last month on the road we couldn't afford to pay the crew.

"Those are pretty bleak moments, where you think you might get dropped and you might not be able to pay the bills and, indeed, you might actually come back owing people money. I mean, even getting a record deal for us was very hard. We'd been turned down by everyone, we'd borrowed some money from our parents to go over and do a kind of club tour of London and, again, we were just naive compared to the other acts out there. We must have sounded so different to the other English bands and that didn't even secure us a record deal. And yet, from a frustration point of view, we were playing good gigs at that time to relatively large numbers of people in Ireland but we couldn't fill the Hope & Anchor which only needed about twenty people to look full."

Is there anything the band have done in the past that you now regard as a mistake?

"Hmmmm, I don't know," he says scrunching up his forehead. "Mistakes? Maybe we should've stopped after U2-3, I dunno. Maybe that's where it all went wrong (laughs). Somehow, every time we do something, we've managed to bring the audience with us and it's really unusual and quite amazing to have had 20 years and have audience that is still young. You can go to shows by many of our contemporaries and you can actually feel like you're the youngest person in the audience. And it's great to be able to make records that are still relevant to young rock bands or young music bands because they're the people that keep it fresh for us and that kind of music is what keeps us fresh. By going into club culture and hearing what people are doing. I mean, we could be a folk band if we wanted to, but that's not what we're interested in. We're interested in risk and that collision of new ideas."

More than any other member of the band, Adam Clayton has always been regarded as U2's wild card -- the most rock star-ish of them all. In the early days he was the rebellious one, always in trouble for some reason or another, out partying while the rest of the band were in praying, constantly trying to throw his arms around the world. Later, when the others were getting married, settling down and having kids, Adam was crashing cars, dating supermodels and being photographed at wild parties. The first real indication that he wasn't named Adam for nothing came in 1989, when he was arrested in Dublin for the original sin of cannabis possession. His arrest made national headlines.

"Getting busted wasn't exactly a great thing," he recalls. "That was a bit bleak. I mean, it was my own fault. And I'm sure I was out of my head -- emotionally apart from anything else. But it is serious because it is illegal. But seeing your name splattered over newspapers because of that is not one of the great feelings."

But that kind of publicity is just part and parcel of the job, surely?

"It has become that," he says. "And it's always a difficult thing to argue, because to some extent there is this very unhealthy and ill-defined relationship between musicians and press. The press make you into a celebrity and once you've crossed that line of being a celebrity -- whatever the hell that means, it's kind of a meaningless phrase -- then you seem to become public property and people seem to think that anything that you do is actually not really you, it's this other person and therefore it's okay to comment on it."

Is it ever hurtful?

"Yeah, there is an element of it that's hurtful and I don't speak just personally. I speak as regards everyone in the band."

How did Bono feel when The Star ran that photograph of him with his pants down on a beach two months ago?

"I think he had to take it on the chin. You know, it's not what you like people to see over breakfast."

Although you did pose naked on the sleeve of Acthung Baby...

"Well, I think stuff like that where you're making a decision to do something and you do it...you know, there ain't nothing wrong with that," he says, lighting another cigarette. "But I think where you happen to be doing something in the privacy of your own moment and somebody with a very long lens and a very long nose is sticking it into your private life and essentially stealing that moment and then spreading it across a newspaper, em, that's not one of the greats. If you're walking down O'Connell Street then fair enough, but if it's not your back garden, if you're in somebody else's back garden, you don't expect that to happen."

Does that kind of intrusion make relationships difficult?

"You get wise to it but...yeah," he sighs. "I'm always shocked by people stuffing a tape recorder in my face when I haven't agreed to talk to them and are asking me for a quote on something. I'm not very good at coping with that whereas Bono is very good at it, he's very, very natural at it. But there was a situation last week where I came out of the studio at midnight or something and I was tired, it had been a long day, and there was some journalist from The Star I think, who was door-stepping the studio and wanted a quote on something. And I just couldn't think straight. i don't know what the fellow thought. But I do find that hard. And I know it's all part of the job but it's part of the job that I'm not good at."

Have there been times when you've been dreading the following day's headlines?

"A few times, yeah. It has happened and I don't recommend it to anyone. It's hard when you see stuff written and it's not always representative, though sometimes you do deserve it. Like you deserve it if you happen to be caught drunk driving or whatever, as happened to me. But there's nothing quite like seeing it spread across the front page of a newspaper at 10 o'clock in the morning."

How do your family cope with that?

"The best they can, they get on with it. I mean, my family have been pretty good considering everything I've put them through. You see, they don't really think of you like that, which is an advantage. I don't know -- you're getting into a pretty complex area that would take a long time to talk about. You just get on with it. The main thing is not to die. You can figure out, with the right support, what your difficulties are."

And certainly, there were difficulties. The moment when Adam finally realised he had to clean up his act came during the Zoo Tour in Sydney in 1994, when the bass player was so exhausted and partied out that bass technician Stuart Morgan had to take his place on stage. It was the first -- and only -- time that a member of U2 didn't play at one of their gigs.

"It was a pretty bad moment," he recalls. "One of those mornings that you wish you'd never woken up. Again, a lot of very complex emotions. And, to some extent, it was about letting down the other guys in the band the audience but, in many ways, it was actually the effect it has on yourself, of letting yourself down or realising that you've crossed the line and saying that, as regards your own personal standards, it's not acceptable. And you have to examine what that's about. And I did examine what it was about and it was not a very nice conclusion that I came to."

What was the conclusion you came to?

"Well, namely that for whatever reasons -- and I still don't know what those reasons are -- I am one of those characters that has an addictive personality. And it's an emotional problem as much as it is a physical problem and I had to start dealing with that. And that's the hard road, figuring out the psychology of it. The avoiding substances of any kind is hard but, okay, it's not that hard. It's facing the devil inside you, that's the tricky bit."

You're completely clean now?

"Um, yeah," he nods. "I am, apart from coffee."

It's a bit of role reversal from the earlier days of the band. Now that they've finally started partying properly, you've stopped!

"Yeah," he laughs. "There are members of the band who seem to be able to cope quite easily without sleep, with a large amount of alcohol inside them. And they seem to be find but I just wasn't one of those people."

Perhaps more than any other band, U2 have always been artistic magpies, begging, borrowing and stealing from every area of popular culture. They've worked with all sorts -- artists, opera singers, composers, film-makers and authors. Last year, William Burroughs appeared in their video for "Last Night on Earth" just two months before his death. So how was Burroughs to work with?

"He was fantastic!" Adam enthuses. "He was very, very with it in spite of his addictions. We'd actually met him before. We'd visited him in Kansas the last time we toured there he kind of hung out and brought his guns along. I don't know, I mean his early work was mindblowing but, in a way, he became a bit of an institution for something that had existed a long, long time ago. And America is like that, America holds onto those things, whereas I think with the British or Europeans in general, once you skip out of sight once a few years have gone by, you tend to get forgotten about. But Burroughs survived very, very well over the last 40 or 50 years as an American legend."

Another Beat writer whom U2 have worked with in the past was Allen Ginsberg, who also died last year. The coincidence hasn't gone unnoticed by the band.

"Well that was really quite an interesting thing because both Ginsberg and Burroughs were people that we'd become creatively involved with and then they were gone," he says. "I wouldn't like to be irreverent but it did feel like the minute that we did something together their number was up. Again, weird stuff. But that's the great thing about what we've been able to do. We're not in some rock 'n' roll ghetto. Being popular has allowed us to really just pull together these things that shouldn't be pulled together, or the rules say that they shouldn't be pulled together."

In a sense, U2 have given as much to popular culture as they've taken from it. They've borrowed in the past, but they've also been borrowed, most particularly by writers. The central character in Salman Rushdie's forthcoming book is apparently based on Bono. Robert Cremmin's debut novel A Sort of Homecoming was partly based around the music of the band. And they also made a cameo in Brett Easton Ellis's controversial novel American Psycho. Has Adam read the book?

"Em, I heard about it. That's the one with the U2 gig in it. That's pretty weird isn't it? (laughs). I mean, that's where you get into the Rolling Stones kind of territory, where you become a justification for a certain time or a certain period in somebody else's fantasy. I've come across references to U2 in a couple of books and a couple of movies and stuff, and it always gives me a bit of jolt because I get confused as to whether it's real or fantasy.

"It's amazing. I mean, it really is amazing to reach that place because, I suppose, our reference point in the early days was kind of, 'how far have Horslips or Thin Lizzy or the Boomtown Rats got?' That was our reference point. As an Irish band -- which is very much our identity and our root -- we've gone beyond our wildest dreams. In a way we can't measure it too easily because we can only measure it in terms of what it feels like to live in Dublin. I mean, if you lived in New York or L.A. then maybe you'd again, it's always a little bit strange when we step out of Dublin and are reminded that U2 means as much everywhere else as it does in Dublin."

Do you rush out to buy books or movies that refer to you or have you gone beyond that?

"No, no I don't," he says, shaking his head. "Sometimes things are out that I'll read but generally I'm not obsessive about knowing everything about us that's going on out there. And in terms of vanity, I'm not that interested either."

Does Adam Clayton have any other artistic aspirations or creative outlets outside of music?

"There isn't really a lot of time," he says. "We work pretty much ten months of the year so when you get to a break -- and it's usually in the summer or winter, a little like school holidays -- all you wanna do is take some time out. Keeping the U2 thing going on requires quite a bit of work. I mean, there are things I would like to do but I'm beginning to accept that unless U2 for reason disappears in the smoke, I'm not gonna be able to do these things until my 60s. If I live that long."

And when do you think U2 will end?

"Well it feels very good at the moment because I feel we're on the threshold of defining something new, in as much as the '80s period was that energy that we talked about earlier -- that naivete and that energy. The '90s have been a period of stepping back from the earlier earnestness and, if you like, that veil of irony came into where we were at. I'm not quite sure what the next ten years is gonna be but I think it's gonna be pioneer territory for us. There's not many bands -- if any -- that have been in that position creatively, critically, financially. And we're gonna take that and we're gonna use it. And if rock & roll can have an expression in the populist culture that's what we want to do.

"I mean, it would be very easy for U2 to hold onto its position, not challenge or threaten it and grow old gracefully with its audience intact," he continues. "We could make critics' record without necessarily trying to make No. 1 records, with lots of integrity or whatever. But we're actually just gonna try and pole-vault into the next century and be in people's faces for the next ten years at least."

And on that note, the world's most famous bass player gathers his car keys and cigarettes, firmly shakes my hand and breezes out the door. Less than a minute later he's back.

"I'm sorry," he smiles apologetically, reaching down to the table. "I almost forgot my spoon."