Hack at work.
Killing Bono
"The best book I have ever read about trying to make it in the music business" - Elton John
"A fantastic book, which manages the difficult trick of being simultaneously very funny and very sad." - Bob Geldof
"I was Neil McCormick's fan in school. He was much cooler than me, a much better writer and I thought he'd make a much better rock star. I was wrong on one count. He's written a great book" - Bono
“Look what they done to my song, ma”
The Undertakers first gig, Ivan (Robert Sheehan) & Neil (Ben Barnes)
I know there’s been a lot of interest in this in some quarters, so now that Hot Press has let the cat out of the bag, here’s a few moments from the set of Killing Bono, including the one that could upset the balance of the universe forever and send us all spinning off in some awful time bending paradox, the moment when I first met my younger self …
One of these Neil McCormicks still thinks he could become a rock star. But which one?
And here’s my brother Ivan and I in our cameo, as a couple of old paddys in the 70s. People used to wear these suits, you know. In fact, my brother still does.
Neil & Ivan, in a time warp. One of these men still thinks he could become a rock star, too
And here’s an excerpt from ‘Look, That’s Me Up There on the Screen!’ by Olaf Tyarensen in the current issue of Hot Press
“Shortly after 3pm, having just jetted in from London, a rather wary-looking Neil McCormick arrives onto the set (he’ll be filming a small cameo tomorrow). A tall, handsome and silver-haired man in his late forties, he doesn’t look like a ringer for Barnes. (Or is it vice versa?).
“It’s all very surreal,” he remarks, looking around at the small army of actors, extras and technicians all dedicated to putting his life story onto the big screen. “They’ve been sort of keeping me away, which I kind of understand. I take everything in my stride, always. I probably didn’t when I was that age, but I’ve learned. You know, a little bit of failure, that joy-ride will teach you to be a bit Zen about everything.
Neil being interviewed by Olaf, whose handheld recorded can be seen on the left
“But I had weird anxiety last night about coming here and being confronted with my younger self, and the fear that I might want to take my younger self aside and tell him a few home truths, and we end up having a bit of a Star Trek moment, where you step back into the portal of your own past, and I’m wondering if maybe I can change things now.”
McCormick still hasn’t actually met Barnes. “I haven’t met him, though I’m about to!” he says, looking mock-nervously around. “We did talk about this – Ben wanted to meet me and I wanted to meet him, obviously – you know, the guy that plays you. But then, it’s not like a biopic. In a biopic – you know, Bono is a real character in this, people know him, and the actor has to get him right, and has done a fucking incredible job. I see him walking around here and I see the younger Bono I used to know. But nobody knows who I am or cares. I’m just the catalyst, and the actor has to bring himself to it.
“Nick’s fear was that the actor would meet me and immediately start saying, ‘Well, he doesn’t talk with an Irish accent, so I’m not going to talk with an Irish accent’. But I’ve been in London for 27 years or something. And he did rather insult me, Nick did. He said, ‘You know that funny little thing you do with your mouth?’ And I said, ‘Yeah?’ Basically, only one side of my face seems to work. He said, ‘He’s going to start doing that, and the first two weeks of shooting I’m going to have him talking out of the side of his mouth’. So I said, ‘Fine, I’ll stay away’. So, because of that I didn’t meet him beforehand, and he’s got his performance together, and now I finally… I have the feeling that I’m going to walk in there and disrupt his concentration a little, when he sees the gap that exists between me and him. So it’s going to be interesting.”
McCormick certainly doesn’t have any complaints about Hamm’s casting Barnes to play him.
“I was talking about this with The Edge, and he was saying, ‘I want Brad Pitt to play me’. Everyone wants Brad Pitt to play them. Of course. But I’ve got Ben Barnes playing me. The only thing I was thinking was that he’s a bit too fucking handsome, because I figure that with my talent and his looks we could have really gone somewhere. I don’t think any record company would have been booting me out, looking like that.”
Unfortunately, the producers – wisely! – wouldn’t grant McCormick his biggest casting request. “I really wanted them to cast Colm Meaney as Bono,” he laughs. “That would’ve been the ultimate revenge!”
Has he discussed the movie with his old nemesis recently?
“Not recently. He has been very supportive throughout this process, as have U2 in general. I mean, he doesn’t know too much about it, and I think it’s best to keep it that way. Ha, ha!”
While he’s obviously thought about it a lot, McCormick is still trying to get his head around the concept of a movie being made about his own life.
“Embarking on this whole process is just kind of weird. I do think to myself, and I had thought to myself in the beginning, the book exists and that is going to stay there no matter what. And that if anybody wants to see what the story was from the inside of the story then they’re going to go back to the book, and nothing’s going to change in the book. But everything else is going to change, because if this film is successful – which is a big ‘if’, because who knows what happens with these things, they can come out and they can go straight to video, and they can disappear – but they seem to be doing an amazing job.
“I think it’s got a great script, it’s very funny, there’s a lot of energy, and Nick Hamm is doing a great job – but the weird thing for me is I’m not going to be me anymore. I wrote this book about being in the shadow of Bono, and I’m about to become a shadow of myself! People are going to think that I’m Ben Barnes!”
A new look Shook Up! poster
and the original picture of Ivan and I on which it was based