Alert! It’s not Edge who’s on fire!

On Christmas day, BBC Radio 1 aired a Jo Whiley interview with Bono that seems to have been recorded the week before Christmas. They covered a lot of topics in the hour-long program (or is it programme?), but I’ll just transcribe the super-duper newsworthy stuff about touring, new songs and albums, and … of course … the obligatory band member on fire comments. At least this time it’s not Edge who is burning. Whew.

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JO WHILEY: If you could take a tour anywhere at the moment, where would you choose to go?

Bono: I just had the most amazing time in Tokyo, and I suppose I would love to go to China. I would love to play India.

I can’t imagine that would be for another year or so?

Probably a couple of years. We’re at a very important juncture now. We’ve put out this collection of our Best Of Singles, which is a joke, really, because we’ve never been much of a singles band. But we did it because we have a very young audience coming through, and we wanted to, you know, just be very available for people who want to check us out, you know? We wanted to have something they could check us out very easy on.

But when you do these collections, they are usually to mark the end of something, and our band has certainly reached the end of where we’ve been at for the last couple of albums. I want to see what else we can do with it, take it to the next level; I think that’s what we’ve got to do.

You going to continue to be a rock band?

We’re gonna continue to be a band, but maybe the rock will have to go; maybe the rock has to get a lot harder. But whatever it is, it’s not gonna stay where it is.

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There’s talk of Bruce Springsteen doing Glastonbury this year. If that happens, you could maybe get on stage with him. Let’s start the rumor now, shall we?

He’s amazing. There’s real power there, in voice and the acoustic guitar. I would like to do a couple of tunes in that direction, with just a lot of space around the voice. I’d like to strip things down; that’s something I’d be very interested in at the moment.

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So, looking ahead to 2007…. All the hard work you’ve done over the past couple of years, how would you describe how you all are?

Something happened on the tour with Adam Clayton, that’s for sure. I think you might call it… rediscovering your mojo. [laughs] I don’t what it was, but he is really on fire. And that’s very interesting because Adam’s the sort who — it’s like catching lightning. He’s the one that decides the pace we move at, and I don’t know how that is or why that is, but if he’s on fire it bodes very well. Edge is determined to reinvent the electric guitar and find his place in the pantheon of guitar players that have inspired him. So that’s good.

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