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Ali’s endless inspiration
Couple rock superstardom with the fact that Bono has Nelson Mandela on speed-dial, and one wonders how they can really have any semblance of an ordinary life
Ali Hewson was a 12-year-old tomboy whose parents owned a small electrical business on the north side of Dublin when a cocky teenager called Paul sidled up to her one day at school: “He had some dodgy pick-up line which I thought was meant for my friend. I just thought he was an idiot.” Little did she know that 10 years later she’d be married to Paul — by now known as Bono, lead singer of U2 — and that she would become half of one of those rare partnerships: a rock music marriage that survives.
In the past 23 years, she’s retained her privacy by staying behind the scenes to bring up their children — Jordan, 15, Eve, 13, Elijah, five, and John, three — in a three-storey tower in Killiney, on the coast outside Dublin. If she’s known at all, it is in Ireland where she’s concentrated on charity work without any Princess Diana-style brouhaha.
Now she’s about to launch an ethical clothing company, Edun. Ethical clothing, like rock marriages, tends to have a bad reputation. One imagines one-size-fits-all jumpers crocheted from odd socks, hemp smocks tie-dyed the colour of muddy nettles. However, Edun’s American designer, Rogan Gregory, has put together a collection which is more Marni than something your mother would make. There are diaphanous batwing tops, funky denim minis, floaty, low-slung skirts, jeans which are both sexy and “right-on”.
Ali has spent four years researching and setting up factories in Tunisia and Peru, often in places where a thriving clothing industry was killed by global brands. There’s also a project in Lesotho, in an area of southern Africa blighted by 50 per cent unemployment and 30 per cent Aids. As much as possible, the materials are produced organically. Staff are paid the legal minimum wage, working conditions are guaranteed and there’s no child labour. Discreet labels on Edun clothes are embroidered with the words: “We carry the story of the people who made our clothes around with us.”
“The whole idea grew from Bono’s trip to Africa and his impression when he came back that what they need more than anything is trade,” she explains. In 2000, Africa had six per cent of world trade. That figure has dropped to a pitiful 2 per cent. “If they could get back just one per cent, it would be worth $70 billion a year. The idea is to show that the world can do business with Africa. They don’t want charity; they want to prove that they can make a profit.”
Eamon Dunphy, U2’s biographer, has said: “The best thing about Bono is Ali. She is calm, rational and able to see beyond individuals to policies.” So while she is working from home on the project, taking calls from Europe during the day and America once the children have gone to bed, I wonder what Mr Ali Hewson is doing for Edun. This is a man whose fashion sense is best summed up by look-at-me hats and tight black jeans. Is he — God forbid — having a say in the designs? “No! It’s my job to keep him away from the designs,” she wails. “He can talk about anything else he wants to. He’s a great sounding-board. He’s really good at inciting people to riot. But no, he’s not famous for his fashion sense.”
Research in America into famous sporting marriages puts the survival rate at 30 per cent. Wives complain that they end up being single parents, lumbered with all the decision-making while partners enjoy a life free from domesticity. I imagine rock star wives have the same complaints, with the added threat of even more groupies. “Absolutely,” Ali agrees. “It isn’t normal and it’s been a huge learning curve. Sometimes, there are arguments when I have to shout, ‘I am not 60,000 people! There’s no point in getting on the table and performing right now’. Meanwhile, he complains that ‘he feels like a piece of litter when he comes home because I’m constantly trying to tidy him up’.”
She makes much of the fact that they’ve sent the children to state schools and that she and Bono can “go to the local chipper” if they want. But couple rock superstardom with the fact that Bono has Nelson Mandela on speed-dial, and I wonder how they can really have any semblance of an ordinary life.
“If I married him for one reason, I married him for this moment: I opened the front door and Mikhail Gorbachev was standing there with this huge teddy bear he had brought for our youngest. I didn’t even know he was in the country, but Bono had invited him for lunch.” The rest of us might have panicked but Ali was delighted. “It’s the one image which will stay in my mind for the rest of my life. Everything that Bono had ever done wrong just melted away.”
Perhaps another reason why the marriage has lasted so long is that they’ve grown up together. Bono’s mother died of a brain haemorrhage in 1974. While his life was falling apart, Ali’s represented stability and family. “He disappeared into this blackness for a while, made all the worse by the fact that he had been just at the age when you think, ‘Oh parents, who needs them?’ I think the whole experience made him conscious of things most people are cushioned from.”
Neil McCormick, U2 ghost-writer and the London-based Daily Telegraph newspaper music critic who went to the same school as Bono and Ali and whose book, I Was Bono’s Doppleganger, traces their friendship, believes his mother’s death has been the driving force behind his career: “To lose your mother at that age leaves a phenomenal hole to fill.”
Creatively, Bono may have filled the gap with the band that would stage its first gig in the school gym. Emotionally, he found solace with Ali and her family. “He fell in love with my mum for her cooking. He’d arrive at mealtimes. The only things at his place were (instant mashed potato), cornflakes and reheated airline food which his brother used to get from work.” His father was struggling to hold the family together. “He had to be a mother and a father while being out of work, trying to keep an eye on his children. He took a hard-line approach which did not help.”
Nevertheless, when they announced they were getting married aged 22 and 23, Ali’s parents “nearly passed out”. She wore a dress made by her mother, and Adam Clayton, U2’s bass player, was best man. “We had 70 quid when we got married.” Initially, Ali worked for an insurance company but when the band “started to take off, she gave up the job to join them on tour. Ambitions to be a nurse were shelved (maybe my one regret) and she took a political science degree. Two weeks before her final exams and as sales for The Joshua Tree were catapulting the band into supergroup status, their first daughter, Jordan, was born.
Despite the charity work, she maintains that bringing up their four children has been her most important role: “The job of being mother is the one I don’t want to fail at. If I ever felt there was any strain on them, I would stop.” —Dawn/The Guardian News Service
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