Book reviews - Reading of Redemption
I was Bono's Doppleganger - Neil McCormick
Neil McCormick is one of the best rock writers of the day. When it comes to U2 his interviews are the most provocative and precise because he has been their friend for so long that he has insight no one else has and also the inside relationship to gain the right to ask.
Neil McCormick is also is like most of us. We all dream of being famous some time. Most of us have probably posed in front of the mirror with our tennis racket guitar or our hair brush microphone. Where McCormick differs is that few of us get outside the mirror or the bedroom door. He pursued the fame that he felt he was destined for and for a decade was many times so close but every time too far from the elusive record deal and world adulation. But where Neil is unique is that most of us who dream of fame, and even some of us who almost make it, don’t sit in school beside the guy who becomes the biggest rock star on the entire planet! It makes it slightly harder to live with and in some ways I Am Doppleganger is a psychological study of having to deal with such a cruel scenario. Remarkably though it is not a bitter tale of how much McCormick has grown to hate the one who stole his dreams. Quite the reverse. McCormick’s admiration for his old school pal grows as their lives part and then come back together again.
The threads of the cloth of McCormick’s life are many and they weave plots and sub plots that make this a fascinating read in a whole range of fronts. For the music fan there is the life of the failure which more musicians will relate to than the usual rock biographies brought out at the peak of success of one of the chosen very few. For the U2 anorak it is a vital book in the way that it documents the late seventies music scene around Dublin and to be truthful nearly every major player in the next decade of Irish rock make cameo appearances mainly in the assortment of bands that McCormick put together in the quest of his dream. There are also insights into life at the Mount Temple School and especially the phenomenon that was its Christian Union at the time which by a freak of nature was a hundred strong in a country where five might be over ambitious!
God. Yes this book is about God too. McCormick just cannot grasp how someone as cool as Bono can believe such nonsense and hang out with such uncool people. Their twenty five conversation about Christianity is intriguing. Indeed a major sub-plot that McCormick probably didn’t intend is Bono’s personal evangelism techniques, never Bible thumping his mate but always making space for the subject and filling that space in a gentle way. Bono finishing times together and phone calls with “God Bless” even irritates the atheist McCormick but how his famous friends treat him seems to only cause him to go after this God question more and more. Indeed in those U2 interviews I referred to earlier he is the one who most asks about God and always asks the best questions.
That the book is a story of McCormick’s journey of faith is certainly intended and it has an amazingly ironic end. After twenty five years Neil McCormick had his first recording released by a record company this year. You might have accidentally bought it. It appeared on Songs Inspired By The Passion Of The Christ. There alongside Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave one man’s life dream comes true. That it was on this album is not lost on Bono whose wife Ali tipped off the producers to this song by The Ghost Who Walks not even knowing it was Neil! (full album released now!) As Bono points out the irony McCormick says something about still searching which for most of the book he would have denied the need to. Utterly fascinating.
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