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Another view: The thing with Bono and Apple...

Supreme: Bono leads his bandmates through The Joshua Tree: Angela Lubrano/Livepix
Supreme: Bono leads his bandmates through The Joshua Tree: Angela Lubrano/Livepix

I hear that U2 have a new album coming out.

I know this not because I have received a press release (though I have) but because all the music journalists I know have already begun sharpening their pens – or fingers, or whatever you sharpen now that nobody writes anything down in longhand any more. They do this every time U2 bring out an album, as regular as the first cuckoo of spring, because music journalists hate U2 – and Bono in particular. They hate them with a vengeance.

That’s partially because music journalists hate anyone who’s popular, especially if they are both popular and privately educated – hello Coldplay, hello James Blunt – and U2 have sold 170 million records and $2 billion (yes,TWO BILLION DOLLARS) of concert tickets. And partly because they hate pop stars who get involved in politics – hello Geldof, hello Sting – because they always think it’s being done for egotism rather than altruism.

Mostly, I suspect, it is because they think Bono comes across in public as a pompous, self-regarding egomaniac. And here they may have a point.

Now I don’t know Bono personally but I do know that pop stars, like actors and other celebrities, often create a public persona to get people to buy their records or see their films, and that it’s not necessarily how they should be judged as a person. Just look at Donald Trump’s tweets: it’s hard to imagine a real president could be that petty and infantile, isn’t it... oh, wait, I seem to have defeated my own argument.

But back to Bono, who I once met while queueing for food at a party. We had a brief chat, during which he seemed anything but pompous or self-regarding as I tried to convince him that he should have released the then newly-released U2-Eno collaboration under his band’s name rather than under the pseudonym Passengers. He said “I don’t think Brian (Eno) would have been very happy if we’d done that” and I said “I think he would have been very happy if it had sold millions instead of almost nothing at all” - it’s the band’s lowest-selling album by far and peaked at number 76 in the charts - and he smiled and said “You might have a point there.” Then he helped himself to some canapés and we never met again.

I also have a friend who taught his children at primary school in Ireland and says he was very good at school events, turning up to sell raffle tickets and that sort of thing, rather than instructing his management to donate gold discs and electric guitars. But I have no axe to grind when it comes to Bono – I am entirely neutral, or at least indifferent.

I can’t say I listen frequently to U2, although I enjoyed their early albums and loved ‘The Joshua Tree’ and I once saw them in a pub where the audience numbered approximately 10 (including me) and I still have a rare copy of their very first Irish single. My fleeting encounter with Bono did not lead to lasting friendship and I cannot help but notice that he disregarded my sage advice to make ‘Original Soundtracks 1’ a U2 album, a decision that deprived him of a few more millions to put into his offshore account. And there’s the real rub.

I suspect a lot of the resentment comes down to envy. U2 are very rich indeed. The one thing their critics always bring up is tax: specifically the avoidance thereof. If you google “U2” and “tax” you’ll find it followed by the word “avoidance.” This began when the band (or their accountants) re-registered some of their companies from low-tax Ireland to lower-tax Holland in 2006, and continued when the recent Paradise Papers revelations revealed that Bono had been investing in a Lithuanian shopping centre – registered in Guernsey, through a company in Malta - that seemed not to be paying any tax at all.

None of this is illegal, by the way, and Bono has stated that he welcomes an audit, and that he campaigns for transparency for offshore companies, but it’s all fuel to the fire of his critics, who accuse him of hypocrisy, given some of his past statements about third world poverty being exacerbated by big corporations dodging their tax commitments.

Now I don’t know whether Bono, whose philanthropic works are many - too many to be listed here - is simply being financially prudent, but I don’t think his financial affairs are any reason to prejudge a new record by U2. Yet that’s exactly how it will be judged, if not by their fans. The critics are still frothing at the mouth about the last U2 album which was delivered free of charge, via an arrangement with Apple, directly to the music libraries of all their subscribers.

To me, that seemed like a generous gesture – giving an album away free. To the music critics, it was an abomination, an intrusion, an obscenity, and a step too far. I remember at the time wondering why: nobody has to listen to it. Not even Apple have yet found a way to force people to listen to music without having to press a few keys, and those same keys (or some nearby ones) can be used to delete the album from your library in a few seconds.

Which brings me to another point. Because many of these critics screaming about Bono’s hypocrisy are doubtless typing out their fulminations on an Apple phone or computer, and Apple’s tax avoidance strategies make U2’s look positively small-scale. Apple owe the Irish tax authorities £11 billion in back taxes, according to the European commission . Yet the “creatives” who worship the cult of Apple, and despise U2, are strangely silent when it comes to criticising the accounting of the company that makes their favourite slimline white electronic devices.

I’ve always been bemused – no, irritated - by the way everybody with a mobile phone made by Apple always talks about their “iPhone” and how everyone with an Apple laptop always talks about their “Macbook”, while everyone else with a non-Apple device just talks non-boastily about their “phone” and their “laptop”.

When did you last hear someone saying: “I’ll check that on my Android” or “I’ll have a look on my Samsung” or “Let me just look at my Dell / Hewlett Packard / Acer”? They just don’t. But the most irritating thing about the Apple cultists is the way they constantly badger everyone else to join them, by telling us that everything beginning with a small “i” is intrinsically better than everything else, when the reality is that they are just more expensive than everything else.

If there was an award for best corporate branding of the 21st century (and there are surely lots of them) there would only be one name on the shortlist; or one apple-shaped logo. And you have to hand it to the Jobs-worths: whenever they put a new phone on the market their army of obliging fans in the media run puff pieces about the queues at the shop, complete with taglines straight out of the press release like “Apple’s best phone ever” rather than shock headlines about “the world’s most expensive phone ever”.

So it’s one rule for big corporations and one rule for another. But only one of them made a song as good as this:

U2’s new album, ‘Songs Of Experience’, is out on 1 December, price £10.99; Apple’s new iPhone X is out now, price £999 to £1,490.