U2's Brit win hugely significant

The triumph of U2 at this year's Brit Awards means more than another bunch of trophies on an Irish mantelpiece

The triumph of U2 at this year's Brit Awards means more than another bunch of trophies on an Irish mantelpiece. It is the culmination of a half-century love-hate relationship, finally matured into mutual respect.

There was a time when the awarding to an Irish band of the accolade of Outstanding Contribution to British Music would have caused muttering into pints about quislings and postcolonial condescension. But, in a strange way, the macro-political events of recent years have rendered this line of thought transparently redundant. The rationale for the award - that U2 signed their first major record deal in Britain - is equally transparent, but irrelevant.

I watched the awards on TV3 and found the occasion moving in a way I had not expected. Music awards ceremonies are invariably tacky affairs, the Brits more than most. Anyway, I had come round to the view that U2 were way past their best, finding it ironic that their latest album, All That You Can't Leave Behind, while perhaps the least interesting developmentally, has become the band's crowning commercial moment.

I had a sense that U2 were seeking to distil something they had grown tired of saying into a capsule of pop consciousness to woo a new generation. Nothing wrong in this: the mark of immortality, as Patrick Kavanagh said, is if one's ideas are exciting to the young. Pop is the repository of the moral clarity of youth, and few artists in the world have a clearer moral vision than U2's.

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At the awards ceremony when Bono delivered his brief litany of thanks, it sounded at first like one of those awful Oscar speeches in which the award recipient thanks everyone but the usherettes, so I wasn't paying as much attention as I might have.

He thanked Brian Eno and one or two other individuals. Then he thanked The Beatles, NME and BBC Radio 1. To the casual ear he might have been paying token homage at the shrine of the elders, and thanking a music rag and a radio station for plugging his band. Maybe that's all he meant to do, but I don't think so.

And when he left the stage during Until the End of the World and walked among the audience, I felt he was transcending the usual limits of that somewhat cliched convention. Until the End of the World is a song about a post-crucifixion encounter between Judas and Jesus: In waves of regret, waves of joy/I reached out for the one I tried to destroy.

NO MATTER how much one's view of the national question might place the blame where it belongs, there is no denying the wealth of cultural life we have gained from our proximity to the UK. During the dark days of censorship and self absorption from which we emerged only in the 1970s, British publishers, newspapers and radio stations helped to maintain some approximation of a cultural life here, beneath the arid, frightened surface of a nation struggling to again find a voice of its own.

And while not forgetting what the usurpers took away, we should remember that, in other ways, we reclaimed perhaps as much. What we might have been, left alone, is one thing; what we are because of what happened is not a universally positive picture, but it is what it is.

For many of us, growing up in Ireland in the second half of the last century, those three entities mentioned by Bono - the Beatles, NME and Radio 1 - were vital lifelines to which we clung when there was little close to hand with which to connect.

The Beatles hardly need a reference. NME, while often smug and nasty, was vital in opening up the pores of Irish popular culture to the outside world. Radio 1's John Peel and Whispering Bob Harris were extraordinarily respectful towards Ireland and the Irish. The things Bono mentioned gave us much of the cultural life we have.

Delight in the delayed acceptance of U2 by the British pop establishment should therefore transcend the pleasure we take in the success of an Irish fly, because it is Irish, climbing fastest up a wall. This was a reconciliation, as important as that in the political arena.

It was, on the one hand, an acknowledgment that U2 owe their existence and their art to the life they breathed from the winds and breezes of British pop. From the other side, it represented an acknowledgment of the meaning of U2's unique ethos and how much that has given back to the British cultural compost heap. It is interesting that recognition came after the band dropped their defensive layer of irony and allowed their passionate heart to beat its way to the top of the charts.

U2's earnest ethos got the band a rough ride in the past from the British pop establishment, perhaps not overtly because of U2 being Irish, but certainly because of elements in the band's sensibility manifestly drawn from Irish culture. The notion we frequently entertain in internal discussions about U2 - that they have excelled in an idiom which is other than Irish - is only one side of the story.

The other is that U2 brought to that idiom a set of qualities and influences which were unmistakably Irish, which could never have been accumulated anywhere else. And that, paradoxically, was why U2 became, as the Brits' citation put it, the Biggest Band in the World.

jwaters@irish-times.ie