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Hard rock being . . .

Big hair and extended guitar solos. I was saying, “Let’s get back to this rock & roll thing.” Then people said, “Oh, have you heard the Clash?” And then seeing the Jam on Top of the Pops in ’76, just going, “They’re our age! This is possible.” Then the Radiators From Space—our local punk band—had a song called . . . “Telecaster” or something: “Gonna push my Telecaster through the television screen/’Cause I don’t like what’s going down.” And it’s a twelve-bar thing—so you can play it.

How far into the band are you now?

It’s just occasional rehearsing. We’re playing the Eagles. We’re playing the Moody Blues. But it turns out we’re really crap at it. We actually aren’t able to play other people’s songs. The one Stones song we tried to play was “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” It was really bad. So we started writing our own—it was easier.

Were the Ramones the big punk influence on you? Or the Clash?

More Ramones than the Clash—though we saw the Clash first, in ’77, in Dublin, and it was extraordinary. There was an air of violence, the sense that somebody could die. But their music didn’t connect with us the same way that the Ramones’ did.

What connected about the Ramones?

I didn’t have the gravel or the gravitas of Joe Strummer. Joey Ramone sang like Dusty Springfield. . . . It was a melodic voice like mine.

Was David Bowie a big influence?

Gigantic, the English Elvis. Bowie was much more responsible for the aesthetic of punk rock than he’s been given credit for, like, in fact, most interesting things in the Seventies and Eighties. I put his pictures up in my bedroom. We played “Suffragette City” in that first wedding-band phase.

We started to listen to Patti Smith; Edge starts listening to Tom Verlaine. And, suddenly, those punk chords are just not the only alternative. Now we’ve got a different kinda language and we started finding different colors, other than the primary ones.

What role did religion play in your childhood?

I knew that we were different on our street because my mother was Protestant. And that she’d married a Catholic. At a time of strong sectarian feeling in the country, I knew that was special. We didn’t go to the neighborhood schools—we got on a bus. I picked up the courage they had to have had to follow through on their love.

Did you feel religious when you went to church?

Even then I prayed more outside of the church than inside. It gets back to the songs I was listening to; to me, they were prayers. “How many roads must a man walk down?” That wasn’t a rhetorical question to me. It was addressed to God. It’s a question I wanted to know the answer to, and I’m wondering, who do I ask that to? I’m not gonna ask a schoolteacher. When John Lennon sings, “Oh, my love/For the first time in my life/My eyes are wide open”—these songs have an intimacy for me that’s not just between people, I realize now, not just sexual intimacy. A spiritual intimacy.

Who is God to you at that point in your life?

I don’t know. I would rarely be asking these questions inside the church. I see lovely nice people hanging out in a church. Occasionally, when I’m singing a hymn like . . . oh, if I can think of a good one . . . oh, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” or “Be Thou My Vision,” something would stir inside of me. But, basically, religion left me cold.

Your early songs are about being confused, about trying to find spirituality at an age when most anybody else your age would be writing about girls and trouble.

Yeah. We sorta did it the other way around.

You skipped “I Want to Hold your Hand,” and you went right . . .

. . . Into the mystic. Van Morrison would be the inverse, in terms of the journey. It’s this turbulent period at fifteen, sixteen, and the electrical storms that come at that age.

There was also my friend Guggi. His parents were not just Protestant, they were some obscure cult of Protestant. In America, it would be Pentecostal. His father was like a creature from the Old Testament. He spoke