Host Tonster says: Welcome everyone! Today we’re chatting with legendary U2 manager Paul McGuinness. Let’s begin!

Nate asks: Do you play any musical instrument and if so have
you ever been on a U2 album?

Paul says: No, I play no musical instruments. I had an early and
unhappy experience with the piano when I was about 12 years
old. Since then my only contribution musically to a U2 album was
some hand clapping on one track on the War album. So I
suppose the lesson from that is that I wasn’t good enough to be
asked again.

Miss_Fly asks: Paul: hi. 🙂 how did you find U2, and how were
you able to spot their potential so early in their career?

Paul says: I met them in 1977, I think, at a concert in the Project
Arts Centre in Dublin. They were looking for a manager and I was
looking for a band to manage and we were introduced by a
Dublin music journalist named Bill Graham, who was a friend of
mine. They had attracted him to one of their rehearsals and he
had told them that I should be their manager. So I suppose we
owe it all to him. Sadly, Bill died last year.

As for how I was able to spot their potential, I would have to say
that I have no technique for that anymore now than I did then.
Since I’ve only had to be right once, I wouldn’t claim a technique. I
just thought they were very, very good and I suppose they were
doing more or less as they are doing now, except that then they
were doing it quite badly and now they do it rather well.

U2isABLE asks: Are you pleased with the way Sarajevo’s turning
out? And, are you concerned about the gig in Israel?

Paul says: Sarajevo is turning out very well. As of today, we’ve
sold pretty close to the capacity and we’re flying in there
tomorrow morning. As you know, we’re doing a webcast of the
entire concert. There’s a lot of excitement around the world about
this concert. I’ve seen a story today on CNN and European
newspapers are certainly paying a lot of attention to it.

It’s a very unusual situation because Sarajevo is still absolutely
devastated by the war. Taking account of that we’re charging a
very low ticket price. But ultimately what we’re doing is paying
Sarajevo the compliment that it is a European city, a center of
culture, and certainly before the war it was truly multi-ethnic. It was
always very clear that what the people of Sarajevo wanted us to
do was the whole show, the same show that we take to all the
cities around the world that we play.

They were definitely not interested in us turning up and doing a
scratch production or a benefit. They wanted to be treated really
like any other city. To some extent that was impossible because
if we’d charged the same ticket price as makes the show viable
in other cities, it would not have been possible for people in
Sarajevo to afford that ticket. So we’ve reduced the price to 20
Deutsche Marks which is about US $12.

Host Tonster asks: If you could manage any other artist or band in
the history of time, who would it be?

Paul says: I’ve never been asked that before. Gosh, well, when
people ask me who was or is the best manager in history I
suppose I would have to say Brian Epstein, who managed the
Beatles. He really did a brilliant job. He was the first person really
on my side of the equation who understood how big pop music
could be.

I’ve always had enormous admiration for what he and the Beatles
did together. But he did do a great job. I suppose they would
have to be anyone’s favorite client. They had so much talent and
they really invented the musical world in which we all live now. So,
the Beatles!

Aingeal asks: What do you do with yourself while the show is
going on?

Paul says: I watch every show! I think it would be crazy to be the
manager of U2 and not at least have the pleasure of seeing the
concert. So I’m a connoisseur of their live performances and I
look forward to the show every night and if I possibly can watch it
from start to finish.

Salome269 asks: Paul, which has been the most exciting date on
the tour so far?

Paul says: I suppose Belfast. Belfast was pulled together at very
short notice. As people will probably have heard, we had a lot of
legal difficulties playing Dublin. Even after the two shows in
Dublin had sold out to 42,000 times two there were some
difficulties in court. There were some local residents who were
objecting to the shows going ahead and they very nearly did not
go ahead.

We had a contingency plan to move those shows to Belfast
where the authorities were frankly much more cooperative than in
Dublin.

When the Dublin shows ultimately received permission to go
ahead, the people in Belfast said well why not come and play
here as well. Because the new cease-fire in Belfast was just a
few weeks old at that stage, the security authorities who had
previously had an objection to large public gatherings were
incredibly cooperative and they said well why not come and play
here anyway and we had a spare date and we were able to fit it
in.

Belfast is a wonderful city anyway. We used to play there a lot in
the early days of the band but we had not been able to play there
since 1987. Just the excitement of playing to 40,000 people, as I
think it was, in Belfast was – that made it a high point, I think. That
would be the most exciting one to date.

Kdaniels asks: There have been a few celebrities who have said
some negative things about U2 (i.e. George Harrison). What are
your
feelings about their statements?

Paul says: I was a bit surprised about that. I think George is a
little out of touch. I think if he wanted to come and see a U2 show
he’d be most welcome. I’m not sure that he’s in contact with the
modern world at this stage. Nonetheless he’s got a fine body of
work behind him even if some of it turned out in court to have
been borrowed from other authors.

Bono, as a matter of fact, has regularly quoted from George
Harrison’s songs in shows since he did that interview with Le
Figaro. Bono has been throwing in a few bars of My Sweet Lord
and indeed George’s other great opus Taxman. I think in recent
times George has been more concerned about things like his
taxes and perhaps his garden.

U2isABLE asks:
What went through your mind when the Lemon did not open in
Oslo?

Paul says: Utter panic. But also a feeling of immense relief that it
was not me inside. I was standing there as it opened. It did open
about
a foot and I could see the eight feet of my clients but not the rest
of them. As I watched, they tried to close it first and then open it
again and it was well and truly jammed. It then had to make an
ignominious retreat to its starting position and they had to climb
out the back and walk round to the B stage, as we call it, and get
on with the show. I really felt for them. It was, of course, the
ultimate Spinal Tap moment.

Aingeal asks: What made U2 decide to take a presence on the
net?

Paul says:
Well, it’s a thriving area of cultural activity. We had had many
approaches from people who wanted to work with us on
producing a site but we felt that in order to do a truly great site we
would have to be with some people from “that culture” rather than
make it up for ourselves. The Microsoft Network came to us on a
creative basis and said for the first time rather than let’s make
money doing this, let’s get sponsors and we can all make a
fortune, let’s do something cool. The approach from Microsoft
was particularly attractive because it seemed to be creatively led.
Microsoft wanted to do something that was
groundbreaking and graphically and in every other creative way
state of the art. It really was a creative decision, if you like, and
I’m very happy that we made the arrangement.

Salome269 asks: If you could change one thing from the
PopMart tour, what would it be?

Paul says: I suppose we would’ve put the tickets on sale later
and released the album earlier. I think the timing at the beginning
of the
campaign was out of whack and we’ve been sort of catching up
on that ever since. The heat that the release of an album
produces is best transferred into tickets going on sale with some
delay. Because we were late on delivering the album, the two
more or less coincided and I think I regret that because it made
the campaign less organic.

It’s much more satisfying for the band to perform the new material
after we’ve released two or three singles, say, than performing as
they did within a few weeks after the release of the album. So I
think the early part of the campaign was a bit too compressed
and I’d love to have had a bit more space then. But these were
the consequences of our own decisions and our own delays in
the release of the album. We’re grown-ups, we’re adults, and we
take the responsibility.

Ibon asks: Were you at Barcelona’s concert? What is your
opinion about the happenings in the karaoke?

Paul says: Oh it was a disaster. It was just a complete
misjudgment on our part. That song, the Macarena, is very much
identified with Spanish-speaking Spain. It might have been
acceptable in Madrid, although I’m not even sure about that
because it is quite corny. In Barcelona, where they speak Catalan

• the first language for certainly 70% of the population of
  Barcelona is Catalan, not Spanish – they really thought it was
  utterly gauche. I think we just didn’t do our research properly. It
  was a big mistake. I hope the population of Barcelona will get
  over it by the time we come back there. We certainly aren’t going
  to do it again!

U2Reverand asks: Do you think Brian Eno’s gonna come back
for a future U2 album?

Paul says: Oh yes, I’m sure we’ll work with Brian again in some
way. We’re actually meeting him tomorrow in Sarajevo. We
remain in close touch, actually, with everyone we ever worked
with! Previous producers of the band like Steve Lillywhite and
Daniel Lanois and Jimmy Iovine are all very much friends of ours
and people whose opinions we take very seriously. In answer to
the question, yes I’m sure we will work with Brian Eno in some
way again.

U2pride asks: What do you feel about bootlegs?

Paul says: Well, I would distinguish between bootlegs and
counterfeits. Counterfeit albums, which are simply illegally
produced reproductions of our records, I obviously would take a
very dim view of because they’re taking money from my clients’
pockets.

The bootleg phenomenon, by which I presume you mean illegal
live recordings of the concerts – I’m very relaxed about that, quite
honestly. I think everyone knows the difference between an
authorized live recording that we would put out, for instance
Under A Blood Red Sky or Rattle & Hum – everyone kind of
understands that that’s a legitimate live recording. The fact that
people circulate and swap recordings they’ve made at our
concerts with tape recorders under their coats I’m actually very
relaxed about that. I know the industry is formally opposed to that
kind of thing but I’m not. I don’t have a problem with it at all.

The other thing I do have a problem with are the recordings that
are produced in Europe in full color packaging, particularly in
Italy, where there’s very inadequate copyright protection. In Italy,
in any Italian record store, you can find a whole range of things
that look like official U2 recordings on CD with full color
packaging and very often borrowing from established U2
graphics and photography. They are usually of extremely poor
quality and they carry a very high price tag and I think there should
be more legal protection against things like that. But,
unfortunately, in Italy the law is utterly inadequate to deal with that.

Salome269 asks: Paul, do you have any say in what goes in and
what doesn’t in a set list?

Paul says: Oh I have an opinion – I wouldn’t call it a veto . One of
our rituals is that since the very beginning of the band we have a
post-mortem after every single concert and discuss what worked
and what didn’t work. Nowadays that is not just the four members
of the band and myself, but also Howie B. Because he’s much
more musical than I am, he takes a big part in that. It’s the old
Chinese communist technique of ruthless self-criticism. I think it’s
a good thing because a day later you really can’t remember
much about the show so it is something that we’ve done for a
long time and will continue to do. I will certainly make suggestions
about things that should and should not be in the set list.

For instance, at the beginning of this tour up to a few days before
the first show in Las Vegas, neither Still Haven’t Found nor Pride
were in the set and I really thought that would be very bad for
those classics not to be included. As it is I still meet a lot of
people who – the two songs that they ask for most are Sunday
Bloody Sunday and Bad. Who knows, maybe they will turn up in
the set list before the end of the tour. It’s nice to have a lot of great
songs to choose between.

Ai asks: It is said that U2 will move on to smaller
venues/concerts after PopMart. Any truth to that?

Paul says: We have no such plans at the moment. I wouldn’t rule it
out. The question I get asked very often is whether we would like
to
go and play clubs. I think the answer to that is no. We were
always – we think anyway, we were a pretty crap band in clubs. It
was really only when we got into the bigger places – the arenas –
that the scale seemed right.

But at the same time we played two nights ago to Reggio Emelia
to 150,000 people at least. Or let me put it this way – we were
paid on 150,000 people so God knows how many people were
there. There’s an obvious loss of contact and intimacy even with a
show as big as PopMart when there are that many people
present. Even though we had several waves of sound relay
towers it was still a very big crowd, particularly if you were
standing at the back of it. Though when I walked through the
crowd all the way out to the back, I was amazed to find that
people were still kind of concentrating on the music and singing
along with it.

One of the things about having developed the expertise of playing
very large shows is that you want to extend it and see how far the
art form of the stadium rock spectacular can be taken. An
obvious reaction to the size of this tour might be to see how far
that can be taken. I’m very surprised that there are not more
bands – more artists – who want to take it on. The only other
people in modern times who do anything on this scale are the
Rolling Stones.

But there’s a change in the culture at the moment, I think, and it’s
becoming hip again to be big. I think that may lead other rock and
roll artists into performing on a large scale rather than doing that
very boring thing of putting up a stage at the end of the stadium,
when you get very big, and just hiring more amps and more lights
and video screens. I don’t think that’s enough. You really have to
embrace the scale of a football stadium in order to do something
really exciting.

^BadCop^ asks: What is the secret of keeping a huge
band like U2 together for 20 years?

Paul says: I don’t know that there’s a secret. I think the secret is
getting the right people together in the first place. In that respect
U2 were good friends before they formed the band and indeed
they were a band before certainly some of them could play very
well. The people were more important than the instruments. Over
the 20 years the five of us have been together we’ve learned how
to be together and we’ve also learned how to keep out of each
other’s way at times. I think that’s probably the secret to any
friendship or any partnership or any business relationship.

SirKits asks: Paul: do you sing along at the shows?

Paul says: I think I have caught myself singing along once or
twice, or my lips moving anyway, but I don’t think anyone would
want to hear my harmony.

Salome269 asks: Paul, who has been your favorite Bono
character so far? MacPhisto, The Fly…etc.

Paul says: I think definitely MacPhisto. MacPhisto who came
from lots of different directions – I don’t know if you know the
character of
Archie Rice in John Osborne’s play “The Entertainer” which was
played in a movie by Laurence Olivier – I think MacPhisto derived
a lot from him. But there are lots of other references in that
character as well. I thought MacPhisto was terrific and I definitely
miss him.

Salome269 asks: Does it surprise you when people ask you for
an autograph and/or a picture?

Paul says: It does a little. I’m not as good as dealing with it as the
band are and I do sometimes feel they’re only asking me
because they
can’t get an autograph from the band . It certainly comes with the
territory and if I have time I certainly will always sign somebody’s
autograph.

Swagger asks: Do you spend a lot of the time in the studio when
U2 are recording?

Paul says: As little as possible . The recording process is
definitely not a spectator’s sport. I’m filled with admiration but
certainly no wish
to be there! I’m filled with admiration for the kind of concentration
that is required to spend months in a studio producing a great
album. But for a non-participant it’s a bit like watching paint dry.

U2isABLE asks: Paul, how does your family handle these long
tours and what do you do in your precious spare time?

Paul says: My family are old enough now to come out and visit
the tours, which is great, so I see them every couple of weeks. My
son is 11, my daughter is 12. I’m delighted that they think U2 are
pretty cool. They go to school in Ireland and they send me tapes
of the music they’re listening to and try to educate me as to what’s
cool. This is obviously a difficult year because we’re pending
most of it away from home but there are compensations in that
the next couple of years I expect I’ll see a great deal of them.

U2isABLE asks: Paul, what is the most fulfilling aspect to your
job?

Paul says: Managing a great band like U2 is still enjoyable for
me because they are still getting better. They’re improving.
They’re doing their best work now. I’m sure the work they do after
this will be even better. I think it must be very dispiriting to
manage an artist whose career is in decline or who has lost the
creative spark. In the case of U2 I’m quite sure that if that ever
happens they’ll just hang up their instruments and stop. It’s not
something that has arisen yet and the fact that it hasn’t is the
most exciting part.

Sirkits says: Paul, what exactly did you grow up listening to?

Paul says: Very much the Beatles and the Rolling Stones . . . Bob
Dylan . . . I was never into Led Zeppelin until Adam turned me on
to Led Zeppelin in the early 80s. I also listened to a lot of other
kinds of music. I listen to opera. I listen to classical music. I have
an involvement in a sort of ethnic label from Ireland called Celtic
Heartbeat Records, which I enjoy very much, which makes a very
different kind of music. You may have heard of Riverdance that’s
one of our records. One would like to think I have very broad
tastes. There’s lots of great music in the world and I’m always a
little disappointed when people express their taste in a single
genre.

That’s one of the great failings, if you like, of the record business
and the radio business in that they don’t care to address the
great variety of people’s taste. I think there’s lots of people like
me who listen to lots of different kinds of music.

Victum asks: Who else do you manage?

Paul says: Through my company Principle Management – and
there’s lots of other people working there – we also manage PJ
Harvey.
We recently started managing Sinead O’Connor. And we
manage another artist, a young band in America called Lazlo
Bane. He’s just made his first record. Those are our only
management clients. We’re also involved in that label that I
mentioned before, Celtic Heartbeat, which is a business of mine.
With U2 I’m one of the owners of a label called Mother Records,
which is a joint venture with PolyGram. We have a couple of
bands on that label that one would have great hopes for,
particularly at the moment called the LongPigs who are starting
to break in America – they have a song on the radio at the
moment called On And On. Then there’s another band who are
enjoying considerable success in Europe – they haven’t really
made an impression in America yet except in Los Angeles – a
band called Audioweb.

L`edGE asks: Who chooses what bands open for U2?

Paul says: Like many other things that’s a committee process. It’s
certainly based on who we like and who’s available. I think it’s
true to
say we rarely choose those bands on the basis of them selling
tickets. We do expect people to come to a U2 show without trying
to attract them with the opening act. We try to exercise some
taste and have bands that the audience will be into even if they’re
unknown to them.

We’ve had some very good acts on this tour – we started out with
Rage Against The Machine, then the Fun Lovin’ Criminals did a
lot of shows with us. Oasis did a couple of shows in San
Francisco. In some countries we try to choose an act from that
country – in Italy we had a band called Casino Royale and another
band from Italy called Prozac. In France and Spain we had a
band called Placebo. In Ireland we had Ash. In London we
actually had Audioweb and LongPigs, those two bands from
Mother Records. We had Skunk Anansie at quite a lot of shows.
It’s a fairly organic process and one would think U2 audiences
over the years have learned that if you come early the opening
act will probably be worth seeing.

Gibigiane asks: What are the plans for the PopMart stage after
the tour is over – can we bid on the inflatable olive or slices of the
lemon?

Paul says: If anyone wants to buy the Lemon, they should get in
touch with us! I’m not sure that we will have any further use for it,
though as Adam has said more than once it is the transport of the
future. The screen will probably be sold to a sports facility. The
other bits of bric-a-brac – who knows. I’m not sure that anyone will
have much use for the arch. I don’t know. Maybe we should have
an auction.

U2isABLE asks: Any truth to the rumours that Pearl Jam will open
in Seattle?

Paul says: That’s the first I’ve heard of it, so I suppose the answer
is no. But if they want to, that would be fine. They know how to get
in touch.

Victum asks: What are your thoughts as to the state of the music
industry today? Bono believes music is too boring. Do you share
this
thought?

Paul says: Boring music is too boring, but there’s a lot of good
music around. I think maybe what I was referring to before – the
lack of
interest on the part of the industry and the diversity of the
audience is a factor. It seems to be that the only way the record
industry knows how to sell records is by selling a lot them all at
one time and that’s not good for sustaining the careers or
developing the careers of young acts, or baby acts, as we
sometimes call them. I think there’s good music around.

I’m delighted by the phenomenon of Oasis, which has had an
enormous effect in Britain and in Europe in that Oasis candidly
admit that they want to be a big band, they want to be as big as
U2. Big is cool again, whereas for a few years it was decidedly
unhip to admit that you wanted to be in a big band, which of
course is ridiculous. People join bands in order to get onstage
and perform in front of large numbers of people and sell lots of
records. That’s the rock and roll instinct. That’s why people buy
guitars and form bands and write songs, I believe. I hope that’s
turning around again. The grunge movement was very joyless, in
a way, and of course there is a lot of joy and excitement in being
a rock and roll band on a roll.

Host Tonster asks: With your filmmaking background, did you
ever find yourself sitting on your hands during Rattle & Hum?

Paul says: I was the Executive Producer of that and I was deeply
involved in the whole process. No, I certainly never sat on my
hands! I wasn’t involved in it creatively except in the way that I’m
involved with everything that U2 do.

I thought it was a good film but a bad campaign. I’ve said before
that we underestimated the impact of a full-blown 1400-screen
movie release. In the way that music buyers and music lovers like
to find their music and have the sensation of discovering it for
themselves, I think movie marketing operates in a very different
way to record marketing in that you get hit over the head with it all
at once. Every TV channel, every radio station, every newspaper
is talking about this week’s movie.

It’s an inappropriate form of marketing for music and I think our
audience were turned off by that, to some extent. It was
overdone. Underlying it there was a very good film and actually a
very good record. The record did very well. And the movie had
one of the most unusual opening weekend profiles of all time. It
had a huge Friday night, which made Paramount Pictures very
happy indeed, Saturday it tailed off, and hardly anyone went to
see it on Sunday, which meant that it basically played to U2’s
existing audience and didn’t go any further. Gave Paramount a bit
of a shock, but I’m sure at the time it was very exciting for U2’s
fans.

Teafan asks: Will there ever be a U2 “box” set?

Paul says: I wouldn’t rule it out. In fact we need to do it at some
time because there’s an enormous quantity of music that has
been made collaboratively with other artists on their records.
There’s a lot of B sides that have never been compiled and
released properly. There’s a lot of remixes and stuff like that. It
certainly is something that we must organize the comprehensive
release of at some stage. We’re wary of it to the extent that the
release of a boxed set always seems to signal the end of
somebody’s career and we’re certainly not at the end or anything
like it of U2’s career.

^BadCop^ asks: What makes you really angry?

Paul says: I suppose lots of things but in the context of our
business: overzealous security people, ticket scalping, people
taking advantage of our audience, those sort of things. People
doing things in U2’s name that don’t have our approval. It’s not so
much that we’re control freaks, it’s that we really do try to ensure if
you’re buying something from U2, it should be worth the money.
There are a lot of people out there who don’t respect that.

Salome269 asks: Do you ever get frustrated with the Americans’
taste in music? Bands like the Spice Girls are topping the charts
while bands like U2 are not doing as well?

Paul says: I rather like the Spice Girls, actually. It’s in a long
tradition of pop-of-the-moment and I think they do what they do
rather amusingly. It’s not exactly my cup of tea but I can quite
understand why people are drawn to it. They are all very pretty.

Host Tonster asks: What kind of conclusions have you drawn on
online U2 fans? How do we differ from other fans? Are they
positive or negative differences?

Paul says: There’s been a lot of U2 web activity over the last few
years and I suppose the people who go online are slightly more
studious. Though sometimes on individual pages you can see a
sort of party atmosphere generating. I don’t think that the people
who tune into the PopMart site on MSN are particularly different
from U2’s other fans. We seem to have pretty intelligent fans
wherever we go.

U2isABLE asks: Paul…why is U2 choosing to perform at awards
shows?

Paul says: Like the MTV Awards? MTV has an enormous reach.
The MTV Awards show from New York this year – the VMA’s –
had a very
significant rating. It’s a way of reaching the audience, that’s why
we perform on those shows. Showing people who might not
otherwise have seen U2 perform live how good they are. It
delivers an audience.

Vini-Brazil asks: TALK ABOUT BRAZIL TOUR !!!!!!!! We WAIT
many years FOR THIS !!!!!!!!!!

Paul says: We’ve been putting together the last details of the
South American tour in the last couple of weeks. We’re very
excited about going to South America and indeed we’re overdue
and we know it. I’m sure that the concerts in Sao Paolo and Rio,
Buenos Aires and Santiago will be absolutely wild. We’ve had
recent experience of the Latin audience in Spain and Portugal
and there’s no doubt about it, the further south you go the more
exciting it is.

Victum asks: Can you describe, as briefly as possible, your
various tasks and responsibilities in a typical day of touring?

Paul says: An awful lot of it is to do with staying in touch with the
record company and that means the record company in all the
countries in the world where we sell records, which is pretty well
everywhere. This album went to #1 in 29 countries, including all
the significant rock and roll territories. Stay in touch with the
production – our command structure is really quite military and the
people who run the stage show are basically briefed to put up the
show physically in an identical way in each city.

My ultimate responsibility is to the band, who are effectively my
partners. I’m responsible to them for producing the business
circumstances in which they can do their shows and make their
records. And that really involves just talking to a lot of people,
making sure they’re doing their jobs properly, watching out for
trouble, things going wrong. Airlines, hotels, things like that are
other people’s responsibility. I’m basically in charge of worrying.

^BadCop^ asks: Why is the Red Hill Mining Town video
still locked up in a vault? A lot of fans would love to see
it.

Paul says: The real answer is that it’s not very good. We thought
that song was a hit and we went straight into making a video for it
before the album was played on the radio. The moment it was
played on the radio – and you can see this from research – it was
the 11th most popular track on album radio in 1987 so clearly it
wasn’t the hit single that we imagined it was going to be. We
threw ourselves into making that video with Neil Jordan, who’s a
friend of ours, without actually checking to see whether anyone in
the audience really liked the song. That was one part of it – it
wasn’t really a hit. The other part of it, I would have to say, is that
the video was awful. The video was really terrible and
embarrassing and that’s the reason it’s been deep-sixed.

U2isABLE asks: Whose idea was it for the band to walk through
the crowd during Pop Muzik?

Paul says: I think it was Bono’s idea. Then we were in Vegas and
Oscar de la Hoya was in Vegas and I think it may even have
been his
idea. We wanted to copy an authentic boxer’s robe we were in
touch with Oscar de la Hoya and he not only was prepared to
lend us a robe to copy, he also gave us one of his own. I think he
may have even suggested the idea of the traditional Las Vegas
boxer’s entry. Like so many good ideas it comes from the ether –
nobody’s quite sure where ideas come from. The only thing that I
would say about that is good ideas have many claimants and bad
ideas are no one’s responsibility. Success has a million parents
and failure is an orphan.

Zye asks: Is U2 really doing that Simpson 200th episode. Any
cameos from you :)?

Paul says: That is true. I can indeed confirm that U2 will be
performing in the 200th Simpsons episode. Maybe somebody
else was
planning to announce that rather than us but since you’ve asked
the question it’s quite true. I do not have a role myself.

Host Tonster says: Any final words for us, Paul?

Paul says: Keep logging on to PopMart Online and let us know
what you think of the site at [email protected].