When people try to take your culture away from you, your essence of your culture becomes stronger. It's like even in Africa. When you see African-Americans, they're stronger because of what they've gone through. It's even subliminal; I think it becomes in their genes.

I don't think Bono decided to be ambitious, he just is. But if this country ever ran out of electricity, just shove a plug up his hole and it would run for a week.

There was engrained poetry and then when you look back at our history and in the 20th century, the last century, probably the greatest writers of the 20th century were Irish. It became our only weapon, was our poetry, our music.

I wanted all the music to sound strong. It's all down to the restoration and mastering. In many ways I feel the work in general was never properly mastered in the first place. To me, making the music sound the way we wanted it was by far my biggest goal with the re-issues.

I grew up on a street called Cedar Wood Road and by coincidence my best friends that are around the age 10 became a guy called Bono and another guy called Guggi. It was music again. The fact that pulled us together. They found me quite interesting because I had the right albums underneath my arm. Those days where you carry the latest David Bowie album or Roxie music album as you go to school. I mean you can't play an album at school but you were being cool just showing, "Look what I got."

We became friends in Dublin through music and we had real names, Fionan Hanvey and Derek Rowan - what a dreadful name. And Paul Hewson. We gave each other nicknames just the way most kids do, but the nicknames had more to do with how we physically looked or our essence and I had quite square features as a young kid. I was called Wavin for awhile, but I'm a bit softer - I'm a little softer than a surge pipe so they changed that to Gavin. I didn't chose it, it was Bono and Guggi who gave it to me.

Friday was added to my nickname because I have a talent of getting on with most people. So it's a bit of a man Friday thing.