You wonder all the time how he manages to straddle between the rock stadium and the politician's ear.What's clear now is that the band of 25 years has survived a thousand tantrums or more and several heart-breaking dramas because of the love and respect they all have for each other. It's a very elegant co-dependency.

Adam Clayton, 44, the bass player, is not with us tonight — partly because he lives on the wrong side of Nice and doesn't like to drive in the dark after the laser operation he had on his eyes. And partly, I suspect, because he doesn't torture himself by being around alcoholic beverages.

He was so nearly lost to addiction some years ago that he is now careful in the other extreme.

Each member of U2 is a little of an outsider — either because their mothers were lost to them at a young age, as with Bono and Larry, or because, in Adam's case, he was lost to boarding schools. He'd grown up in East Africa. When he arrived in Ireland he felt bad, because although he was the only one in the class who spoke Swahili, he couldn't speak Gaelic. The Edge, 43, the guitarist, had a different kind of displacement. He was born in Wales, moved to Ireland and was cursed by not sounding like he fitted. He's careful now to have an accent that reveals little because of that sense of alienation.

The girlfriend of Ash's lead singer is talking to Bono about clubs in Dublin. He's looking a little distracted, as he's trying to earwig on the Edge's conversation. "What are you talking about Wales for?" he keeps on. Later on he tells me it's his performer's ear: he can hear everything that is going on in the room. More likely he heard his name being mentioned. The Edge was saying how Bono is different from other people, because other people get in a pattern of thinking and he never thinks there are any parameters. That's why he thinks there's nothing wrong with phoning George Bush.

Some Brazilian rhythms are playing. It's past midnight and the restaurant is shutting. It's a short walk along the beach to the twin villas in which the Edge and Bono live, separated only by two swimming pools. People find it odd that they actually live next door to one another. There's not even a fence between them. The problem with the walk across the beach is that it is a stone beach, not a speck of sand in sight, and I am wearing stiletto-heeled mules. Bono offers to carry me. I opt for bare feet. It's painful. I'm almost yelping. Then Bono offers me his shoes. They are Japanese-inspired flip-flops, and a godsend. Now he is in pain, but he doesn't yelp: he says it's like an intense reflexology.

When we get back to his place he puts on U2's new CD, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. Bono sings, karaoke-style, along with it. One track begins with the line "Take my shoes", which he sings directly into my ear.

The Edge is looking solemn and worried. "Look at him," says Bono. "He's going through all those mixes, assessing it all in his head."

Bono sings the line "I know that we don't talk but can you hear me when I siiiiing". It's a weird cry that vibrates into the night after the already-vibrating note from Bono's voice on the album. "I am hitting a note a man of my age shouldn't
be hitting," he says. "I don't know what's happened to me. I have a different voice. Where did that come from?"

One theory is that How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb is about dismantling the life and death in 2001 of his father, Bob Hewson, who was a big-time opera fan and a perfect tenor. Since he's gone, Bono walks in a different way; maybe it's his father's walk — maybe he swallowed him. "Or maybe something just lifted," he says, "like a very strange weight, and I am more at ease with myself. And this is as easy as I'll ever get, and this is pretty good. He is the atomic bomb in question and it is his era, the cold-war era, and we had a bit of a cold war, myself and him. When he died, I had no idea what would happen. I did start behaving a little odd, took on more and more projects. Looking back, now I've finally managed to say goodbye, I think that I did do some mad stuff. I got a letter from a friend of mine that said, '1) Don't leave your job, 2) your wife, 3) take large sums of money out of the bank.' I wasn't doing any of that, but what he was saying was, when fathers die, sons do mad stuff. I thought
I was ready for it."

Can you ever be ready for death? "Well, he'd been ill for a long time [with cancer and Parkinson's disease] and I would go and visit him in hospital, take the night watch." He was on tour for the final stages of his father's life, but would fly back to the hospital. "I didn't know that grief affects you in surprising ways.

I didn't know that two years later, when you're walking down the street, there's tears going down your face and you don't know why."