Big Drum Thump

…and he isn’t afraid to put ‘em on the table. First he called out Tony Blair, and now he’s publicly stated the obvious: U2 need to retire while they’re still on top (i.e., while they still don’t suck too much). Mullen said:

There will be a time when it’s like, “It’s time to go.” I would like that to be on a high when you’re still achieving as opposed to the curve down. That’ll be sad for me. I think it’ll be a more dignified time to go.

We might come back in five years’ time and may do something together for old times’ sake because we know we’ll want to. That’ll be a beautiful end to a long beautiful career. It can’t go on for ever. It just can’t.

…and George Bush a probable war criminal. The U2 drummer let loose in a recent interview with Q magazine about Bono’s association with the two former world leaders (yep, we’re using “former” to describe Bush because, hey, we never followed him in the first place):

Tony Blair is a war criminal and I think he should be tried as a war criminal. Then I see Bono and him as pals and I’m going, “I don’t like that.” Do I think George Bush is a war criminal? Probably—but the difference between him and Tony Blair is that Blair is intelligent. So he has no excuse for what he did.

Though Mullen recognizes that Bono is “prepared to use his weight as a celebrity, at great cost to himself and his family, to help other people,” the great sunglassed one might have a crossed the sacrosanct line between art and politics (….right now, there are about 8,000 postcolonial literary theorists cocking their Winchesters because of that sentence: please shoot us a contempt-riddled message). Mullen said, “[A]s an outsider looking in, I cringe.”