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Towards the end of these witty and entertaining conversations, Bono’s interlocutor, the French journalist Michka Assayas, hints that there will always be something enigmatic and mysterious about this “Bible-reading band man”. Wrong. Bono is about the least enigmatic person you could imagine: an extrovert, utopian,unreflective, candid, verbose, fidget-brained show-off. He has never had the enigmatic cool of one of his rock heroes. What you see is exactly what you get. Even while he irritates our consciences with Drop the Debt and Live 8, or just irritates us by publicly comparing Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, there is no doubting that behind the perpetual shades there is fundamentally a good, plain man.

He is guilty of some preposterous Oirishry: how Bono can still dare to refer to the Irish as “the white niggers” beggars belief. Although he still has a house in Ireland he obviously spends a lot of time in New York or the south of France, where most of these interviews take place, praising his homeland to anyone who will listen. (Like the Irish boomerang: never comes back, just keeps singing about how much it wants to.) On the other hand, he is sharp on the hypocrisy of Irish Catholics over the Troubles: one moment looking slightly uncomfortable about the latest IRA atrocity in England, the next singing A Nation Once Again down the pub, hats being passed around, and everyone putting in for the Provos. “I hated that about us Irish, our duplicity.” He had the guts to stand up and say so, too, earning him the accolade of “little shit” from Gerry Adams, MP for Belfast West.

Bono hints darkly that he himself has “done a lot of stupid stuff” in the past, and without grace and forgiveness would be “in deep shit”. But these protestations remind you of nothing so much as St Augustine worrying in his Confessions that he suckled too greedily as an infant. Bono, like St Augustine, was never really a bad-ass mutha. He played in an international chess championship when he was 12 (“What a pain in the arse!”) and he thinks “ cigarette smoking is dumb”.

On his musical heroes — Dylan, Elvis, Johnny Cash and Prince (yes, Prince) — he is original and observant. One Bono mot on Elvis is downright brilliant. Rock’n’roll, he says, was born of gospel and the blues: “One hand on the positive terminal, one hand on the minus terminal. And Elvis’s dance was really electrocution.” Able to reconcile his religion with the music, he remains well aware that in the violence and raw sexuality of rock ’n’roll, “Demons can appear to be exorcised, but they’re not really, they’re usually being exercised.”

He may have a name like a dog-biscuit (although it’s an improvement on a previous moniker, Steinvic von Huyseman), but Bono is no daft, wide-eyed puppy. Cool and enigmatic he will never be, but his heart is warm, his mind is sharp, and his conversation is a rich, unstoppable noise.

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