"They're coming to a rock'n'roll concert and watching television That says it all," he commented Charlie Watts would have been proud. The similarly gargantuan PopMart tour of 1997/8 utilised the biggest TV screen ever seen, and an inexplicable stage entrance from a giant lemon.You can't keep Bono down, of course, recently developed sense of irony or not. This man implored a German audience to reject fascism with the words "This is your chance to be heroes" (it worked - thanks Bono) and named his son Elijah Bob Patricius Guggi Q. His contribution to the Irish peace process, bringing together John Hume and David Trimble in an uncanny visual echo of Bob Marley's Peace Concert of 1978, was as uncontroversial as it was photogenic. With his film collaboration with Wim Wenders, Million Dollar Hotel, just out to mixed reviews, U2 releasing a song with (somewhat woeful) lyrics penned by Rushdie and a new album due in the autumn, there's little chance of his profile sinking.

Even queries about a future in politics always garner the same response about not wanting to move to a "smaller house", an answer as hackneyed as George Best's "where did it all go wrong?" anecdote But credit where credit's due His desire to please remains as strong as ever You'll never see Bono refusing to sing the hits. A Sinatra-length career seems inevitable.The 'Million Dollar Hotel' soundtrack is out on Universal/Island. It's appropriate that this week's recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society's conducting award was unable to accept it in person: Sir Charles Mackerras was busy at the Royal Opera House, conducting a work he'd helped rescue from oblivion. For it was his idea that the aborted first version of Martinu's The Greek Passion should be reconstituted from pages scattered round the globe; to his gold star for conducting should be added a further one for musicological tenacity. It's appropriate that this week's recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society's conducting award was unable to accept it in person: Sir Charles Mackerras was busy at the Royal Opera House, conducting a work he'd helped rescue from oblivion. For it was his idea that the aborted first version of Martinu's The Greek Passion should be reconstituted from pages scattered round the globe; to his gold star for conducting should be added a further one for musicological tenacity. As a boy in Sydney, he had begun on the piano but gravitated via the flute to the oboe because, for obscure reasons, Second World War conscription had left oboists in short supply.

Migrating to London, he became an oboist at Sadler's Wells, also began to conduct, and to discover what makes singers tick.One day in 1947, fate took a hand. "I was sitting in a café reading a miniature Dvorak score," he recalls, "and a stranger opposite leant over and said 'I see you are studying the music of my compatriot.' I told him of my ambition to be a conductor, and it turned out that he was a refugee cellist who had just come from the Anglo-Czechoslovak Friendship League armed with information about exchange scholarships. He suggested that I apply."Mackerras got one, went to Prague, saw Janacek's Katya Kabanova and was bowled over by it - and the rest is history, both his and ours. "Nobody ever needed me to point out that Mozart and Handel are great composers," he says. "But after the war, we did need someone to speak up for Janacek."He did, and with a vengeance.