Bono And The Christian Right

Ed Bradley Profiles U2 And Its Activist Frontman

(CBS) 
Truth is, Bono and the band are treated like royalty on the French Riviera and spend as much time there as possible.

On tour last summer, they commuted to many of their European concerts from the South of France in a private jet.

Poking fun at themselves is something they do well, and often. At the height of their early fame almost 20 years ago, Frank Sinatra joined in at one of his Las Vegas concerts.

"During the show, he stood up, he stopped us and made us kind of stand up and do the wave thing. And we were dressed in, you know, rags, just in comparison," remembers Bono. "And he just stopped. He said, 'You're number one all around the world.' He said, 'Look at you. You haven't spent a dime on your clothes.'"

Today, they do spend millions on their concert production. Every detail of their sets is state-of-the-art, even a cappuccino machine under the stage.

And the attention to detail goes for the music, too. The band gets a lot out of their instruments. Part of their secret is guitar technology.

"It's like a programmable switching system. So I can go through any combination of effects," explains The Edge.

But Larry Mullen makes his job as simple as possible. He doesn’t do big drum solos. "It's fairly simple and straightforward. But because of my…I'm not that good. And I concentrate quite hard," he says, laughing.

Mullen and Clayton focus on creating the engine that drives the music. Bono and Edge are the navigators, trying to take each song and each concert to new heights, every night.

This is where the band's two worlds collide. Their global fame has given Bono a political voice. U2’s politics give their music a little something extra.

And Bono is confident U2's music will be remembered in the future.

"Actually oddly enough, I think my work, the activism, will be forgotten. And I hope it will. Because I hope those problems will have gone away," says Bono. "But our music will be here in 50 years and 100 years' time. Fact that our songs occupy a sort of an emotional terrain that didn't exist before our group did."