'Nothing comes close to the feeling of waking up with a melody in your head...'

Music is his first love and he has no interest in becoming a full-time politician says Bono in the latest edition of Hot Press.

"Nothing comes close to the feeling of waking up with a melody in your head and having a band like U2 to help you capture it," Bono told the Irish music magazine.

'Politicians don't turn me on, politics doesn't turn me on, the way music does. I have a lot more respect for them than I used to. They work a lot harder than I thought... but I don't want to be one."

In recent months Bono has lobbied world leaders from George Bush and Tony Blair to Jacques Chirac in a bid to improve aid and debt forgiveness for poor countries and in May went on a high-profile 12-day trip through Africa with U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.

But Bono dismisses talk of aiming for political career and says he has no dream of becoming the Irish President, a largely ceremonial position which usually attracts a wide-range of candidates from outside the political mainstream.

"I don't think I could live with the pay cut or moving to a smaller house," he said.

Bono has set up a new group called DATA (Debt, Aid, Trade for Africa), advocating economic aid, lower export tariffs and money to fight AIDS.

He is not getting mellower with age. 'I'm getting angrier and that's what makes me believe that with some smart thinking and simple changes to our lives, we can drastically improve the lives of so many other people.'

He also added that U2 had been working on a follow-up album to the Grammy-winning "All That You Can't Leave Behind" since the end of their "Elevation" tour in December 2001 .

'We set up in a disused bar/nightclub in the South of France. Very punk rock and very like old clubs we used to play. Maybe it was being in that kind of venue, but the music we started to make was very lo-fi high energy.'

More on DATA at www.datadata.org