The singer & the saint
There is a moment when describing the acute existential crisis brought on by Achtung Baby’s creation that Bono is hit with a rare bout of self-awareness. ‘There were days when making this album felt like it was the end of the world for us,’ he writes in his memoir, before pulling himself up sharp as if suddenly remembering his reader.
‘Are you not laying it on a bit thick, I hear you ask. It’s not as if you’re going down a coal mine every morning. Okay. I’ll grant you that. I know. It’s male egos rubbing up against each other. But we are a band, a foursome. Unlike a solo artist we’re trying to realise a shared vision. That can offer unparalleled exhilaration… or a dreadful kind of torpor.’
Some 266 pages into Surrender, Bono’s new memoir and this acknowledgement of the finite nature of reader patience strikes me as long overdue. But then I am no U2 superfan, parched for every last tortuous detail about the genesis of the rock band’s hits, or overwrought analysis of the interdependence of Dublin’s own Fab Four.
The laboured exegesis of U2 lyrics was beginning to produce in me, to coin the leading man’s own words a ‘dreadful kind of torpor’, not to mention frustration at being continually diverted from the search for clues to the phenomenon that is Paul David Hewson.
Like him or loathe him, Bono is one of our greatest cultural exports, the driving force of the greatest rock band the country has ever produced. In its heyday U2 filled the biggest stadiums on the planet, inspiring an almost religious fervour among the masses.
Running parallel is Bono’s lifelong philanthropy, particularly his work for Africa which in the cause of debt relief and Aids prevention has seen him lobby politicians and heads of state of all persuasions while embracing the world of celebrity.
Yet after reading 546 pages about Bono’s remarkable life and times, I’m still no wiser about the X factor, the magic ingredient that leavened his natural talent, propelling him into the pantheon of great Irish figures, alongside the likes of James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw. I suppose you could say that I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.
Surrender does though throw up some clues as to how Bono has left such an indelible mark on the world, unlike the thousands of Irish lads of his era who, like him, were as he puts it, ‘born with melodies’ in their heads… ‘looking for a way to hear them in the world’.
He had an extraordinary drive from the beginning. Although it was drummer Larry Mullen’s note on the school noticeboard looking for musicians to join a band that catalysed U2, it was Bono’s rage that sustained the momentum of their upward trajectory.
As his teenage bandmates worked their instruments during rehearsals, Bono would shout and scream his head off at them, ‘spouting unforgiveable invective for which now years later I ask forgiveness’, he writes.
When Adam Clayton said that the band could relax – that they had it made after they won a slate of Grammys for The Joshua Tree in 1988 – Bono bridled, fearing they were going mainstream and stale.
And when manager Paul McGuinness warned that the band wasn’t yet ready for the London music scene, Bono headed over with Ali to hand cassette tapes to his favourite music journalists. He didn’t take ‘no’ or ‘not yet’ for an answer, so he continually propelled himself forward, oblivious to the effect of his insouciance on others.
His deep faith is also unusual, particularly in our secular world. U2’s early involvement in the Shalom church group is well known as is the story of how the band nearly broke up when Edge began doubting if a music career could be justified when there was so much of the Lord’s work to be done.
The assumption, however, that the band relinquished its Born-Again moorings once it embraced the rock’n’roll lifestyle, is wrong.
Although Bono distrusts churches and warns his children against them, he knows his scripture and psalms and views friendship as a sacrament and life as a pilgrimage. The band still prays together before every show.
Bono reveals in the book that his father Bob and his mother’s sister had an affair, and that his cousin – Scott Rankin, a senior civil servant at the Department of Finance – is also his half-brother.
On his deathbed, Bob, with whom he had a strained relationship, admitted he had lost his Catholic faith, but urged his son that ‘I should never lose mine.
‘That it was the most interesting thing about me’.
Bono chose Surrender as the title
of his memoir because he believes that surrender is an idea at the heart of many great faiths. He writes: ‘Not my will but thy will’, as Jesus prayed on the night the Roman soldiers came for him’. The prayer in his family was ‘make us useful dear God. We’re available. How can we be useful in this world where we find ourselves?’
It’s easy to see why Bono was compelled to use his fame to help the poor, moving into the world of politics and activism to leverage his money and influence.
His record of attendance at many of the watershed events in recent history is also uncanny, perhaps prompting those of a superstitious streak to see a divine hand at work:
● Bono was in Paris rehearsing for a show in 2015 when the Bataclan theatre was attacked and his band were pulled off stage for fear music venues were being targeted by Islamic State gunmen.
● He is friendly with the drummer from Eagles of Death Metal who were playing the Bataclan when all hell broke out, and he called him the next day.
● Months later, Bono hid under a table of La Petite Maison, his favourite restaurant in Nice, as a Tunisian terrorist drove his lorry into the crowd killing 86 people.
● Bono and the band arrived in Berlin to record Achtung Baby – within hours of German reunification.
● Earlier this year, Zelensky invited him to Ukraine to highlight the Russian blockade. Bono already knew the war hero from Zelensky’s days as an actor and comedian.
● The singer performed at Barack Obama’s inauguration concert in 2009. He had known the US president for years through his work for ONE, the global campaign he cofounded to end extreme poverty.
● While dining on pizza and wine with Obama at the White House, Bono – who needs antihistamines to tolerate wine – went missing and was found asleep in the Lincoln bedroom.
● Three days before the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement, U2 performed a concert on the understanding that the two main party leaders, David Trimble and John Hume, would come on stage and say nothing.
Unusually the two politicians agreed to keep quiet, convinced by Bono’s claim that silence speaks louder than words.
When they shook hands, Bono stepped in to lift their hands high in the air.
● But for the fluke of having to cycle to school because of a bus strike, Bono would have been standing in his usual haunt of Dolphin Discs at 5.30pm on May 17, 1974, when the place is blown to bits by a car bomb on Talbot Street, part of a co-ordinated attack by loyalist paramilitaries.
Bono is a curator and convenor of people and ideas, so much so that it’s easier to list who he hasn’t rubbed shoulders with and been influenced by than who he has. He has learned at the knees of great men like Mikhail Gorbachev (who he credits with having the most influence on the world during his lifetime), Bill Clinton, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. He knows everyone from Sean Penn, Christy Turlington, Quincy Jones to the late Steve Jobs and David Bowie.
Saint or social climber, he must still be at heart the boy whose reputation for being able to ‘make everyone laugh but also throw a dig’ preceded him at school.
His critics say that U2’s controversial tax arrangements cast him as a hypocrite. Bono touches on the issue in his memoir, saying that moving a U2 company to Holland, ‘maybe went too far’ and that the band dug its heels in, displaying a stubborn streak.
He owns up to the usual slate of flaws assigned to rockstars: narcissism, a messiah complex… selfloathing and insecurity caused by abandonment from the death of his mother the root of all paranoia.
But he has humility and generosity, rare jewels in his world of privilege and glamour.
‘U2’s story is a freak of nature,’ he writes. ‘A black swan event. Worlds have come crashing around the ears of more talented people than me, but since success first arrived for this band in the late 1980s, freedom has been our story and the story of our families. We owe a lot of that to you, whoever you are reading this book.’
■ Bono’s book, Surrender: 40 songs, One Story, €35, is available now.