I had eight hours of surgery after an artery next to my heart nearly burst, says U2 singer Bono
BONO has journeyed through his life less ordinary in a blizzard of presidents, popes, billionaires, supermodels and fellow travellers in music.
It’s fair to say the U2 singer is one of the world’s best-connected people.
He’s shared private moments with Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, Johnny Cash, Barack Obama, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra, Bill Gates, Naomi Campbell, David Bowie, Steve Jobs . . . to name but a few.
Not bad for the boy born Paul David Hewson 62 years ago in modest circumstances and raised at 10 Cedarwood Road on the Northside of Dublin.
It probably comes as no surprise, therefore, that Bono’s memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, is filled with what he calls “luminous times with some luminous lives”.
He describes his raw, 557-page tome as “confessions of an artist, activist, ar*ehole, actualist”.
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The last of these carefully chosen words confirms his determination to tell it like it is.
Despite his rock star riches, it’s also clear that Bono has long endeavoured to make the world a better place, hectoring the great and the good to support his initiatives around famine, Aids and extreme poverty.
‘I curled my lip and brought the house down’
But the beating heart of his writing is provided by enduring love . . . for Ali, the childhood sweetheart he married, for his daughters Jordan and Eve, for his sons Elijah and John, and for his U2 buddies The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr.
And for his mother Iris, who died when he was just 14, for his postal worker father Bob, for his older brother Norman and for his best friends, Guggi and Gavin Fryday.
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He begins by taking us back only six years to Christmas, 2016, and opening up for the first time about his brush with death . . . “So here I am. Mount Sinai Hospital. New York City”.
His aorta has developed “a blister that’s about to burst”, requiring eight hours of surgery.
“I know it’s not going to feel like a good day when I wake up,” Bono writes.
“But I also know that waking up is better than the alternative.”
Soon, however, we’re back in Dublin for a flood of childhood memories.
His beloved mum only heard her youngest son sing in public once when he took the role of Pharaoh in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph And The Technicolor Dreamcoat.
“Dressed up as Elvis, I curled my lip and brought the house down,” he recalls.
Larry Mullen Jr posts a notice: ‘Drummer seeks musicians to form band.’ Adam Clayton was on bass, looking the part, while guitarist David Evans had the coolest aura of anybody
Not long after, he and brother Norman were saying goodbye to the dying subject of the tender U2 song Iris.
For all the words of comfort from relatives, he decides that her passing means “everything isn’t okay. And everything won’t be okay. Everything will be different”.
Bono turns his attention to the other great love of his life, Alison “Ali” Stewart, who he met at Mount Temple Comprehensive School, along with his future bandmates.
“Ali would become the one who would believe in me, now that my mother no longer could,” he says.
He remembers the “pure joy” of their desperate first kiss and, later, the dawning realisation that he “had to ask the ‘future’ out on a date”.
Another pivotal Bono moment arrives soon after. An invitation pops up on the school noticeboard, “Drummer seeks musicians to form band”.
It is posted by Larry Mullen Jr, “who already had a big fan club” and who offers him an early lesson in rock star mystique when he turns a garden hose on a bunch of giggling girls.
As the four chancers assembled, “Adam Clayton was there on bass,” Bono continues, “looking the part,” while guitarist David Evans, with his angular face, “had the coolest aura of anybody”.
Evans, of course, becomes known as The Edge, taking his curious stage name from his favourite album, Close To The Edge, by prog rock’s noodlers-in-chief Yes.
Over the next few chapters, Bono documents the rise of U2, a band emboldened by punk and not afraid to confront Northern Ireland’s divisive troubles with their first iconic song, Sunday Bloody Sunday.
He describes Live Aid at Wembley Stadium in July 1985, prompted by the devastating Ethiopian famine, as “a gigantic moment”, and pays due respects to another Dubliner, this one from the Southside.
“What are the odds of two anti-poverty campaigners being born a few miles apart from each other and both in a rock ’n’ roll band?” he muses.
“The truth is that Bob Geldof opened the door and I walked through.”
Those old enough might remember The Boomtown Rats singer crying out to the millions glued to their TVs: “Don’t go to the pub tonight. Stay in and give us the money. There’s people dying out there!”
Bono affirms that Geldof “was a genius of vocabulary and communication. Words would do anything for him”.
Also on the bill that day is David Bowie, another of Bono’s huge inspirations who performs the immortal Heroes.
He calls Bowie “England’s Elvis Presley”, pointing out that he was born on the same day as The King, 12 years apart, and says they were “cosmic twins”.
During the recording of seminal 1991 U2 album Achtung Baby, the Starman pays the Hewsons a visit, arriving up Dublin’s river Liffey on his yacht, dressed as a ship’s captain.
On another occasion, he even spends the night and fawns over Bono and Ali’s firstborn, Jordan.
Bowie’s manager passes the couple these instructions: “David can be odd during the night.
“If he sleepwalks into your room and stands at the end of the bed, just tell him to go back to his bed. He usually does.”
It turns out that their guest sleeps well but Ali, who keeps watch because she is up with her baby, is rather smitten.
“What a beautiful creature, like one of (William) Blake’s angels,” she tells her husband.
“Only just anchored to the ground.”
Bono’s memories of the Zoo TV Tour era, 1992/3, are populated by beautiful women, inspired in part by American choreographer Morleigh Steinberg, who had married The Edge in 1983.
‘I guess I was drunk, high on Frank Sinatra’
Supermodels Christy Turlington, Helena Christensen and Naomi Campbell become part of the tour’s “rolling improvisation” and are “three women we treasure to this day”.
Bono finds himself sitting next to “Naomi F***ing Campbell Soups” on a transatlantic flight and he recalls how Adam Clayton has “a massive crush on her” before they actually became an item.
Another of his close acquaintances is the Australian frontman of INXS who, around this time, is dating Helena.
“I always felt a bit of a sham as a rock star, a bit part-time,” writes Bono. “I’ve known some real rock stars and Michael Hutchence was one of them.”
One night, they are lying under the stars on a stony beach, considering the suicide of Kurt Cobain.
Bono’s had a bit too much to drink and is smoking “clumsily, ash falling on my chest”.
Hutchence tells him: “I hate people saying he (Kurt) couldn’t cope with being famous, it’s such a cop out.”
And a bit later, he adds: “If he’d just have waited, he’d have found a way out of whatever hole he was in. Didn’t need to be a grave.”
These words, told with sensitivity, are weighted with sorrow and knowledge of what happened to Hutchence a few years later, when he also takes his own life.
The mood of Bono’s rollercoaster existence lightens when he talks about being so inebriated at Frank Sinatra’s house that he wakes up “with a damp sensation” between his legs.
Thankfully, he has only spilled his drink. “I guess I was drunk, high on Frank, a shrinking, shadowboxing short-ass following in this giant’s footsteps.”
The self-deprecating humour continues with him meeting the Republican congressman for Alabama who, as chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operation, holds “the purse strings for the world’s poor” and keeps calling the U2 man “Bonio”. (Yes, I know what you’re thinking, that’s a dog biscuit.)
If that episode is a consequence of his Drop The Debt campaign, another finds him in the company of Pope John Paul II.
He gives the Polish pontiff a copy of Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s collected works and, wait for it, a pair of his blue-tinted Fly sunglasses.
Only after the Holy Father’s death six years later did a picture finally emerge of him wearing said funky shades alongside Bono.
The singer also tells of being captivated by Nelson Mandela, and how he thought of him as “The President Of The World”.
“He could charm the morning from the night and the cash right out of wallets,” he says, reporting that “Madiba” once got Margaret Thatcher to give a personal donation of £20,000 to his foundation.
Then there’s the time, not so long ago, when a red Range Rover picks Bono up from Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport.
“The driver is Paul McCartney.” Macca proceeds to show him round The Beatles’ old haunts, pointing out the 86 bus which he “and John used to ride”.
I have always felt a bit of a sham as a rock star, a bit part-time. But I have known some real rock stars and Michael Hutchence of INXS was one of them
Bono writes beautifully when he likens his personal magical mystery tour to “Moses giving you a tour of the Holy Land, Freud giving you a tour of the brain and Neil Armstrong giving you a tour of the moon”.
Deeper into the book, he doesn’t shy away from the controversy over U2’s album Songs Of Innocence, which was given away free with Apple Music.
He ruefully recounts a social media comment: “Woke up this morning to find Bono in my kitchen, drinking my coffee, wearing my dressing gown, reading up paper.”
He also takes “full responsibility”, taking care to exonerate his bandmates, U2 manager Guy Oseary and even the bigwigs at Apple.
“Mea culpa.”
As this wild ride of a book draws to a close, Bono’s thoughts return to his family.
‘You can’t have a child and remain a child’
He talks movingly of his “long-distance marathon” relationship with his wife and poses the question: “Am I more desperate for our marriage to make it than Ali, who is never as desperate as her husband?”
Bono also reflects on how having children has helped him grow up: “As Ali and I had kids, I slowly understood that you can’t have a child and remain a child.”
He spares a thought for Elijah, the son following in dad’s footsteps by becoming frontman in a rock band called Inhaler.
“He is capable of realising his own musical vision. He is aware his father’s face will bring him mixed blessings,” says Bono.
Before he signs off, he reveals two more seismic events.
First, how he and his family had to cower under the table at his favourite restaurant, La Petite Maison, in Nice, during the 2016 Bastille Day terror attack.
And then there’s the moment his brother Norman calls to say that the man they believed was their cousin, Scott Rankin, is in fact their half-brother.
Bono says: “Since this disclosure, Scott and I have become even closer. He’s smart and sincere. At peace with past and present.”
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All I can add is that I’ve only managed to scratch the surface of this compelling life story, filled with euphoric highs and just a few devastating lows.
Despite his book’s title, one thing is for certain, irrepressible Bono isn’t ready to Surrender . . . except to love.
