But I would say all of our kids have a deep desire to do something with their lives . His children can each engage and disengage, healthily. Recognize their privilege and then dismiss it. Pray about making themselves useful and then tear through a season of reality TV. He opens with the devastating and dramatic tale of his 2016 surgery to repair a potentially fatal aortic aneurysm, leaping on a table that will become symbolic for many reasons in the show.
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But in late 2023, Bono stepped down from the shared board. He knew it was time to promote a new generation of young activists. And, as he says, at this point, “I’m the wrong sex, wrong age, wrong color, wrong ethnicity, and I’m not African.” Still, it’s obvious how hard the decision was. https://p1nup.in/ Is. “You need to find your place, don’t you? I had found a place where I could be useful,” he says. After thirteen years with a white-knuckle death grip on the steering wheel of their career, Bono finally learned how to take a breath.
And Hewson was desperate—for community, mainly. The last several years have been a time of recovery and reckoning for Bono, who turned sixty-five this spring. He made it past a serious health scare (one that he’d played down in public) and emerged with a more balanced perspective on how to enjoy the everyday pleasures in life. He faced demons from his youth that have fueled him throughout his career. And he reassessed his role in the nonprofit work that has captured so much of his passion and energy over the decades.
- And when he did, he felt cut down by his father’s barbs and one-liners.
- It’s his father, Bob Hewson, whose emotional distance and hard-shelled manner shaped his son.
- The U2 frontman spent the past few years reexamining his life and career.
- It all connects, and we do, always, in time come back to the original prompt.
- But the frontman and guitarist couldn’t resist splurging.
Bono Has Another Story to Tell
He shares the unfathomable story of his mother collapsing at her father’s funeral and dying that day from an aneurysm when Bono was only 14. Bono’s life and career have been shaped by his passion for music, his Christian faith, and his desire to make a difference in the world. TED rejected the third wish as being a sub-optimal way for TED to help Africa244 and instead organised a TED conference in Arusha, Tanzania. Bono attended the conference, which was held in June 2007. His eldest, Jordan, got him into Fleabag. His second daughter, Eve, an actress who has found onscreen success in Bad Sisters and The Perfect Couple, introduced him to The Kardashians.
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Bono, it’s clear, has more stories to tell. And he believes the world needs to hear them. Throughout the band’s debut and follow-up (Boy in 1980, October in 1981), Bono, the Edge, and Larry Mullen Jr. were locked in a personal religious struggle. They’d fallen in with a church of Christian fundamentalists, called Shalom, and their calling to Jesus was increasingly difficult to square with something as flip as sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. As their profile continued to rise, so did their pastor’s displeasure. Tormented, they decided that to stick with this business, they’d have to make their music mean something.
“This place saved our musical lives,” says Bono a few days later, sitting in one of the living rooms. The space around us is stunning but informal. Two big gray couches, a wall of windows to stare at the sea. A piano in the corner and a giant fireplace behind us.
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- “But you don’t have the luxury.” There’s too much at stake.
- As their profile continued to rise, so did their pastor’s displeasure.
- While they were rehearsing one particularly intense set piece, Bono recalls standing up on a wooden table (in that moment representing a hospital bed) and playing both himself and his father, Bob Hewson, during his father’s final breaths.
- Throughout U2’s career, religiosity has infused the group’s songwriting and performance.
“But you don’t have the luxury.” There’s too much at stake. Bono founded ONE in 2004 and (RED) in 2006. They are as much his life’s work as his music is.
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They hadn’t yet learned how to enjoy it. Yeats was buried just down the road,” says Bono near the end of our first afternoon together, name-checking the famed Irish poet. It’s early April and the U2 singer is walking me up the driveway of his vacation estate in the South of France, toward my waiting car.
But as much introspection as Bono may have done here by the Mediterranean, it’s not in his nature to sit idle or live in the past. The relentless drive that has propelled the singer and his band for nearly fifty years now is very much still there. And much like in his early years in the South of France, he’s feeling newly energized. U2 is in the studio working on songs—perhaps the band’s first album of new music in nearly a decade—and his excitement about the material is palpable.
For forty years, Bono has been one of the loudest and best-known advocates for globalization. He has staked his reputation, a lot of his money, and a lot of other people’s money on the belief that the more blended the world becomes, the better off everyone in it becomes. He watched it raise Ireland out of poverty, and he’s seen it bring industry and infrastructure to Africa. Ten years ago, we were, he felt, on our way to solving a lot of the world’s problems. And now he is watching as a violent snap back toward nationalism has spread across continents.
“I was going through the pure joy of having adolescence the wrong way around—having it in my thirties instead of my teens,” he recalls. “There was a moment where I had to ask myself, ‘Where is this self-love and where’s this self-indulgence? The decade that led up to buying the summer home had been thrilling, and exhausting. “You’re pushing a rock up a hill,” Bono says of what it takes to become the biggest band in the world. U2 had grown into Serious Musical Artists.
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Hewson, who would soon after embrace the nickname Bono, was still reeling from the loss of his mother two years prior. “This guy was really, really, really alone,” recalls childhood best friend Gavin Friday, who, before founding the band the Virgin Prunes in 1977, lived down the block from Bono. “It’s why our friendships became so tight.” Bono’s father, Bob, was just forty-eight at the time of his wife Iris’s death and quickly embraced a life out on the town. Bono’s brother, Norman, was seven years his senior, living a much more adult life.
The U2 frontman spent the past few years reexamining his life and career. Now he’s back with new projects, new music—and a fresh sense of urgency to change the world. ” Bono says with a smile before imitating Bob, who died in 2001, bellowing at him as a teenager, as he does with that subtle head turn in the show. You’re the baritone who thinks he’s a tenor,’ ” Bono sneers before pulling out of character.
Behind us, the Mediterranean Sea fills the horizon, blue as far as the eye can see. It’s blissfully private, even if the glitz of Monaco and Cannes isn’t too far away. Bono is not the first Irishman to trade the dampness of his home country for the sunny shores of the Côte d’Azur—but he might be doing it better than the rest. Bono shares an anecdote that he was standing next to Clayton when the latter received a text from JJ Burnel, a punk legend and bassist for the London band the Stranglers. U2, it turns out, played on a bill with the band in the ‘70s, but because Burnel refused to wear a button stating “U2 can happen to anyone,” Bono and the boys robbed their dressing room. But the star of the show isn’t Bono, says Bono.
“That’s really on my mind at the moment,” he admits. When Bono is considering something deeply, his mouth will often start moving seconds before any words emerge. As much as he is a lively conversationalist, he’s prone to pregnant pauses as well. Sitting and chewing on a thought before he shares it. Following conversation threads with Bono is usually a journey and often an exercise in Old World literature and religious theory.
Bono’s experiences informed the band’s biggest-selling and most influential recording, The Joshua Tree (1987), which ranked 26th when Rolling Stone magazine selected its top 500 albums of all time in 2003. How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004) became U2’s sixth number one album, and by 2006 the group had sold some 150 million albums over its career. With Songs of Experience (2017), its eighth number-one album, U2 became one of the few bands to have a chart-topping album in four consecutive decades. The group received numerous honors, including more than 20 Grammy Awards.
