David Remnick: Early in his career, Bono once told an interviewer about his plans for a band called U2. He said, "If we stay in small clubs, we'll develop small minds and then we'll start making small music. Now, that turned out not to be at all a problem. In the course of a decade, U2 went from playing gigs in small places in Dublin, Ireland, to being one of the biggest bands in the world. Bono, the fearless and sometimes shameless leader of U2, became among the most definitive rock stars of the modern era, conquering arenas and stadiums around the globe, singing out and often holding forth.

Bono is out with a new documentary now on Apple+ called Bono: Stories of Surrender. I spoke with him at the New Yorker Festival in 2022 before his memoir was released.

[applause]

David Remnick: When you talk to people, people who have been in bands when they're 16, no matter what their destiny was, they have no expectations other than to play in a bar, to maybe be the best blues band in London, like the Stones or whatever. What was the ambition that was fired up in you pretty quickly once this band took shape?

Bono: Megalomania started in me at a very early age, David.

[laughter]

Bono: The other part of it is desperation and the sense that, from my point of view, this was liberation for me. I had known as a child that I had melodies in my head and here and there I'd be good at school, but I was losing concentration and more interested in girls and then music and then, oh, music and girls-

[laughter]

Bono: and a release from a kind of the pain that a lot of people feel when they don't know what it is that they might have to offer. When I sang in U2, something got a hold of me and it made sense of me.

David Remnick: Do you think that some of that feeling, some of that passion came from the loss that you had suffered two years before? Your mother died at her own father's funeral, or certainly fell ill and then died soon thereafter. Eerily, strangely, this is a loss at the same age that Paul McCartney, I think Johnny Lydon, Bob Geldof, John Lennon's mother died very early. What was in you from that loss, and then a household of three guys, your brother, and your father, it seemed there was a great emptiness after that.

Bono: It's funny, that thing about rock and roll singers and the mother. I heard somebody say in hip-hop, it's more the father. It's interesting. I don't know if that's true or not, but they're both about abandonment and the heart of the blues; for me, it turned into a gift. This wound in me just turned into this opening where I had to fill the hole with music. It's a very unscientific theory. If someone you love's passing, there's sometimes a gift. The opening up of music came from my mother. When my father passed, I came into a different kind of voice. My father used to say, "You're a baritone who thinks he's a tenor."

[laughter]

Bono: After my father died, I felt I kind of became the tenor.

David Remnick: What do you think of that analysis of your voice? A baritone who thinks he's a tenor?

Bono: Very accurate.

[laughter]

Bono: My father was quite accurate.

David Remnick: Quite was.

Bono: Had me down.

David Remnick: Loved opera himself.

Bono: Yes, he did. He was a tenor and pretty good tenor. It's interesting. You think about working-class Dublin, city centre Dublin, Catholic. His mother used to listen to the cricket scores on the radio in England. He listened to opera. They read. It's interesting. I like the fact that when people don't fit into their box-- My father didn't fit into the box. Then just round the corner, my mother lived. She was a Protestant. They fell in love with each other. Not remarkable in these days, but in a time when Ireland was nearly at civil war, it became a big thing.

David Remnick: Tell me about your memories of that sectarian violence and the way it fed into your art that was beginning your music.

Bono: Developed a distrust of religion. Very suspicious of religion. I still am. Even going back to when I was growing up, it was very male, that energy. My father was also suspicious of nationalism. My father used to say things like-- He'd quote O'Casey, he say that line from O'Casey, "What is Ireland but the land that keeps my feet from getting wet."

[laughter]

Bono: When I was writing the book, I found out O'Casey never wrote that. No, he made that up.

[laughter]

Bono: He really did. It's a great line, though, isn't it?

David Remnick: It is a great line. Your title is Surrender. It's a motif that runs throughout the book. Why did you name the book Surrender?

Bono: It's a word I am still grappling with. I'm kind of gathering around it. It doesn't come natural to me.

David Remnick: How do you mean?

Bono: I find I was kind of born with my fists up, metaphorically speaking, sometimes literally.

David Remnick: You describe yourself as an angry guy right off the--

Bono: A little bit. It's not even that. Just a bit suspicious, bit defensive maybe, and just have my Fists up. The word surrender doesn't come natural to me or a lot of Irish people growing up in the '70s. I still find it hard to surrender to my bandmates as an older person as you, it gets even harder to surrender to my wife, to surrender to my maker. I'm quite a defiant character, but I'm working on that, David.

[laughter]

Bono: That's why I wrote the book.

David Remnick: That's why we're here.

[applause]

Bono: I'm here. Yes. My mother dropped me on my head when I was a baby.

David Remnick: An incredible fraternity and friendship, and creative ferment develops in the band. Yet you describe more than once how the band almost breaks up. There's an early--

Bono: Only on the good albums.

[laughter]

David Remnick: There's one moment that I wish you'd talk about that where Edge has a kind of spiritual crisis, and he's going to leave. Then if he's going to leave, you're going to leave. The whole thing seems ready to just dissipate in a moment's time. What happened?

[laughter]

David Remnick: It's in the book. I swear to God.

[laughter]

Bono: Is tonight a Friday night? It's more of a Sunday morning story, but I will answer that question.

David Remnick: Thank you.

Bono: We're in a non-denominational school. They're not pushing religion down our throats. Yet three of us end up with this very deep faith. We're touched by some of the people we meet at a deep level and we start reading the sacred text. We start exploring this. We meet these, I suppose you'd call them first-century radical Christians, kind of punks. They didn't need many material things. They were very strict in that sense. They were interesting.

At first, we thought that they accepted us for being who we were. After a while, they started to get in on us. "Maybe this music thing is-- You should just put that down. The world is broken really, and it's really broken, and if you want to be part of the fixing of it, maybe music is something you should just put away and sing these praise songs." I'm like, "Every song we sing is a praise song. What is the story on this?" I can't do the happy-clappy [sings] [unintelligible 00:10:15]. I think God might object to being patronized,

[applause]

Bono: [sings] Lovely. Brilliant. Isn't he brilliant?

David Remnick: You figure God already knows.

Bono: I think God knows. I'll tell you what, I'm into worship and I do believe in worship and the worship even if it starts with [sings] brilliant. If you get to the brilliance, ooh, well, that's something. Anyway, we're kind of going, we're believing these people. Maybe we're wrong. Edge is feeling it really badly. He's in a kind of agony, actually. He rings me up and he says, "I don't think I can resolve this."

I said, "Well, yes, I'm having some problems with this too. I want to be useful. I want to be useful in my life. I want my life to add up to something. I want our life to add up to something. I want to be useful to the world. The world is fucked." They didn't like you saying fucked, but that's how we spoke. I said, "Okay, we'll agree, I'll leave." Then Larry was like, the same. Then Adam again, all he ever wanted, and he's like, "Oh, God."

[laughter]

Bono: Adam had introduced us to a quite posh manager called Paul McGuinness.

[applause]

Bono: We just had success with our first album called Boy.

[applause]

Bono: We'd go and tell him that it was all over. He was sitting there, and we walked in, and Paul looked over and said, "So you've been speaking to God?" We're like, "Yes. Yes." "God has told you that you don't want to be in the band, again, you want to break up the band?" I said, "Well, in a manner of speaking, yes." "Okay, so you've been speaking to God, and he doesn't want you to be a band. How's God on legal contracts? Because I've signed a legal contract here."

[laughter]

Bono: We were just completely, "Oh, maybe we didn't hear that right." Anyway, so we went back on the road and we played the October tour. It was pretty special, but Edge still wasn't resolved. He was trying to figure out how could we make our music not utility, but useful in the more profound sense. Ali and I got married, and I went away to Jamaica. Chris Blackwell gave us GoldenEye, this place that he-- We were like, "Whoa." We didn't have much cash to speak on, so this was incredible. This was the land of Bob Marley.

Bob Marley played a role in our life, though I would never meet him. Here's what it was. Edge, whilst we're away, starts to work on a song that will solve the problem. The song was called Sunday Bloody Sunday.

[applause]

Bono: He starts off, but if you hear it, you'll hear the Jamaican influence. [sings]

I can't believe the news today

I can't close my eyes all on that way

How long?

You realize that the reason why Chris Blackwell didn't throw us off Island Records because we'd made a mad religious album wasn't mad at all, but people were calling it mad. He was used to dealing with Bob Marley and Bob Marley wanted to sing to God. Bob Marley wanted to sing to girls. Bob Marley wanted to sing to the world around him and protest it. There it was, a three-chord strand that became U2. That started with Edge. Sunday Bloody Sunday.

[MUSIC - U2: Sunday Bloody Sunday]

I'll wipe your tears away (Sunday, Bloody Sunday)

I'll wipe your bloodshot eyes (Sunday, Bloody Sunday)

David Remnick: Bono speaking live at the New Yorker Festival. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, and we'll continue in a moment.

[MUSIC - U2: Sunday Bloody Sunday]

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

[music]

David Remnick: This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick and I'm speaking with Bono, the lead singer of U2. He's out with a new documentary on Apple+ called Bono: Stories of Surrender. One of the things I wanted to ask about was one of U2's earliest hits, Sunday Bloody Sunday. The lyrics refer to a 1972 massacre in northern Ireland when protesters were killed by British soldiers.

[MUSIC - U2: Sunday Bloody Sunday]

Broken bottles under children's feet

Bodies strewn across the dead-end street

But I won't heed the battle call

David Remnick: Bono insists on the song's non-sectarian message. He says, "It was a condemnation of violence on all sides of the conflict."

[applause]

David Remnick: It's such an interesting song in so many ways, such a wonderful song. It was also something that was a little complicated for you, politically. You described it once as for Unionists it was a betrayal, for nationalists it was an ad campaign. What was the political line that you were trying to tread with SundayBloodySunday?

Bono: It was an odd song because we were trying to contrast this bloody event in Irish history with Christ on the cross and the kind of stupidity of religious violence, but we're like 22 and feeling this in our country. At first, people got excited. The Republicans were like putting up the war album and the posters around, "Good man." The Unionists were like, "Ooh." Then they swapped and was like, "No, they're not for the war." It was like, "Oh." We didn't know which side we were on.

Then I started to dismantle the Irish flag on stage. I would tear off the gold and then tear off the green and just hold up the white. These were dramatic acts I learned from, I suppose, studying John Lennon, whatever. These were powerful acts. Then, through reading about the civil rights in these United States and reading about Dr. King, then I started to understand more about nonviolence. We went into New Year's Day, we went into a whole-- this vein, just a very rich vein in songwriting. In Dublin, there was-- not in Dublin, but around the country, suddenly it just wasn't as cool to be into U2. We weren't so much the national team in certain areas.

David Remnick: You would preface the song and performance by saying, "This is not a rebel song." Was that alienating to some?

Bono: Yes.

David Remnick: How did you feel it? How did that alienation or rejection or opposition make itself known?

Bono: I remember being in a car coming out of one of our concerts in Croke Park, and our car was surrounded. I had just dismantled the flag and there were some angry people around the car, and they were trying to smash the window where Ali was sitting with me. I remember thinking that was, wow. You feel the pain of these people. Now I understand the real pain people were in and I wish not to make light of it. I think you can die for your ideals, but you shouldn't kill for them, if at all. I understand that these people felt they were at a war and that I had betrayed them and our band was betraying them.

David Remnick: You recently appeared, as you do so often in these situations, in Kyiv, in Ukraine.

Bono: Oh, yes.

David Remnick: I saw you, I believe you were in a metro station, a subway station, and met with politicians. What do you find yourself achieving when you do that? Tell me about your experience in Ukraine.

Bono: It goes back to Sunday Bloody Sunday. It goes back to charity is a thing that we all are part of but justice is something that really is a reason for me to get out of bed. The injustice of what's happening in Ukraine was so hard to take that we just wanted people to know that we were with them. I'd met President Zelenskyy before he was president, met him in Ukraine. He's a great storyteller. You know this. He's an actor. He's one of us. You know what I mean? Yermak, his right hand, is a film producer. They're storytellers. They need to get their story out, which is why they're doing all this media, because they know, if they disappear from our phones, if they disappear from your screens, then they mightn't get the money from the United States.

When President Zelenskyy asked us to go, I had to go. Edge wanted to go. There was lots of musicians. Remember, Bob Geldof wanted to go. We all wanted to go. In the end, it was the two of us busking in a subway. You know what's interesting? When I saw it back, they lit it really well. I'm like, "They're in a war." They're like, "No, you know what to do here. Make this look-- Bono, you need to look good. You're going to--" It's like, "What?" It's just, these are incredible people. They love freedom, and they love it so much, they're ready to lay down their life for freedom. We who live in freedom should really, really remember not to fall asleep in ours.

[applause]

David Remnick: Bono, I should say, I came here several hours ago, and people had been lined up outside. They were very eager to ask you questions. One that I kept hearing was, did you find writing a memoir therapeutic in any way? What was the motivation to do so?

Bono: The gift it gave me was time on my own. It turns out I need more time on my own. It changed me, actually. I don't know if it's changed me for well, I don't go out as much. Also, I'm such a shy typist that when I talk, I talk too quickly and I sort of throw the paint at the canvas. When I'm typing, I have to slow down my thoughts, and they make more sense of me, and I make more sense of them.

David Remnick: This is a wonderful question. You and Ali recently celebrated 40 years of marriage-

[applause]

David Remnick: -who is here tonight. This is great. This is terrific. An Irish newlywed in the audience asks, "What's the secret?"

[laughter]

Bono: A newlywed in the audience. It's quite mad getting married.

David Remnick: I know.

Bono: There's a grand madness about it, and there's something about that and knowing that you're going against the odds. I would say if you're asking me seriously, that friendship can outpace romantic love sometimes. Friendship is what myself and Ali have. When you have romantic love and friendship, that's really something special. I don't want to give you the impression that everything was all easy for us, but any time either of us got lost, the other would be there to get the other one home. I'm so grateful. It was brilliant when we got to 40 and we went, "Let's not fuck this up now."

[laughter]

[applause]

David Remnick: A related question. The other relationship, that's 40 years old, we just had the documentary, the Get Back documentary. We watched the Beatles in rehearsal.

Bono: Brilliant.

David Remnick: Anybody who was in a band said, "It's amazing. They're so creative. They're getting along so well." Then anybody else who's not in a band thought, "They hate each other. They're not getting along at all." When you watch that documentary, how did you relate it to your 40 years in the band? This band has outlasted the Beatles by a factor of four.

Bono: I couldn't believe it, Get Back, if you haven't seen it. First of all, who knew the Beatles invented reality TV?

[laughter]

Bono: That was mad. They had little microphones in the flower pots, and they're over there, John's talking like this, and they're giving out walking now, and they [unintelligible 00:27:15] wired. They invented reality TV. Second thing was like watching Jesus on the Beatitudes or something. You could imagine. It's like-

David Remnick: Drafting the Beatitudes.

Bono: -and the weak will inherit the earth, no, the meek will inherit the earth.

[laughter]

Bono: No, no. You could see them actually doing it. I couldn't believe it. You could feel the tension. It's very hard for males and it gets harder to move around each other the older you get. Males are funny, especially, I think women are better at this, but I could see it in the Beatles. I should tell you just a tiny little story that Paul told me, which is brilliant, like I hang out with Paul all the time, I don't. Let me tell you, when I do, I pay attention because it's like hanging out with Johann Sebastian Bach. I would carry his guitar case, and no question about it, but he was talking about his relationship and he says, "It could be really overbearing, I realize." He says, "I was going at John one day, was going at him, and he just looked up and actually he was wearing glasses just like you." No kidding. "And he just did this. He went, 'Hey, Paul, it's just me, it's John. It's only me. It's John.'" He said, "Trying to calm me down, you was." Bands go at each other, but again, it's friendship. It has to be friendship. That's the thing that has kept U2 together.

David Remnick: You did something very unusual for a band in that you split everything up financially, equally.

Bono: What a fool.

[laughter]

Bob: What a fool. Didn't think it would add up to anything.

David Remnick: [Laughs]

Bono: [chuckles] It's the best thing ever. Those songs are made what they are because of Edge, Adam, and Larry. Our manager used to say to us, "It's not musical differences that break up most bands. It's the moolah."

[laughs]

David Remnick: He say, "Get that right." Another cracker's like, "Don't be the band who looks too stupid to enjoy being at number one. Smile, for God's sake."

[laughter]

[music]

David Remnick: That's Bono speaking at The New Yorker Festival in 2022. This year's festival, which takes place in October, will celebrate the magazine's hundredth anniversary.

[music]

 

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