U2’s Bono on the Power of Music

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1:07This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

1:16This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm 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. And 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.

1:58Bono is out with a new documentary now on Apple Plus called Bono, Stories of Surrender. And I spoke with him at the New Yorker Festival in 2022 before his memoir was released.

2:12When you talk to 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 sort of took shape? Megalomania started in me at a very early age, David. and the other part of it is desperation and the sense that you know from my point of view this was liberation for me and I had known as a child that I had melodies in my head and you know 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.

3:21And a release from a kind of 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 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 um eerily strangely this is this is a loss at the same age that paul mccartney at i think johnny lyden bob geldoff 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 um it seemed there was a great emptiness after that it's funny that thing about rock and roll singers and the mother um 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 you know 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 and it's a very unscientific theory I have someone you love's passing there's sometimes a gift and the opening up of music came from my mother and when my father passed, I finally became, I came into a different kind of voice.

5:28My father used to say, you're a baritone, who thinks he's a tenor? And I sort of, after my father died, I felt I kind of became the tenor. What do you think of that analysis of your voice, a baritone who thinks he's a tenor? Very accurate. My father was quite accurate. He had me down. And loved opera himself. Yeah, he did. He was a tenor and pretty good tenor. And yeah, it's interesting. You think about working class Dublin, city center Dublin, Catholic, loved. His mother used to listen to the crickets course on the radio, like in England. And he listened to opera. They read. It's interesting.

6:16And I like the fact that when people don't fit into their box, my father didn't fit into the box. And then just around the corner, my mother lived. She was a Protestant. And 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. Tell me about, though, your memories of that sectarian violence and the way it fed into your art that was beginning, your music. Developed a distrust of religion, very suspicious of religion. I still am. And even going back to when I was growing up, you know, it was very male, that energy.

7:11and my father was also suspicious of kind of nationalism. My father used to say things like, you know, he'd quote O 'Casey. He'd say, that line from O 'Casey, you know, what is Ireland but only the land that keeps my feet from getting wet? And when I was writing the book, I found out O 'Casey never wrote that. He made that up. He really did. It's a great line though, isn't it? 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? It's a word I am still grappling with. I'm kind of gathering around it. It doesn't come natural to me.

8:08How do you mean? I find it I know I was kind of born with my fists up metaphorically speaking sometimes literally you describe yourself as an angry guy right off the a little bit I'm just it's not even that just a bit you know a bit defensive maybe and just have my my fists up and so the word surrender it doesn't come natural to me or a lot of Irish people growing up in the 70s I still find it hard, you know, to surrender to my bandmates. As an older person, it gets even harder to surrender to my wife, you know, to surrender to my maker. I'm quite a defiant character, but I'm working on that, David.

9:00And that's why I wrote the book. And that's why we're here. I'm here, yes.

9:09My mother dropped me on my head when I was a baby. An incredible fraternity and friendship and creative ferment develops in the band, and yet you describe more than once how the band almost breaks up. Only on the good albums. Yeah. And there's one moment that I wish you'd talk about where Edge has a kind of spiritual crisis, and he's going to leave, and then if he's going to leave, you're going to leave, and the whole thing seems ready to just dissipate in a moment's time. What happened?

9:49It's in the book, I swear to God. Is tonight a Friday night? It's more of a Sunday morning story, but I will answer that question. Thank you.

10:07So, we're in a non-denominational school. They're not pushing religion down our throats. And 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 texts. We start exploring this. We meet these, I suppose you'd call them first century radical Christians, kind of punks. And, you know, they didn't need many material things. They were very strict in that sense. But they were kind of interesting. And 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 so I'm like every song we sing is a praise song What is the story on this?

11:28And I can't do the happy clappy. I think God might object to being patronized.

11:40And lovely, brilliant, isn't he brilliant? Now. You figure God already knows. I think God knows. But I'll tell you what. I'm into worship and I do believe in worship. And the worship, even if it starts with brilliant, if you get to the brilliance, the brilliance, ooh, well, that's something. So anyway, we're kind of going, we're believing these people. Maybe we're wrong. and Edge is feeling it really badly. He's in a kind of agony, actually. And he rings me up and he says, I don't think I can resolve this. And so I said, well, yeah, I'm having some problems with this too. I want to be useful. I want to be useful in my life.

12:45I want my life to add up to something and I want our life to add up to something. I want to be useful to the world. The world is, you know, fucked. And they didn't like you saying fucked, but that's how we spoke. But I said, okay, we'll agree. I'll leave. And then Larry was like the same. And then Adam, again, all he ever wanted. And he's like, oh, God.

13:16And Adam had introduced us to a quite posh manager called Paul McGuinness.

13:31And we just had success with our first album called Boy.

13:41And we'd go and tell him that it was all over. So he was sitting there and we walked in. and Paul... So you've been speaking to God. And we're like, yeah. Yeah. And God has told you that you don't want to be in the band again. You want to break up the band. Well, in a manner of speaking. Yes. Okay. So you've been speaking to God, and he doesn't want you to be in a band. And how's God on legal contracts? Because I've signed a legal contract here. And we were just, you know, just completely, oh, maybe we didn't hear that right.

14:45And anyway, so we went back on the road, and we played the October tour. and it was pretty special, but Edge still wasn't resolved. And he was trying to figure out how could we make our music, not utility, but useful in the more profound sense. And Ali and I got married and I went away to Jamaica. Chris Blackwell gave us Gold and I, this place that he, and we were like, whoa. we didn't have much cash to speak on so this was incredible and this was the land of Bob Marley and Bob Marley played a role in our life though I would never meet him and here's what it was Edge whilst we're away starts to work on a song that will really explain will solve the problem and the song was called Sunday Bloody Sunday and he starts it off but if you hear it you'll hear it the Jamaican influence I can't believe the news today I can't close my eyes oh Lord never wait how long and 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 so there was a three chord strand that became U2 and that started with Edge, Sunday, Glitch Sunday.

16:56Bono, speaking live at the New Yorker Festival. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour and we'll continue in a moment.

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21:57This 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 Plus 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.

22:35But Bono insists on the song's non-sectarian message. He says it was a condemnation of violence on all sides of the conflict.

22:48It's such an interesting song in so many ways, such a wonderful song. And it was also something that was a little complicated for you politically, for the public. You would say, 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 Sunday Bloody Sunday? I mean, yeah, 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. and, you know, but we were like 22 and feeling this in our country.

23:44And at first people got excited. Some of the more, the Republicans were like putting up the war album and the posters around. Good man. And then, and the unionists were like, ooh. And then they swapped and it was like, no, they're not for the war. and it was like, oh, and we didn't know which side we were on, and 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, and these were sort of dramatic acts I learned from, I suppose, studying John Lennon, whatever, but these were powerful acts, And then through reading about the civil rights in the United States and reading about Dr.

24:39King, then I started to understand more about nonviolence. And we went into New Year's Day. We went into a whole vein, just a very rich vein in songwriting. but it did in Dublin there was, not in Dublin but around the country suddenly it wasn't as it just wasn't as cool to be into U2 we weren't so much the national team in certain areas You would preface the song and performance by saying this is not a rebel song was that alienating to some? Yes How did you feel it? How did that alienation or rejection or opposition make itself known?

25:31I remember being in a car coming out of one of our concerts in Croke Park, and our car was surrounded, and I 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. And I remember thinking that was, wow. And 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. but I understand that these people felt they were at a war and that I had betrayed them and our band was betraying them.

26:29You recently appeared, as you do so often in these situations, in Kiev, in Ukraine. Oh, yeah. And 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 so 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 And 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. And I'd met President Zelensky before he was president, met him in Ukraine.

27:38He's a great storyteller. I mean, you know this. And he's an actor. He's one of us. You know what I mean?

27:51Jermak, 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 your phones, if they disappear from your screens, then they mightn't get the money from the United States. So when President Zelensky asked us to go, I had to go. And Edge wanted to go. And there was lots of musicians. I remember Bob Geldof wanted to go. We all wanted to go. but in the end, it was the two of us busking in a sort of, in a subway. But you know what's interesting? When I saw it back, they lit it really well.