U2 Legend Bono on Why the World Has Forgotten What Freedom and Democracy Mean

Yahoo

18-05-2025

A lifelong storyteller, Bono continues to take audiences to that other place.
The longtime frontman for U2 is the focus of the Apple TV+ documentary Bono: Stories of Surrender, which just got a special screening at the Cannes Film Festival.
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He tells The Hollywood Reporter about the film and that potential U2 series.
In the film, you discuss the strangeness of not having your band with you. Did this process allow you to connect with your songs in a new way?
Absolutely. If you change the key, you're already changing the mood of the song. If you slow down the tempo, you're already changing it. In the case of Stories of Surrender, it has to drive the story forward. So 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' is involved, not just because it's a song that U2 fans like, but because it illustrates and hopefully illuminates a period in time when a song about nonviolence mattered in Ireland.
It was even ridiculed at the time in Ireland. I used to introduce it as, 'This is not a rebel song,' because it was an anthem to nonviolence. 'Pride (In the Name of Love)' in the '80s was another anthem to nonviolence. But these songs were chosen to develop how I developed and how the band developed in that part of who we are, that militant pacifism.
Later, there would be songs like 'With or Without You,' which turns into this meditation about marriage and what we put each other through and the compromises we ask each other to make, and you end up with this mad definition of love where you discover love is the realizing of another's potential, realizing of your own potential. And if it's perfectly balanced and reciprocated, you get through it — not just in a marriage, but in a band, in a family. It ends up in a very intimate place. But in the end, [this project is] about the family I was born into and all the families I ended up in.
You mention that the song was ridiculed. We're currently in a moment where our world leaders can make it feel that wanting to change our world or express empathy are worthy of ridicule. Can popular artists still be a voice for change?
The world has forgotten what 'freedom' and 'democracy' mean. These are words we never thought we'd ever question, but they are being questioned right in front of our very eyes. 'Maybe democracy is not the right way to deal with climate change.' 'Freedom is for people who are of a certain level of education.' This is wild. In my whole lifetime, the world has never been closer to all-out war. Here I am, on the Croisette, at the red carpet of Cannes, with a film called Stories of Surrender at a time when the word 'surrender' has never seemed so absurd, and everyone's got their fists up.
I started writing this book [that was adapted into the stage show] because I thought it was just me. We're getting through it — sorry, we're not getting through it. I have hope and faith that we will get through it. You know Dr. [Martin Luther] King's great line about, the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice? I don't think that's true anymore. But I think we have to bend it.
And so we owe a lot to the Beatles. We owe a lot to Bob Dylan. We owe a lot to Aretha Franklin. We owe a lot to these great writers and poets who brought in what we now can refer to as a kind of renaissance in the '60s of peace and love. I'm ever more respectful of that generation. They came out of a World War. They knew what that was. They knew the cost of when you put a load of egocentric men in charge of weapons of mass destruction, what can happen.
You named a few artists who have received the biopic treatment or, in , soon will. I know that U2 fans were excited that a Netflix series about the group was in the works with J.J. Abrams. Any progress you can share?
No. We'll know it when it's right. We'll know it when it's ready. The U2 story is a bizarre one. It's a high school drama, really, slash Stranger Things. [Stories of Surrender] is the end of a four-year process of addressing the past, lifting stones, discovering a few creepy-crawlies underneath them, dealing with them, and now we move on [with new music]. I hope that whatever I've uncovered in my own little opera, if it's of use to people, then I'm thrilled.
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