The world according to Bono

Otago Daily Times

24-05-2025

Bono is telling all in a new documentary, to put the past behind him, he tells Sean O'Hagan.
The new film Bono: Stories of Surrender begins with the U2 singer re-enacting the moment his life almost ended: December 2016, an operating theatre in Mount Sinai hospital, New York. As the camera circles him on a minimal, starkly lit set, he climbs on to a table and mimes the actions of the cardiac surgeon who sawed through his chest bone with "the combined forces of science and butchery".
The eight-hour emergency operation on what he calls his "'eccentric heart" was a success, but soon afterwards, a complication left him struggling to breathe for several long, life-threatening minutes.
Given all that, I ask him, is he taking things even a little bit slower these days?
He nods, smiling. "It was Edge [U2's guitarist] who once said I treated my body as an inconvenience, but I'm definitely trying to be more respectful of my physical self after what happened. I think I'm getting a bit better at it."
Dressed in a vintage khaki green US army jacket, black T-shirt and jeans, his eyes framed by round, rose-tinted spectacles, Bono looks relaxed, if battle-worn. We are sitting on a terrace in the expansive garden of his house in Killiney, County Dublin, on the first tentatively warm day of the summer.
Below us, through tall trees, the full expanse of Dublin Bay is visible and, from time to time, the shouts and laughter of bathers braving the waters drifts upwards on the breeze. "You should be able to see the sun glinting off the glass roof of the Martello tower we used to have," he says, signalling in the direction of Bray, a seaside town a few miles up the coast, where he and his wife, Ali Hewson, lived in the early 1980s, when, driven by his unbounded ambition, U2's ascendancy was just beginning.
I first crossed paths with Bono at a pivotal moment in that journey in May 1987, when I travelled to Rome to interview him for the NME . The occasion was the first date of the European leg of The Joshua Tree world tour and, with hindsight, the devotion of the thousands of Italian fans in the outdoor Stadio Flaminio amphitheatre was a signal of what was to come.
All that seems a long time ago. Next year will mark 50 years of U2's existence; at least one celebratory documentary is in the offing, as well as — intriguingly — a Netflix drama series produced by JJ Abrams ( Star Trek, Mission: Impossible III , Lost ) and scripted by Anthony McCarten, who wrote the screenplay for the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody .
Bono's Stories of Surrender is drawn from his 2022 memoir and subsequent one-man stage show. Directed by Andrew Dominik, it prefigures that celebratory reappraisal of U2's career and, as our conversation attests, it arrives at a moment of serious self-reflection. The singer recently turned 65. From here on, it seems, his focus will be on making music rather than campaigning, a decision underpinned in part by a newfound understanding of his own mortality.
"I will have to stop doing some of what I have been doing elsewhere in order to do this thing that I have been given since I was 16 or 17," he says.
In the film, vignettes from his suburban childhood and fractured adolescence — his mother, Iris, died when he was 14 — rub against anecdotes about his activist encounters with some of the most influential people on the planet, including Bill Gates, George Soros, George W. Bush and Nelson Mandela.
Bono is on camera throughout, playing several versions of himself — rock star, dogged campaigner, but also plaintive son in search of his father's blessing and driven teenager wired on punk — as well as deftly impersonating a passing parade of characters, including his father, the three other members of U2 and even the great Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti. "It is", he quips at one point, "the world according to me". As such, it will be manna for the faithful and anathema to those for whom very little of Bono goes a long way. Same as it ever was.
The performance is revealing to a degree. "The mask reveals the man," as Bono says knowingly at one point.
How does he feel about that John Updike quote: "Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face?"
He smiles. "I'd say it's about your choice of mask that is sometimes more revealing. I have a particular thing about what I could call 'bogus authenticity'. I remember the first time I saw us on the telly, thinking: 'That's someone who is trying to look how he thinks you should be on the telly, but he doesn't know the first thing about it'."
Having known Bono for a time and enjoyed his company, I've always been intrigued by the disjuncture between his private and public self, the latter tending to be less mischievous and, at times, altogether more earnest-sounding. When I mention this, he replies: "Yes. Yes. And you were right."
And is he still like that? "Yes."
Bono, the consummate performer, takes centre stage for much of the film, but for me, the picture is most revealing when he speaks of the people and places that shaped him: his father, with whom he had an often thorny relationship; the mother he lost; the enduring friendships that began his almost ordinary childhood and adolescence on Cedarwood Rd in north Dublin and later at Mount Temple school, where, in the same fateful week in September 1976, he met Alison Stewart, his future wife, and the three fellow pupils with whom he would form U2.
It turns out that my Observer colleague Killian Fox's father, Tony, taught Bono biology in the late 1960s and early 70s. Tony tells me he remembers "parking up at school one day and hearing a rumpus coming from the music room, all this crashing and banging. It turned out to be Bono and his gang when they were just getting going". What was the young Paul Hewson like as a pupil? "He was a character, and I respected him for that. He wasn't disruptive in any way, but he was, how shall I put it, noisy."
As Bono tells me, the education that really mattered to him came from elsewhere. "Those nights as teenagers, when we'd meet up at Gavin Friday's house up the road and sit in the 'good room' and talk about Picasso and Brecht and listen to Bowie. It was all about art, trying to find yourself through art. Back then, it was almost a matter of life and death for people like us. It was that serious."
At one point in the film, Bono says of his childhood self: "I was born with my fists up." Was he combative even before he lost his mother?
He pauses. "I went to a primary school called the Ink Bottle school when I was just 3 years old and I remember on the second day, there was a scrap. At 3! There were a few early scraps at Mount Temple, too, so maybe my fists were up because that was just the nature of the beast back then. But things definitely went south on me when my mother died. I started to feel abandoned, and that was a different thing altogether."
The previous evening we had attended together a live home-town performance by his close friend Friday, where, in between songs, the artist regaled the audience with anecdotes about his childhood and family life, referencing those shared formative years on Cedarwood Rd more than once.
When I speak to Friday a few days later, I ask him about that time. "I was just getting to know Bono when [his mother died]. It's maybe a strange thing to say, but I think her death created him in a way. For me, the lines he speaks about her are the most powerful and the most revealing. When he says that the family 'disappeared' after she died, there's a real brutal honesty to that."
In the film, Bono describes how, in the wake of his mother's death, he suddenly found himself in "a house of rage and melancholy" in which she was never spoken of. His life became, for a time, "a river of silence" that someone less strong-willed might have drowned in.
Like other musicians who lost their mothers when they were young — John Lennon and Paul McCartney being the most obvious — Bono's sense of deep loss seems to have transmuted into a desire to remake himself anew. "There was something about him, even then, that was different," says Friday. "I was very shy as a kid and I remember being almost bewildered by the extraordinary confidence he had. At the time, I thought it was a Protestant thing."
As the film makes clear, Bono's late father, Brendan "Bob" Hewson, was a man for whom paternal encouragement did not come easily. Their relationship is acutely evoked on screen in scenes in which Bono sits at a table on the semi-darkened stage and relives the stilted, but often darkly humorous conversations they had over pints of Guinness in Finnegan's pub in Dalkey. It was a fraught bonding ritual familiar to Irishmen of a certain generation. In his memoir, Bono writes: "We stare at each other. Talk around each other. Occasionally, we talk to each other."
By the time he developed the cancer that ended his life in 2001, Bob Hewson had finally, as Bono wryly puts it, "become comfortable with his son being loved and loathed, which is the price of popularity in Ireland".
Having written the book and evoked his father on stage and on screen, is he any closer to understanding him?
"I'm only starting to realise now, after playing my father night after night on stage," he says, "that he might have been a lot more likeable than I was. And funny. And charming. It would have been easy to caricature him, but that would have misrepresented his complexity."
In May 2023, I watched Bono play the final date of that one-man stage show, at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, the oldest opera house in the world. As the show drew to a close, he sang one of his late father's favourite songs, Torna a Surriento . It was a characteristic move, if a risky one given the setting, but the Italian audience lapped it up, rising to their feet with shouts of: "Bravo, maestro!".
It seemed like there was a tear in his eye at the end ...
"Yes," he says, "and it was OK. It's a sad song to sing even if you are not thinking about your father."
He pauses. "In one sense, my dad could not have been less ambitious, and I've sometimes thought [recently] that maybe he was right to make his life and friends the priority rather than ideas. He certainly made the family a priority."
In terms of his own family, his daughter, Eve, is a successful actor and his son, Elijah, fronts an acclaimed rock band, Inhaler. How did he feel when Elijah followed in his footsteps?
"In a way, the last thing you want anybody you love to do is to put themselves out there," he says. "For me, that always brought a lot of judgement and unpleasantness and, even though I pretended it was just water off a duck's back — and to some degree it is — it hurt. I'm much thicker-skinned now but, when I was younger, the armour wasn't on properly. That's what I don't want for my kids. And, by the way, they don't suffer from it. Elijah is close to understanding who he is now, but, for me, art was always an attempt to identify myself."
One consequence of his recent reflections, it seems, is that the singer has recently stepped away from what seemed like an integral part of his life's work — the efforts to marshal western politicians to engage with structural global inequality to prevent avoidable deaths in sub-Saharan Africa.
At the end of 2023, without fanfare, Bono stepped down from the board of the One, the campaigning organisation he co-founded in 2004. It seemed an acknowledgment not just of his age, but of a decision he had made to reset his own priorities towards his family and his band.
There have been times when he recognised the contradiction between his two callings. When I spoke to him in 2009, Bono had acknowledged that his relentless campaigning had caused friction with his other band members: "They thought that it would distract me. And more than that, they were just not into it at all."
When I remind him, he nods and says: "Yep, I could have lost the band."
And yet he continued to somehow juggle two jobs, both of which were all-consuming. How hard was that?
"Let me put it this way: I won't go to my grave thinking I wasted my time in terms of my activism. I might, however, go to my grave thinking there was that one U2 song I let go of, when it was so close and I went out the back door before it was finished."
Over four decades, Bono's pragmatic approach to activism for African debt relief and the provision of retroviral medicines to treat HIV/Aids has seen him justifiably lauded — but also criticised for, among other things, having a white saviour complex, being hypocritical about his tax affairs, and cosying up to rightwing Republicans and the world's elites, whose vast wealth, his critics argue, remains an essential part of the problem he is attempting to solve.
Against this, he has always insisted that he deals in "real politics and realpolitik", in the dogged pursuit of outcomes rather than the voicing of outrage.
Jamie Drummond, another co-founder of One, describes Bono to me as "a factivist, an evidence-based activist, who's spent years learning these subjects in detail, which is also helpful when you're trying to get someone to invest billions of dollars in a country they may have never been to".
In 2003, after determined pressure from Bono, then US president George W. Bush created Pepfar (president's emergency plan for Aids relief), which set in motion the largest commitment by any nation in history to address a single virus. (He and Bush have since become friends.)
To date, successive US administrations have committed more than $120 billion (NZ$202 billion) to that cause, which has helped save an estimated 26 million lives. Despite the deep reservations of lefties about the company he was keeping, the results — while not creating the systemic change his critics insist is needed — do undoubtedly speak for themselves.
His approach was, until now, predicated on what he often refers to as his single useful idea: you don't have to agree with people on everything if the one thing you do agree on is important enough. I ask him if that philosophy is still tenable in the face of Donald Trump's brutal "America first" ideology?
"I don't think so," he says, wearily, "I can't do it. The organisations I helped create and sustain can't carry the anger that I have at the vandalism, not just of USAID, but of people's lives — the people that worked on it and the people whose lives depended on it."
There is a sense of deep personal betrayal evident in his voice. "I think what [Trump's government is] doing now is so shortsighted and frankly dumb. Then there is the delight, the — dare I say it — glee of these people, as they pull life-support systems out of the wall with no warning. That means a haemorrhaging of human life. It's hard to measure the enormity of it now."
Aren't many of the people who are behind this vandalism, as he calls it, the same Republicans and Christian evangelists he had worked with previously?
He accepts that some of them are. "I'm sure that, when their constituencies find out, they will take their support for this administration away. Whether it's millions or hundreds of thousands of lives at risk, how in any way can you justify that as a Christian or religious person?"
Given all that, where does this leave him?
"Out of a job. I don't think you can turn off being an activist, but I'm not sure the conversations I enjoy between opposite points of view are ones I can referee at this present moment. But there are other people who can take up that torch. We are into new territory and it's incredibly disturbing. I don't recognise the GOP [Grand Old party]. There are some people I know who I imagine still care and have kindness in them. And it's worth dwelling on the word kindness. In terms of the evisceration of USAID and Pepfar, unkind is not the word to describe it — it's murderous."
He falls silent for a while. "In our lifetimes, yours and mine, we had the sense that the world was evolving in the direction of freedom ... but, the thing is, there is no sound historical backing for that belief. Our lives are a tiny fragment of time; the bigger moral arc of the universe does not bend towards justice. It has to be bent towards justice."
Which brings us to Gaza. In January, Bono provoked a storm of online criticism for accepting a presidential medal of freedom from Joe Biden, who had just committed another $8 billion (NZ$13.5 billion) of hi-tech weaponry to Israel. In Ireland, where support for Palestine is such that Israel closed its embassy in Dublin at the end of last year, U2, like many established rock groups, have been regularly condemned on social media for their silence.
He once famously said, I remind him: "Where you live should not determine whether you live." Surely that also applies to Gaza ...
"Yes."
Was he surprised, then, that many people were outraged at him taking the medal from Biden? He takes a deep breath. "I've worked with Joe Biden, and his friends and foes, for 25 years, and he has fought for debt cancellation and supported our campaigns, which have saved 26 million lives — so of course I was going to take the medal. I was also accepting it on behalf of all the activists who spent 25 years of their lives on this."
What, though, about the huge number of civilian lives lost in Gaza and the current withholding of aid — maybe people think that he should be consistent in terms of speaking out?
"As it happened, I did sound off about Gaza on the very day I received the medal of freedom. I spoke about the void of freedom in the lives of Palestinian people in the Irish Times and the Atlantic. So, with respect, I reject your central argument that I haven't spoken out. But, also, I think it's daft to accept the notion that people's public pronouncements are the sum of them. I'm after outcomes — from my activism and, more importantly, for the activists often in U2's audience who work harder if there is a clear end in sight."
At the medal of freedom ceremony, he tells me, he was sitting near Jose Andres, founder of the food aid charity World Central Kitchen. "This is someone who has lost seven of his aid workers in Gaza, who were taken out by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]. And he is there, blessing himself as he is given his medal by Joe Biden. That's why I had my hands clasped like that, for him. I was following his blessing and that's why I look like such a pious dick."
We go at it for a while longer, until his press officer arrives to tell us we have another 15 minutes. Somewhat reluctantly, he agrees to move the conversation to his other job.
I put it to him that U2 have been very nostalgic of late, revisiting 1987's The Joshua Tree album on stage in 2017 and the groundbreaking Achtung Baby for their marathon residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas last year.
Surprisingly, he concurs. "Yeah, we have been involved in some nostalgia. But I would say, you have to know where you came from in order to be more effective in the present and the future. That's the case in a different way with the book, the stage play and now the film. I have a record of it all, but now, I have to move back into the future, which is where U2 always lived."
The band, it turns out, have recently reconvened in a nearby studio with longtime collaborator Brian Eno to prepare the groundwork for what will be their 16th album. "We're busy writing another reason to exist as a band," Bono says. "I still find Brian an extraordinary inspiration and I'm sure he still finds me quite frustrating. But I know he will keep on defending our right to be ecstatic in our music."
Is it more difficult to do that as you grow older?
"Not in terms of the music. It does get harder particularly for men to move around each other's egos."
Has writing the memoir and adapting it for the stage and screen made him think differently about his role in the band?
"It certainly opened up more questions. Ultimately, our art is more interesting than us, and I think the disservice I've done to the band is distracting from their greatness. There is something that we own — a fingerprint, a genetic code — and I feel that I haven't served it enough, that it needs my full attention."
Before he departs for a band meeting, he tells me that one of the early titles for his memoir was The Pilgrim and His Lack of Progress . Reflecting one more time on the solo journey he has been on of late, he says.
"I think I've made a beautiful little opera of a film, and that it's OK to give vent to these outsize emotions if you do so with some humour and some humility. I hope I got the humour." He grins. "The humility's in the post." The film
• Bono: Stories of Surrender will be available globally on May 30 on Apple TV+. — The Observer