‘We became close friends after he passed… I didn't think I was a very good son' – Bono on relationship with his father Bob

Irish Independent

24-05-2025

Bono's memoir, Stories of Surrender, which is now the subject of a documentary, largely tells the story of the singer and his father, Brendan Robert Hewson.
'I always loved my father but I really learnt to like him. I realised how funny he was and how I might have missed some of his humour in my teenage years,' Bono told the Brendan O'Connor Show earlier today.
'And then there is this other father, which I am now and the fear of becoming a father because I didn't think I was a very good son,' he said.
Bono, who hit superstardom with U2 in the 1980s, told how became close friends with his father after he passed away, which he described as 'not so smart'.
'But we got on great in one sense. We would go to Finnegan's [pub] and sit there and not speak to each other, but there were looks and glances exchanged,' he said.
He said that he felt his brother was closer to their father and more useful to him as he got ill.
However, he added that he feels he now 'has his father's approval' and that he can 'move forward' with his life.
'I have always felt the blessing of my mother and I still get memories, even though I was 14 when she passed,' he said.
'It's amazing the amount of people in rock n' roll who lost their mothers as a teenager, whether it was Paul McCartney or John Lennon.'
He said his father was very clever, but was taken out of school and later got a job in a post office.
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'He had all these other dreams but he just put them aside because in Ireland at that time, it just was dangerous to have those kind of dreams,' Bono said.
'People would leave Ireland to follow those kind of dreams and we forget this. My mother was totally non-ambitious, she would tell him to take more time off.
'We were just not materially very ambitious and that's very impressive. They put their friends first.'
He added that his father 'really lived his life' and 'laughed a lot'. 'He had this beautiful voice and he had the Coolock musical society.'
When asked if he thought his father was envious of his life, the U2 singer said: 'I don't think so, I just think he couldn't say, 'wow, you got to do all the things I wanted to do'. He just couldn't say that.'
He also spoke of religion, saying: 'It gets more and more fascinating. I am more and more in awe. The Americans have ruined it with that word 'awesome', we have all ruined it. But awe is an extraordinary word.'
Bono described his father as a 'very courageous man' – he was a Catholic and married a Protestant woman against the wishes of his family.
'His own family did not turn up at the wedding. He raised us, me and my brother Norman, in the Church of Ireland, if that's what my mother wants,' he said.
The 65-year-old recalled how his father would drop them at a Protestant church and would then walk 100 metres up the road to attend a Catholic church.
'I have found myself completely comfortable around Catholicism, with its mysticism… genuinely this sense of awe and wonder. And I love that aspect of Catholicism,' Bono said.
'And yet I also feel really comfortable in the Evangelical world, particularly a black church in America where people are up freestyling scriptures, the poetry of them...they are conversant with those scriptures.
'I need them. I'd be comfortable in a synagogue, or in Islam. I am in that sense a religious person.'