Latest news with #Bob
Time Out
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Time Out
‘Stories of Surrender': 8 Things We Learned About Bono From His New Documentary
World, meet Bono. In Bono: Stories of Surrender, a new doc directed by Andrew Dominik (best-known for two excellent films about Nick Cave), the U2 singer born Paul Hewson bares his soul in front of an intimate audience, in a lively stage show based around his memoir. The candour is punctuated with stripped back versions of his band's mega-hits. He's backed by a handful of young, mostly classical musicians; his U2 bandmates, as well as his parents and his wife, are all represented simply by chairs. The whole thing is captured in stunning, cinematic black and white. Here are eight things we've learned about a man usually seen leaping about a giant, effects-heavy stadium stage in front of thousands. 1. His dad was dismissive of his son's talents The film leans heavily with humour (and pathos) into the difficult relationship the singer had with his father, Bob, who begrudged his son having the musical career he'd wanted for himself. Cue a series of putdowns ('You're a baritone who thinks he's a tenor!') and only a begrudging acknowledgement when Bono plays him Pride (In the Name of Love) for the very first time. Even when Pavarotti called personally asking for a song from Bono, Bob didn't believe it. 'I craved my father's attention,' Bono admits. 2. He met his future wife Ali and joined U2 in the same week It turns out The Edge had his eye on Ali first, but Bono soon put a stop to that. Ali and Bono married at 21 and have been together ever since – as have the band. As Bono says, all the important adults in his life he has known since he was a teenager. To say they are tight is an understatement. 3. He once nearly died at Christmas It turns out a rock 'n' roll lifestyle can catch up with you. During the festive season, Bono collapsed at home with his 'lifeline' (aorta) about to burst in 2016. He was wheeled off to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York for emergency treatment. He describes in vivid detail staring up at the ceiling as the surgeons worked frantically to save him. 4. Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen once hid from Pavarotti in a cupboard Originally a punk outfit, Bono had a hard time convincing his bandmates to get excited about the world's greatest tenor visiting them for a major collaboration. When the great man brought a film crew with him, only Bono and Edge were there to greet him. 5. Bono lost his mum at 14, and his father never spoke of her again With heartbreaking honesty (and lashings of Irish charm), Bono recounts the trauma of losing his mother from an aneurysm on the same day they buried his grandfather. His father refused to talk about it – or her – ever again, and Bono never visited her grave. 6. Bono met up with his dad once a week at a bar in Dublin and they barely spoke to each other 'Anything strange or startling?' is all Bob had to say to his young son as they supped their pints in silence. Bob's dying words were also suitably opaque ('Fuck off!'). In his younger years, Bob liked to sing and conduct classical music at home with his wife's knitting needles. Punk was not his thing. 7. Bono is fine with being seen as a hypocrite when it comes to money He admits he has his faults. He also explains why he doesn't accept that people should be starving, or that countries in Africa should still be paying interest on debt to the big banks of the world from dodgy loans from the Cold War. He's still a man of the people, then, who can get a good table at a fancy restaurant. 8. U2 came up with their first big hit with two strings and two chords A massive punk fan, Bono always believed in the immediacy and directness of music. In an early rehearsal one day, he grabbed Edge's Gibson Explorer and began playing what he describes as the 'sound of an electric drill on the brain'. When the band joined in, the classic I Will Follow was born. And despite wanting to quit after one album, they went on to become the biggest band in the world.
Bloomberg
a day ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Expensive Cancer Drugs Don't Always Work
Hi, its Bob in soggy New Jersey. I'm about to head to the big annual cancer conference in Chicago. How many of those new drugs save lives? More on that in a moment, but first ... I've been reporting on the FDA's expedited drug approval process for a couple of years now. Critics say it's helped drug companies make billions on drugs that turned out to be ineffective. And the cost of cancer drugs came up again and again.
AsiaOne
a day ago
- Entertainment
- AsiaOne
I had a mini cook-off with Chef Bob as he launches his latest creations - here's how it went, Lifestyle News
I've watched my fair share of cooking competitions, from Culinary Class Wars to MasterChef, but never did I expect to be participating in one. Even if it was just a friendly cook-off. My opponent for the day? None other than Shahrizal Salleh, better known as Chef Bob, an established name in the local culinary scene. For the uninitiated, Chef Bob had stints at luxury hotels like Grand Hyatt and Ritz-Carlton. He also began his own ventures like The Landmark, a halal buffet in Bugis, and Bobmi, which specialises in Indonesian Bakmie. On Wednesday (May 28), at a media preview for his latest collaboration with Halal restaurant Good Old Days in Sentosa, I had the chance to sample his three new dishes: Nasi Lemak Goreng, Assam Pedas Pasta and Ginger Fish Horfun. These dishes will available on Good Old Days' menu for the next seven months. Being a self-proclaimed foodie, I was naturally excited to have a first taste of these creative inventions. That enthusiasm would soon morph into mild panic when I found out I'd be cooking alongside Chef Bob during the event. Behind the kitchen counter To be fair, I willingly accepted the offer to step into the kitchen with Chef Bob. Regardless, that sense of dread was genuine. The cook-off was simple enough in-theory. I had to mirror Chef Bob in whipping up his new Assam Pedas Pasta. Once plated, our dishes would be put through a blind taste test to decide the winner. Ingredients included fresh prawns, Thai asparagus, laksa leaves, onion, asam pedas, evaporated milk and pappardelle pasta. Mix it all up in a pan and there's the dish. Sounds easy enough, I thought. In practice? Not quite. Chef Bob's knife skills had me trailing behind from the very start. As he sauteed his onions like a seasoned pro, I was already left sweating (both figuratively and literally) just trying to keep up. Despite the early wobbles, I managed to complete cooking the dish and both our Assam Pedas Pasta was done and sent off to plating. The blind taste test was a wipeout, with every participant picking the "cylinder" instead of the "sampan" option. Imagine the surprised, and slightly suspicious, look on my face when it was announced that I cooked the winning dish! The cook-off was all in good fun and once that was done, I had the chance to dive into all of Chef Bob's latest creations. Verdict on new dishes Right off the bat, I'll admit that I've never been particularly fond of assam pedas. So there was a slight hesitance on my end on whether I'd appreciate his Assam Pedas Pasta ($12.80). But having won the cook-out, I thought: "Why not go in with an open mind?" I took a bite and was pleasantly surprised. The tangy and lightly spiced sauce was a winner for me, and it paired well with the choice of pasta. Fresh prawns and crunchy Thai asparagus also added texture to the dish. Did the dish completely win me over when it comes to a classic assam pedas? Probably not. But would I order it again at Good Old Days? Highly likely. Then came the Ginger Fish Horfun ($10.80). Fans of Chef Bob will be glad to see this classic menu item return from his earlier culinary career A comforting dish featuring rice noodles, dark soy sauce, egg gravy and fish slices, this is a solid pick if you're a hor fun lover. But my suggestion would be to save space for a plate of Nasi Lemak Goreng ($12.80) instead. Rich, aromatic and so addictive. Coconut rice is wok-fried and plated with Chef Bob's signature crispy turmeric chicken, a sunny-side up egg and a variety of sides such as cucumber slices, sambal, ikan bilis and peanuts. Simple in appearance but deceptively tricky to execute. Chef Bob explained that due to the rice's high fat content, a different level of skill was required to fry it right. We got a sampler portion that left me wishing for a full-sized plate. [[nid:716024]] After the tastings, I sat down with Chef Bob to talk about the collaboration. He told AsiaOne that he'd long been a patron of Good Old Days. When asked about the creation of his three new dishes, Chef Bob replied: "I came up with [these dishes] to complement whatever Good Old Days already has. "Because their menu is already extensive." He also noted that bringing new ideas to the table is often an arduous process, especially when it comes to menu planning. According to Chef Bob, the R&D process can take six months as it involves numerous tweaks and iterations before the final dish is finally presented to the public. Take the Assam Pedas Pasta, for example. I learnt that the choice of pappardelle was intentional. "Pappardelle is very wide so when you cook it with a sauce, it'll hug the pasta. When you eat each strand, you can get all the flavours as well," Chef Bob explained. And having tasted and cooked the dish myself, I can certainly vouch for that. Address: 60 Siloso Beach, Singapore 098997 Opening hours: 10am to 10pm daily, last order at 9pm [[nid:717704]] amierul@
RTÉ News
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Bono: Stories of Surrender - Bono on his ownio on Broadway
As the man himself says, welcome to "a whole new level pf navel-gazing." The film of the book tour of "the buke" he wrote himself swims into life in stark monochrome with Bono on the stage of the Beacon Theatre in New York. It's Bono on his ownio on Broadway with only a simple table and chairs and the Jackknife Lee Ensemble working their minimalistic magic behind him. We're not in Vegas anymore. For a man who often thinks bigger is beautiful, Bono: Stories of Surrender is a refreshingly intimate close up of a rock star flipping through his back pages and doing a very good job of charming the birds down from the gods and maybe even giving Bono haters pause for thought. Across the short one and a half hours running time, the man behind the perma shades is very good company, spinning yarns, singing songs, and only occasionally lapsing into the Bono-sprech that makes him just that tiny bit naff and cringey - or a hate figure to many who see him as a hypocrite riddled with contradictions. And nobody knows that better than Bono. He is half self-effacing preacher and half penitent, creeping to the cross. He does humility very well but this "over-lavished, over-praised, over-fed and over0paid rock star" is also more than willing to declare his right to be ridiculous. The shaman and shameless showman admits that doing this "quarter man show" feels transgressive without his three band mates. They are represented here by those three chairs but there are few new insights into the inner workings and tensions of U2 in this film. All too often inter-band friction is explained away with more poetic slights of, well, Bono-sprech. You can almost here Larry muttering side of stage, "Fine, do the solo show - just keep me out of it." There are pen portraits of Paul McGuinness ("the Winston Churchill of rock. He went to war for U2"), Bono's wife Alison (they married at only 21) and his bandmates ("When he loves, Larry loves completely") but the anchor of this show is Bono's voyage around his father, the late Bono Hewson. When the singer's mother, Iris, died when Bono was just 14 after collapsing at her own father's funeral ("almost too Irish, I know"), Bob took a vow of angry silence and never mentioned her name again, turning the family home on Cedarwood Road into, as Bono says, "a river of silence in which I might have drowned." "The Opera of Bon Hewson" brings us to the Sorrento Lounge of Finnegan's Pub in Dalkey where father and son held Sunday afternoon seances over Guinness (Bono) and Bushmills (Bob), barely speaking to each other, but cracks begin to emerge in Hewson Sr's resolute refusal to be impressed by his son's wild success. When the lifelong opera fan accompanies his son to Pavarotti's hometown of Modena in Italy, he initially turns down an invitation to meet Lady Diana. However, when she comes up unannounced and introduces herself, Bob is charmed out of his patriotism. "800 years of oppression disappeared in eight seconds" says his still incredulous son. So, this is a Bonologue that obeys all the conventions of a stage production but this being Bono, it is only a folk mass and a sermon. And this being Bono, there are also plenty of gnomic one-liners (Sunday Bloody Sunday is "religious art meets The Clash," with I Will Follow, The Edge turned my graffiti into some f***in' Rapheal Mother and Child"), and philosophical guff like "There's a selfishness implicit in the desire to be great at something." The songs take on a new life. Cellist Kate Ellis and harpist Gemma Doherty pick out the strident melody of Vertigo (a song about the vertiginous heights of U2's fame) and there are great snatches (arias, if you like) of Desire, Where The Streets Have No Name, With or Without You and the spine-tingling quasi religiosity of I Will Follow. Shot in a clean lined but atmospheric black and white by director Andrew Dominik, it moves along at a brisk, playful pace and the fourth wall is shattered once or twice. An interval section goes meta with Bono staring for long seconds at his own reflection in a mirror and the film's closing scene takes us to (where else) Teatro San Carlo Napoli, with Bono singing - rather beautifully - the U2 track The Showman - another song about the strangeness of being Bono. In the past few years, U2 have recorded albums full of childhood reveries and played a Vegas residency dedicated to their 1991 magus opus Achtung Baby. Solo Bono in particular has been busy with his own archaeology of The id but with the drumbeat of a new U2 album sounding again, maybe this film closes a chapter that was in danger of meandering on for far too long. It's all played out in front of a wildly appreciative audience as only American audiences can be and Bono has them eating out of his often outstretched hand. Of course, whether you will enjoy this story of fate and faith as much as the folk in the Beacon Theatre all depends on whether you enjoy Bono but this is a very likeable, funny and moving night pf tales from a short rock star.
Irish Independent
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Bono – Stories of Surrender review: The life and times of this gifted raconteur is an elegant affair
We might add to this list a night in late 2022 when Bono brought the debut show of his all-singing, all-sharing book tour to the Olympia Theatre. Marking the release of his memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, the night was attended by a who's-who of Irish life; everyone from heads of state to broadcasting giants. What greeted them was a side to the U2 frontman perhaps less seen, part opera star, part seanchaí, relating the knots of his extraordinary life from a stage of rare intimacy. Stripped-down versions of songs would helix through stories about his parents, his upbringing in Dublin, meeting wife Ali and his eventual bandmates (in the same week), and the globe-gobbling stardom that would eventually come. Two things seemed to strike anyone lucky enough to get a ticket or an invite that night – the stagecraft of the entire performance, and the sheer dexterity and control of the then 62-year-old's vocal cords. One music industry friend of mine, someone who has seen all the greats down through the years, put it in the top five things he had ever seen staged anywhere in our capital. That show's beguiling format of yarns and renditions from one of the most famous people on the planet has been captured on camera without too much in the way of reverence or pomp. Andrew Dominik's film brings just a slick monochrome sheen and some light digital trickery to proceedings as it swoops about New York's Beacon Theatre. Accompaniment is provided by producer and occasional U2 collaborator Jacknife Lee, who strips those arena-filling compositions back to their essence with vocal and instrumental help from Crash Ensemble cellist Kate Ellis and harpist Gemma Doherty (of Saint Sister). That aside, it's just a table, a few chairs, a bit of a lighting rig and a gifted raconteur cherry-picking from his bestselling memoir. ADVERTISEMENT Learn more As with the book, the 'eccentric heart' trouble that hospitalised him in New York in 2016 is a jumping-off point for what is essentially a scenic route through a newfound sense of mortality. And then it's right into Cedarwood Road, The Ramones and a complicated parental dynamic. More than in the print memoir, Bono's over-arching niggle in Dominik's film is father Bob, the opera-lover who married protestant Iris (much to his own family's disapproval). Following Iris's death when then Paul Hewson was just 14, much head-butting went on between the punkish teenager and the nonchalant, old-school Bob. All good frontmen carry the 'look at me, Mum' gene, but while Iris's death certainly played a role, it was Bob's reluctance to really acknowledge his pride in the rising superstar that provides the emotional cornerstone for these stories. By the time Bono is re-enacting their stunted Sunday afternoon conversations in Finnegan's pub, the delicate dynamic is tangible but somehow never mawkish or self-pitying. Always there is a sense of forward momentum, a dance that, much like the operas his father would sing along to, have their ebbs and flows. A brilliant mimic who is naturally predisposed to physical showmanship and far-reaching activism, you come to appreciate just what a rare and unusual creature Bono is and how wide of the mark are those tiresome slurs on his character (he does pay taxes, by the way, as do all members of U2 – find a new hobby). And what of the songs chosen from that imperious back catalogue? Well, there are moments in this show where a classic track bubbles up to the surface of an anecdote – see the penning of debut single Out of Control or Pride (In the Name of Love) – that are so cannily timed they arrive like goosebumps exploding. Hate them all you like, but there can be no denying that U2 and their singular frontman push buttons that no one else has really found access to. While an early Christmas present for fans, for everyone else this is an elegant, classy, fun and often poignant one-man opera that revels in the limitations of its setting. Four stars
