“This place saved our musical lives,” says Bono a few days later, sitting in one of the living rooms. The space around us is stunning but informal. Two big gray couches, a wall of windows to stare at the sea. A piano in the corner and a giant fireplace behind us.
Bono Has Another Story to Tell
They hadn’t yet learned how to enjoy it. Yeats was buried just down the road,” says Bono near the end of our first afternoon together, name-checking the famed Irish poet. It’s early April and the U2 singer is walking me up the driveway of his vacation estate in the South of France, toward my waiting car.
At some point, he even caught some Love Island. Not as much as he should, but more than he had. And as his foundations (RED) and ONE chugged along, he finally reconsidered his involvement. “Maybe I should fuck off into the background,” the thinking went. Mainly, he spends a lot of time here alone. “Working like a dog, living like a shih tzu,” he quips.
- In 1986, Bono and U2 performed on Amnesty International’s Conspiracy of Hope Tour of benefit concerts in the United States,7 alongside musicians such as Sting and Bryan Adams.
- Bono’s experiences informed the band’s biggest-selling and most influential recording, The Joshua Tree (1987), which ranked 26th when Rolling Stone magazine selected its top 500 albums of all time in 2003.
- His children can each engage and disengage, healthily.
- After Iris died, the three men never spoke her name again.
Bono says he’s ‘done singing about all the dead people I was close to’
The U2 frontman spent the past few years reexamining his life and career. Now he’s back with new projects, new music—and a fresh sense of urgency to change the world. ” Bono says with a smile before imitating Bob, who died in 2001, bellowing at him as a teenager, as he does with that subtle head turn in the show. You’re the baritone who thinks he’s a tenor,’ ” Bono sneers before pulling out of character.
Personal life
During performances, Bono attempts to interact with the crowd as often as possible. In recent years, drummer Larry Mullen has been struggling with back pain—you hit things for a living, eventually they hit back—while Bono has been working through his own individual story. “There was a period of reflection where we had to figure out, do we have anything to offer? ” Bono’s glad the answer they arrived at is yes. “You don’t want what I have,” he says finally. “I’m really grateful for the fire in my belly and whatever kind of pugilist it made me—to try and put a finer word on a man who can just throw a bad punch in a pub.
Musical style
Bono, it’s clear, has more stories to tell. And he believes the world needs to hear them. Throughout the band’s debut and follow-up (Boy in 1980, October in 1981), Bono, the Edge, and Larry Mullen Jr. were locked in a personal religious struggle. They’d fallen in with a church of Christian fundamentalists, called Shalom, and their calling to Jesus was increasingly difficult to square with something as flip as sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. As their profile continued to rise, so did their pastor’s displeasure. Tormented, they decided that to stick with this business, they’d have to make their music mean something.
They are working with Brian Eno again—the superproducer behind The Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby, and Zooropa. And, as he was during the writing of 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind, Bono is currently consumed by a desire to return to the essentials. He sees it now as a fraught exploration of the male perspective.
“That’s really on my mind at the moment,” he admits. When Bono is considering something deeply, his mouth will often start moving seconds before any words emerge. As much as he is a lively conversationalist, he’s prone to pregnant pauses as well. Sitting and chewing on a thought before he shares it. Following conversation threads with Bono is usually a journey and often an exercise in Old World literature and religious theory.
But as much introspection as Bono may have done here by the Mediterranean, it’s not in his nature to sit idle or live in the past. The relentless drive that has propelled the singer and his band for nearly fifty years now is very much still there. And much like in his early years in the South of France, he’s feeling newly energized. U2 is in the studio working on songs—perhaps the band’s first album of new music in nearly a decade—and his excitement about the material is palpable.
And Hewson was desperate—for community, mainly. The last several years have been a time of recovery and reckoning for Bono, who turned sixty-five this spring. He made it past a serious health scare (one that he’d played down in public) and emerged with a more balanced perspective on how to enjoy the everyday pleasures in life. He faced demons from his youth that have fueled him throughout his career. And he reassessed his role in the nonprofit work that has captured so much of his passion and energy over the decades.
- From the 2010s, however, Bono’s activism has mostly taken place behind the scenes.
- In addition to his acting credits, Bono has contributed music to films, as part of U2 and other collaborations.
- Bono didn’t see that reaction coming but takes all the credit for the decision.
- “You don’t want what I have,” he says finally.
- In 1976, fourteen-year-old Larry Mullen Jr. hangs a flyer on the bulletin board of his Dublin high school, Mount Temple, reading, “Drummer seeks musicians to form band.” Paul Hewson, David Evans, and Adam Clayton all show up.
Bono Has Another Story to Tell
For forty years, Bono has been one of the loudest and best-known advocates for globalization. He has staked his reputation, a lot of his money, and a lot of other people’s money on the belief that the more blended the world becomes, the better off everyone in https://p1nup.in/ it becomes. He watched it raise Ireland out of poverty, and he’s seen it bring industry and infrastructure to Africa. Ten years ago, we were, he felt, on our way to solving a lot of the world’s problems. And now he is watching as a violent snap back toward nationalism has spread across continents.
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He’s gone deep within himself and come out different. Using empty chairs as stand-ins, Bono unwraps his U2 mates Larry Mullen Jr., Adam Clayton and his brother in all but name, the Edge. In his 25 performances, Bono – one of the most mega of music stars on the planet – played to intimate theater crowds a fraction of the size of the stadiums U2 commands and learned that sometimes the most gripping props are an empty chair and a spotlight. He is best known as the lead singer and lyricist of the Irish rock band U2, which has sold over 150 million albums worldwide and won 22 Grammy Awards.
