Bono's new memoir 'Surrender' details his long career in music and activism Transcript

14 studio albums, 170 million records sold, 22 Grammys, more than any other band, and legendary live shows and global tours. The only band in history with number-one albums on the Billboard 200 in four consecutive decades, starting in the 1980s. By any measure, U2 is one of the world’s biggest bands and their lead singer, Bono, one of music’s biggest stars. He’s telling his own story now in a new memoir, and recently sat down with Jeffrey Brown to talk about it. Part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

U2, one of the greatest and most enduring of all rock bands. Bono, it’s lead singer, now looking back at how it all began, and what made it work.

Megalomania started at a very early age. And U2, we knew we hit something, it just wasn’t very musical. My friend used to say about bands, he’d say, “Oh, they’ve everything but it.”

But it.

But it.

Yeah.

You go, “They look good, they’ve got everything, but it.”

Yeah.

U2 only had it.

Whatever it is, U2, Bono, guitar player the Edge, born David Evans, bassist Adam Clayton, drummer Larry Mullen, has had it for more than 40 years. And Bono has not only been the frontman for the band, but long ago developed a different kind of voice, as a leading activist, lobbying world leaders to do more to advance global health and development.

I mean, people have come to help us from all over.

We met recently in New York at his organization, RED, which focuses on fighting AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa. In his new memoir, Surrender, he writes of it all, beginning with a young boy born Paul David Hewson in Dublin, who didn’t get much encouragement to think big.

It’s an Irish thing. I suppose, growing up in the seventies, my father, his kind of view on life was don’t dream, actually.

Don’t dream?

To dream is to be disappointed because he was very, very capable. He was really talented, and he was like, “Just get yourself through, get a job.” He works in the post office. It’s funny, the things that are locked inside people. And my whole life has pledged the idea really of trying to unlock potential. The squandering of human potential is a thing I grew up fighting against, one of the things I grew fighting against.

Perhaps the most personal and painful part of the book, the sudden death of his mother, Iris, from a brain aneurysm when Bono was 14. He describes himself, his older brother, Norman, and their father as three lost souls, pretending they could just move on. “In our house when she died,” he writes, “she was never spoken of again. I fear it was worse than that, that we rarely thought of her again.” That’s a painful last line.

Yeah, yeah, some of this stuff was hard to write. But the book was partly about finding those memories. Well, the emptiness is there to be filled, isn’t it? It’s the void. My own family was my father and my brother, Norman. We were all Irish males screaming at each other and the television set, and facing off and squaring off with each other. It was the home just became a house, and my whole life would be really the pursuit of home and the alternate families to get me there.

A lucky man, he found those families in one place, his school. He met Ali Stewart, now his wife of 40 years, when he was 13, and the members of U2 were classmates who got together as teenagers. That was quite a school.

Rock, Rock, Rock & Roll High School. Ramones sang that.

In his book, Bono cites punk bands like The Ramones, as well as legendary singer, performer and actor David Bowie as leading influences. And he describes the work that went into finding his own voice and style.

I wasn’t a great rock and roll singer, I’m still not really. I can sing, but rock and roll is like The Barking Dog, the great rock and roll singers like Mick Jagger or whatever.

So what are you?

It’s a feminine sound in a way. It’s not a macho, it’s not shouting at you thing. I am shouting at you, but my voice isn’t.

The band’s first album, Boy in 1980, was a critical success and they were well on their way. But there was always another thread to the U2 story, three of the members, Bono, the Edge, and Larry Mullen, were and are deeply spiritual, Christians without attachment to organized religion. You could hear it everywhere in the songs, which in some cases Bono refers to as akin to biblical psalms.

Yeah, my life is very influenced by Judeo-Christianity, and this idea that if there’s a force of love and logic behind the universe, and I believe there is, that it may be absurd that this force of love might be interested in the detail of our lives. But I choose to believe that, and I can’t live up to it unfortunately. That’s the only problem. But I meet it in so many places. I meet it with both music, painting, that takes me to that, I suppose the word is awe, but the Americans have ruined that word. Awesome. No.

Sorry.

Ah, he’s like, “No. Actually it’s a great word, awesome. But I like the awe.

Bono describes one moment though where the need for higher purpose almost derailed the band, until their manager brought them back to work.

We go and see our manager, and we say, “We want cancel the next tour and the next album.” He’s an extraordinary man, Paul McGuinness, the Winston Churchill of rock, and he goes, “So let me get this right. You’ve been talking to God, have you?” And I’m like, three of us are like, “Sort of, yeah.” “And he wants you to not do this tour and that kind of thing?” “Yeah.” “So how’s God with legal contracts? I mean, because I’ve signed on your behalf.” And we’re like, “Oh yeah, he wouldn’t want to break a legal contract [inaudible 00:07:33].”

No contracts were broken. Instead, the band found a way forward, and Bono found a way to mix the music with a high-profile, high-stake social activism that brought him to different kinds of world stages. We’ll explore that in part two of our talk with Bono. For the PBS NewsHour, I’m Jeffrey Brown in New York.

You can tune in tomorrow for part two of Jeff’s conversation with Bono. And online, right now, you can watch Bono read an excerpt from his new memoir. That’s on our Instagram account.