The New Yorker Radio Hour - U2’s Bono on the Power of Music

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

In 2022, The New Yorker published a personal history about growing up in Ireland during the nineteen-sixties and seventies. It covers the interfaith marriage of the author’s parents, which was unusual in Dublin; his mother’s early death; and finding his calling in music. The author was Bono, for more than forty years the lyricist and lead singer of one of the biggest rock bands on the planet. As U2 sold out arenas and stadiums, Bono held forth on a range of social causes; he became “the definitive rock star of the modern era,” as Kelefa Sanneh puts it. Bono joined David Remnick at the 2022 New Yorker Festival to talk about his new memoir, “Surrender.” “When I sang in U2, something got a hold of me,” Bono said. “And it made sense of me.” They discussed how the band almost ended because of the members’ religious faith, and how they navigated the Troubles as a bunch of young men from Dublin suddenly on the world stage. Bono shared a life lesson from Paul McCartney, and he opened up about the early death of his mother. “This wound in me just turned into this opening where I had to fill the hole with music,” Bono said. In the loss of a loved one, “there’s sometimes a gift. The opening up of music came from my mother.”This segment originally aired on October 28, 2022. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Early in his career, Bono once told an interviewer about his plans for a band called You Two. He said, if we stay in small clubs, we'll develop small minds, and then we'll start making small music. Now, that turned out not to be at all a problem. In the course of a decade, U2 went from playing gigs in small clubs. places in Dublin, Ireland to being one of the biggest bands in the world. And Bono, the fearless and sometimes shameless leader of YouTube, became among the most definitive rock stars of the modern

era, conquering arenas and stadiums around the globe, singing out and often holding forth. Bono is out with a new documentary now on Apple Plus called Bono, Stories of Surrender. And I spoke with him at the New Yorker Festival in 2022 before his memoir was released. when you talk to people who have been in bands when they're 16, no matter what their destiny was, they have no expectations other than to play in a bar, to maybe be the best blues band in London like the Stones or whatever. What was the ambition that was fired up in you pretty quickly

once this band sort of took shape? Megalomania started in me at a very, early age, David. And the other part of it is desperation. And the sense that from my point of view,

this was liberation for me. And I had known as a child that I had melodies in my head and, you know, here and there I'd be good at school, but I was losing concentration and more interested in girls and then music and then oh music and girls and and a release from a kind of the pain that a lot of people feel when they don't know what it is that they might have to

offer when I sang in you two um something got a hold of me and it made sense of me. Do you think that some of that feeling, some of that passion came from the loss that you had suffered two years before? Your mother died at her own father's funeral, or certainly fell ill and then died soon thereafter. Irrely, strangely, this is a loss at the same age that Paul McCartney, I think Johnny Leiden, Bob Geldov,

John Lennon's mother died very early. What was in you from that loss and then a household of three guys, your brother and your father? It seemed there was a great emptiness after that. It's funny that thing about rock and roll singers and the mother. I heard somebody say in hip-hop,

it's more the father. It's interesting. I don't know if that's true or not, but they're both about abandonment. And, you know, the heart of the blues, for me, it turned into a gift, this wound in me, just turned into this opening where I had to fill the hole with music.

And it's a very unscientific theory. have. Someone you loves passing, there's sometimes a gift. And the opening up of music came from my mother. And when my father passed, I finally became, I came into a different kind of voice. My father used to say, you're a baritone. Who thinks he's a tenor? And I sort of, after my father died, I felt I kind of became at the tenor. What do you think of that analysis of your voice? voice, a baritone who thinks he's a tenor. Very accurate. My father was quite accurate.

Quite much. And loved opera himself? Yeah, he did. He was a tenor. And pretty good tenor. And yeah, it's interesting. You think about working class, Dublin, city-centred Dublin, Catholic. His mother used to listen to the cricket scores on the radio.

like in England. And he listened to opera, they read. It's interesting. And I like the fact that when people don't fit into their box, my father didn't fit into the box. And then just around the corner, my mother lived. She was a Protestant. And they fell in love with each other.

Not remarkable in these days, but in a time when Ireland was nearly at Civil War, it became a big thing. Tell me about your memories of that sectarian violence and the way it fed into your art that was beginning, your music. Developed distrust of religion, very suspicious of religion. I still am. And even going back to when I was growing up,

you know, it was just very male. that energy. And my father was also suspicious of kind of nationalism. My father used to say things like, you know, he'd quote O'Casey. He'd say, that line from O'Casey, you know, what is Ireland, but the only the land that keeps my feet from getting wet. And when I was writing the book, I found out, O'Casey never wrote that. No, he made that up.

He really did. It's a great line though, isn't it? It's a great line. Your title is Surrender. It's a motif that runs throughout the book. Why did you name the book, Surrender? It's a word I am still grappling with. I'm kind of gathering around it.

It doesn't come natural to me. How do you mean? I find it, you know, it's kind of boring. born with my fists up, metaphorically speaking, sometimes literally. You describe yourself as an angry guy right off the... A little bit. It's not even that, just a bit defensive maybe, and just have my fists up. And so the word surrender doesn't come natural to me.

Or a lot of Irish people growing up in the 70s, I still find it hard, you know, to surrender to my bandmate. as an older person as you get even harder to surrender to my wife you know to surrender to my maker I'm I'm quite a defiant character and I but I'm working on that David and that's why I wrote the book

and that's why we're here I'm here yes my mother dropped me on my head when I was a baby An incredible fraternity and friendship and creative ferment develops in the band, and yet you describe more than once how the band almost breaks up. There's an early... Only on the good albums. Yeah.

just dissipate in a moment's time. What happened? It's in the book, I swear to God. Is tonight a Friday night? It's more of a Sunday morning story, but I will answer that question. Thank you. So we're in a non-denominational school. They don't, they're not pushing religion down our throats. And yet, Three of us end up with this very deep faith. We're touched by some of the people we meet at a deep level. And we start reading the sacred text. We start exploring this. We meet these, I suppose you'd call them first century radical Christians.

Kind of punks. And, you know, they didn't need many material things. They were very... strict in that sense, but they were kind of interesting. And at first we thought that they accepted us for being who we were. After a while, they started to get in at us. Maybe this music thing is, you should just put that down. And if, you know, the world is broken, really.

And it's really broken. And if you want to be part of the fixing of it, maybe. music is something you should just put away and sing these praise songs. So I'm like, every song we sing is a praise song. What is the story on this? And I can't do the happy clubby. I think I think God might object to being patronized. And, and, um, lovely, brilliant.

Isn't he brilliant? Now, you figure God already knows. I think God knows, but I'll tell you what, I'm into worship, and I do believe in worship. And the worship, even if it starts with brilliant, if you get to the brilliance, the brilliance. well that's something so anyway we

we're kind of going we're believing these people maybe we're wrong and Edge is feeling it really badly he's in a kind of agony actually and he rings me up and he says I don't think I can resolve

this and so I said well yeah I'm having some problems with this too I want to be useful I want to be useful in my life I want my life to add up to something and I want our life to add up to and I want to be useful to the world

the world is you know fucked they didn't like you saying fucked but that's how we spoke but I said okay we'll agree I'll leave and then Larry was like the same and then Adam again all he ever wanted

and he's like oh god and Adam had introduced us to a quite posh manager called Paul McGuinness and we just had success with our first album called Boy and and we'd go and tell him that it was all over so he was sitting there and we walked in and Paul so you've been speaking to God and we're like yeah and yeah and God has told you that you don't want to be in you want to break up the band again you want to break up the band Well, in a manner of speaking. Yes. Okay.

So you've been speaking to God and he doesn't want you in a band and how's God on legal contracts? Because I've signed a legal contract here. And we were just, you know, just completely. Oh, maybe we didn't hear that right. and anyway so we went back on the road and we played the October tour and it was pretty special but Edge still wasn't resolved and it was trying to figure out how could we make our music

a utility but useful in the more profound sense and Ali and I got married and I went away to Jamaica Chris Blackwell gave us gold and I this place that he, and we were like, whoa, we didn't have much cash to speak on, so this was incredible, and this was the land of Bob Marley. And Bob Marley played a role in our life, though I would never meet him, and here's what it was. Edge, whilst we're away, starts to work on a song that will really explain, will solve the problem. And the song was called Sunday Bloody Sunday.

And he starts it off. But if you hear it, you'll hear it the Jamaican influence. I can't believe the news today. day I can't close my eyes. Oh Lord, never way how long? And you realize that the reason why Chris Blackwell didn't throw us off Ireland records because we'd made a mad religious album, it wasn't mad at all. But people were calling it mad.

He was used to dealing with Bob Marley. And Bob Marley wanted to sing to God. Bob Marley wanted to sing to girls. Bob Marley wanted to sing to the world around him and protest it. So there was a three-cord strand that became U-2, and that started with Edge Sunday-gliss Sunday. Bono, speaking live at the New Yorker Festival. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and we'll continue in a moment.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I'm speaking with Bono, the lead singer of YouTube. He's out with a new documentary on Apple Plus called Bono, stories of surrender. One of the things I wanted to ask about was one of U-2's earliest hits, Sunday Bloody Sunday. The lyrics referred to a 1972 massacre in Northern Ireland when protesters were killed by British soldiers. But Bono insists on the song's non-sectarian message. He says it was a condemnation of violence on all sides of the conflict. It's such an interesting song in so many ways,

such a wonderful song, and it was also something that was a little complicated for you politically, for the public. You would say, you described it once as for unionists,

it was a betrayal. For nationalists, it was an ad campaign. What was the political line that you were trying to tread with Sunday Bloody Sunday? I mean, yeah, it was an odd song

because we were trying to contrast this bloody event, in Irish history with Christ on the cross and the kind of stupidity of religious violence. And, you know, but we're like 22 and and and and and and feeling this in our country. And and at first people got excited. Some of the more the Republicans were like putting up the war album and the posters around, good man. And then, and the unionists were like, ooh.

And then they swapped and was like, no, they're not for the war. And it was like, oh, and we didn't know which side we were on. And then I started to dismantle the Irish flag on stage. I would tear off the gold and then tear off the green and just hold up the white. And these were sort of dramatic. I learned from, I suppose, studying John Lennon, whatever, but these were these were powerful acts. And then through reading about the civil rights in these United States and reading about Dr. King,

then I started to understand more about nonviolence. And we went into New Year's Day, we went into a whole, this vein. just a very rich vein in songwriting. But it did, in Dublin, there was, and not in Dublin, but around the country, suddenly it wasn't as, it just wasn't as cool to be into you too. We weren't so much the national team in certain areas.

But you would preface the song in performance by saying, this is not a rebel song. Was that alienating to some? Yes. How did you feel it? How did that? that alienation or rejection or opposition make itself known? I remember being in a car coming out of one of our concerts in Crowe Park,

and our car was surrounded, and I just dismantled the flag, and there was some angry people around the car, and they were trying to smash the window where Ali was sitting with me. And I remember thinking that was, wow. And you feel the pain of these people. Now I understand the real pain people were in, and I wish not to make light of it. I think you can die for your ideals,

but you shouldn't kill for them if at all. But I understand that these people felt they were in, at a war and that I had betrayed them and our band was betraying them. You recently appeared, as you do so often in these situations, in Kiev, in Ukraine. Oh, yeah. And I saw you, I believe you were in a metro station, a subway station, and met with politicians. What do you find yourself achieving when you do that? Tell me about your experience in Ukraine.

So it goes back to Sunday, bloody Sunday. It goes back to charity is a thing that we all are part of. But justice is something that really is a reason for me to get out of bed. And the injustice of what's happening in Ukraine. was so hard to take that we just wanted people to know that we were with them. And I'd met President Zelensky before he was president. I met him in Ukraine. He's a great storyteller.

I mean, you know this. And he's an actor. He's one of us. You know what I mean? He is, his, Yermak, his, his, his, his, his, his, his, his, his, his, his, his, his, his film producer, their storytellers. They need to get their story out, which is why they're doing all this media, because they know if the, if the, if the, if they disappear from your, from your phones, if they disappear from your screens, then they might get the, the, the, the money from the United States.

So when President Zelensky asked us to go, I had to go. And Edge wanted to go. And there was lots of musicians. Remember, Bob Gelder wanted to go. We all wanted to go. But in the end, it was the two of us busking in a sort of in a subway. But you know what's interesting? When I saw it back, they lit it really well.

I'm like, they're in a war. And they're like, no, you know what to do here to make this look. Bono, you need to look good. You're going to that. It's like, what? And it's just, yeah, these are incredible people. And they love freedom. And they love it so much.

They're ready to lay down their life for freedom. And we who live in freedom should really, really remember not to fall asleep in ours. I should say I came here several hours ago and people had been lined up outside. They were very eager to ask you questions and one that I kept hearing was did you find writing a memoir

therapeutic in any way? What was the motivation to do so? The gift that gave me was time on my own and it turns out I need more time on my own. And it changed me, actually. I don't know if it's changed me for well. I don't go out as much. And also, I'm such a shy typist

that when I talk, I talk too quickly and I sort of throw the paint at the canvas. But when I'm typing, I have to slow down my thoughts and they make more sense of me and I make more sense of them. This is a wonderful question. You and Ali recently celebrated 40 years of marriage. He's here tonight. This is great. This is terrific. An Irish newlywed in the audience asks, what's the secret? A newlywed in the audience? It is, it is, it is quite, it's quite mad getting married.

Yeah, I know. There's a grand madness about it. And, and the same thing. something about that and knowing that you're going against the odds. But I would say, if you're asking me seriously, that friendship is, friendship can outpace romantic love sometimes. And you know, friendship is what myself and ali, have, we have, when you have romantic love and friendship, that's really something special. But I don't want to give you the impression that everything was all easy for us. And, and, but any time either of us got lost, the other would get, would be there to, to get, to get the other one home. and I'm so grateful.

And it was brilliant when we got to 40 and we went, let's not fuck this up now. I mean, you know. A related question. The other relationship that's 40 years old, we just had the documentary, the Get Back documentary, we watched the Beatles in rehearsal. Brilliant.

And anybody who was in a band said, it's amazing. They're so creative. They're getting along so well. And then anybody else who's not in a band thought, they hate each other. They're not getting along at all. When you watch that documentary, how did you relate it to your 40 years in a band? This band has outlasted the Beatles by a factor of four. Yeah.

I couldn't believe it. Get back if you haven't seen it. first of all, who knew the Beatles invented reality TV? That was mad. Like they had little, you know, they had little cameras in the flower pots and they're over there. John's talking like this and they're giving out,

looking out, and they... Why it? So they invented reality TV. Second thing was like watching Jesus like on the, you know, the beatitudes or something. And it was, you know, you could imagine, It's like...

Drafting the be honest. And the weak will inherit the earth and the meek will inherit the earth. No, no. You know, you could see them actually doing it. I couldn't believe it. But yeah, you could feel the tension. It's very hard for males

and it gets harder to move around each other the older you get. But males are funny, especially. I think women are better at this, but, you know, I can see it in the Beatles. And I should tell you just a tiny little story that Paul told me, which is brilliant. Like, I hang up with Paul all the time.

I don't. But let me tell you, when I do, I pay attention. Because it's like hanging out with Johann Sebastian Bach. I would carry his guitar case and no question about it. But he was talking about his relationship. And he says, you know, it could be really overbearing. I realize. And he says, you know, I was going at John one day.

It was going at him, you know. And he just looked up. And actually, he was wearing glasses just like you. No kidding. And he just did this. He went, hey, Paul, it's just me. It's John. It's only me.

It's John. And he said, trying to calm me down. He was. But bands go at each other. And we, you know, But again, it's friendship. It has to be friendship. And that's the thing that has kept you two together.

You did something very unusual for a band in that you split everything up financially, equally. What a fool. What a fool. Didn't think we're out of anything. No, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's. It's the best thing ever. And those songs are made what they are

because of Edge, Adam and Larry. And our manager used to say to us, you know, it's not musical differences that break up most bands. It's the Moolah. And he said, get that right. And other crackers,

like, don't be the band it looks too stupid to enjoy being at number one. Smile for God's sake. That's Bonho speaking at the New Yorker Festival in 2022. This year's festival, which takes place in October, will celebrate the magazine's 100th anniversary. I hope you'll join us for a weekend of live conversation, musical performances, screenings, and much more.

You can read more about it at festival.newyorker.com. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow,

Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Parrish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccan. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trina Endowment Fund.