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Featured stories, bono discusses his new memoir, 'surrender,' and the faith at u2's core.

Rachel Martin

Phil Harrell

Reena Advani

It was 1976. An Irish kid named Paul Hewson was trying to figure a lot of things out; his mom had died a couple years earlier, when he was just 14. Bono , as he was known, spent a lot of time at home, in Dublin, arguing with his dad and his older brother. But two goals kept him focused — to win over the heart of a girl named Alison Stewart and to become a rock star.

And in the same week, he asked Alison out — (she said yes) — and he ended up in Larry Mullen JR's kitchen for an audition. Two other guys were there — Adam Clayton and David Evans, also known as The Edge. The four of them would go on to become one of the biggest bands of their time: U2. And he is still married to Alison Stewart 40 years later.

Bono writes about these foundational relationships in his new memoir, called Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story , releasing Tuesday Nov. 1. In it, he also delves into another core relationship: his spirituality. Though never a Mass-on-Sundays kind of Catholic, from a young age he was fascinated with mysticism and ritual – and Jesus.

The following has been edited and condensed. To hear the broadcast version of this conversation use the audio player at the top of this page, or watch a longer cut in the video here . Additionally, an extended version of this interview will be available on Sunday, Oct. 30, via Up First , NPR's daily news podcast .

Rachel Martin, Morning Edition : You write in the book, "If I was in a café right now, and someone said 'Stand up if you're ready to give your life to Jesus,' I'd be the first to my feet." Did your band share your focus, your preoccupation, with faith?

Bono : They still do. At first, Adam [Clayton] was just like "Aw, man .. ." You know, he had just one thing in life, he's a bass player — just wants to be in the bad-ass rock and roll band ... But he stood by me, you know, and stood by us in our devotion.

Could you imagine Ireland in the '70s, it's a civil war — all but a civil war. The country's dividing along sectarian lines. I was very suspicious, and still am a little suspicious of ... religious people, I mean, religion is often a club that people use to beat someone else over the head with. I learnt that at a very early age in Ireland.

You write that a lot of U2's music is grounded in the feeling, the emotion, even the structure, of a hymn.

Edge's family were Welsh — if you've never heard crowds singing at a Welsh-Irish rugby match, the stadium filled with song. They sing these huge hymns, and the Welsh sing as a crowd really, really well. [ Singing ] "Bread of heaven, bread of heaven ... we'll support you evermore..."

And it's in him, it's in Edge, those fifths. And that's the feeling we've been looking for in our music — yes we want punk rock, we want it to be brutal, we want it to be tough-minded, we wanted to have big tunes. But the ecstatic music is part of who we are.

With "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," you say explicitly that in that song, there's some kind of root of that?

Yeah. It's a gospel song — it's a psalm, if you wanted to ...

What's a "sam"?

Sorry, did I not pronounce that right? [ Exaggerated ] " Sam, " is that how you say it, Rachel? You're so posh!

Your dad said, near the end of his life, that the most interesting thing about you was your spirituality, was your religion.

My faith, yeah. He was brilliant. He had faith and he lost it, you know, and people do — just when you need it. When he was dying, I write in the book, I'd gone in to see him and I was reading him bits of scripture and he was kinda giving me the hairy eyeball. [ Laughs ] A little bit of "Knock it off, will ye?" And I was so sad for him that he didn't have that, because he had always said to me things like, "You know, this stuff, this God stuff, I don't experience that — but you shouldn't give that up, 'cuz it's the most interesting thing about you," he says. Sort of a classic ...

I mean, was that sort of a slight to you? You're this musician ...

Now you're picking it up — his compliments would arrive either with a tickle or a boxing glove. [ Laughs ] I remember when we were recording U2's first album, he's like, "What're you doing?" And I said I've just been recording the album, and he's like, "You've been doing that for weeks ." And I said yeah, it's three weeks — this is the last week. And he says "how long is an album?" About 40-odd minutes ... "Oh God, will you get it right? Get it right ."

[ Aside ] After 40 years of selling out arenas as a musician, trying to eradicate hunger and AIDS as an activist, and also being a father and a husband, Bono is ready to admit he hasn't gotten it all right -- the Dublin kid who's always been the big voice at the center is ready to hear what others have to say.

"Just shut up and listen" is kind of where I'm at, at the moment. I just need to be more silent, and to surrender to my band as being at the core of what I'm trying to do with my life, surrender to my wife — and when I say "surrender," I do not mean making peace with the world. I'm not ready to make peace with the world. I'm trying to make peace with myself, I'm trying to make peace with my maker, but I am not trying to make peace with the world. The world is a deeply unfair place, and I'm ready to rumble. I'm keeping my fists up for that one.

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I have very few memories of my mother, Iris. Neither does my older brother, Norman. The simple explanation is that, in our house, after she died she was never spoken of again.

I fear it was worse than that. That we rarely thought of her again.

We were three Irish men, and we avoided the pain that we knew would come from thinking and speaking about her.

Iris laughing. Her humor black as her dark curls. Inappropriate laughing was her weakness. My father, Bob, a postal worker, had taken her and her sister Ruth to the ballet, only to have her embarrass him with her muted howls of laughter at the protruding genitalia boxes worn by the male dancers under their leotards.

I remember, at around seven or eight, I was a boy behaving badly. Iris chasing me, waving a long cane that her friend had promised would discipline me. Me, frightened for my life as Iris ran me down the garden. But when I dared to look back she was laughing her head off, no part of her believing in this medieval punishment.

I remember being in the kitchen, watching Iris ironing my brother’s school uniform, the faint buzz of my father’s electric drill from upstairs where he was hanging a shelf he’d made. Suddenly the sound of his voice, screaming. An inhuman sound, an animal noise. “Iris! Iris! Call an ambulance!”

Racing to the bottom of the stairs, we found him at the top, holding the power tool, having apparently drilled into his own crotch. The bit had slipped, and he was frozen stiff with fear that he might never be stiff again. “I’ve castrated myself!” he cried.

I was in a state of shock at seeing my father, the giant of 10 Cedarwood Road, fallen like a tree. And I didn’t know what that meant. Iris knew what it meant, and she was shocked, too, but that wasn’t the look on her face. The look on her face was the look of a beautiful woman suppressing laughter, then the look of a beautiful woman failing to suppress laughter as it took hold of her. Peals of laughter like those of a bold girl in church whose efforts not to commit sacrilege just make for a louder eruption when it finally arrives.

She reached for the telephone, but she couldn’t get it together to dial 999; she was bent double with laughter. Da made it through his flesh wound. Their marriage made it through the incident. The memory made it home.

Iris was a practical, frugal woman. She could change a plug on a kettle, and she could sew—boy, could she sew! She became a part-time dressmaker when my da refused to let her work as a cleaning lady for the national airline, Aer Lingus, along with her best friends from the neighborhood. There was a big showdown between them, the only proper row I remember. I was in my room eavesdropping as my mother reared up at him with a “you don’t own me” tirade in her defense. And, to be fair, he didn’t. Pleading succeeded where command had failed, and she gave up the chance to work with her mates at Dublin Airport.

Bob was a Catholic; Iris was a Protestant. Theirs was a marriage that had escaped the sectarianism of Ireland at the time. And because Bob believed that the mother should have the deciding vote in the children’s religious instruction, on Sunday mornings my brother and Iris and I were dropped at the Protestant St. Canice’s Church in Finglas. Whereupon my da would receive Mass up the road in the Catholic church—also, confusingly, called St. Canice’s.

There was less than a mile between the two churches, but in nineteen-sixties Ireland a mile was a long way. The “Prods” at that time had the better tunes, and the Catholics had the better stage gear. My mate Gavin Friday used to say that Roman Catholicism was the glam rock of religion, with its candles and psychedelic colors, its smoke bombs of incense, and the ringing of the little bell. The Prods were better at the bigger bells, Gavin would say, “because they can afford them!”

For a fair amount of the population in Ireland in the sixties and seventies, wealth and Protestantism went together. To be mixed up with either was to have collaborated with the enemy—that is, Britain. In fact, the Church of Ireland had supplied a lot of Ireland’s most famous insurgents, and south of the border its congregation was mostly modest in every way. My da was hugely respectful of the church community he’d married into. And so, having worshipped on his own up the road, he would then return from his St. Canice’s to wait outside our St. Canice’s to drive us all home.

Iris and Bob had grown up in the inner city of Dublin around the thoroughfare of Oxmantown Road, an area known locally as Cowtown because every Wednesday it was the seat of the country-comes-to-the-city fair. In nearby Phoenix Park, Bob and Iris loved to walk and watch the deer run free. Unusually for a Dub, the term for an inner-city resident, Bob played cricket in the park, and his mother, Granny Hewson, listened to the BBC to hear the results of English Test matches.

Cricket was not a working-class game in Ireland. Add this to my da’s saving up to buy records of his favorite operas, taking his wife and her sister to the ballet—and then not letting Iris become a “Mrs. Mops,” as he called it, even though her friends were—and you can sense that there might have been just a bit of the snob in Bob. His interests were not the norm on his street, that’s for sure. Actually, the whole family might have been a little different. My da and his brother Leslie did not even speak with a strong Dublin accent. It was as if their telephone voice was the only one they used.

My da’s family name, Hewson, is also unusual in that it is both a Protestant and a Catholic name. I once saw in a posh pub a death warrant for the beheading of Charles I, with one John Hewson among the signatories. A republican? Good. One of Oliver Cromwell’s henchmen? Bad.

As a kid I could see that Hewsons tended to live in their heads while Rankins were more at home in their bodies. The Hewsons could overthink. My da, for example, would not go to visit his own brothers and sisters in case they might not want to see him. He would need to be invited. My mother—a Rankin—would tell him just to go on and drop in on them. Her siblings were always dropping in on one another. What’s the problem? We’re family. Rankins are laughing all day long, and, if the Hewsons can’t quite do that, we do have a temper to keep us entertained.

There’s another difference. The Rankin family is susceptible to the brain aneurysm. Of the five Rankin sisters, three died from an aneurysm. Including Iris.

My mother heard me sing publicly just once. I played the Pharaoh in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.” It was really the part of an Elvis impersonator, so that’s what I did. Dressed up in one of my mother’s white trouser suits with some silvery sequins glued on, I curled my lip and brought the house down. Iris laughed and laughed. She seemed surprised that I could sing, that I was musical.

As a very small child, from when I stood only as high as the keyboard, I was transfixed by the piano. There was one in our church hall, and any time alone with it was time I held sacred. I would spend ages finding out what sounds the keys and pedals could make. I didn’t know what reverb was; I couldn’t believe how such a simple action could turn our church hall into a cathedral. I remember my hand finding a note and then searching for another note to rhyme with it. I was born with melodies in my head, and I was looking for a way to hear them in the world. Iris wasn’t looking for those kinds of signs in me, so she didn’t see them.

When my grandmother decided to sell her piano, my hints about how well it would fit in our house could not have been any less subtle. “Don’t be silly, where would we put it?” was the reply. No piano for our house. No room. When I interviewed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral Grammar School, in the city center, the principal asked if I had any interest in joining their famous boys’ choir. My eleven-year-old’s heart stirred. But Iris, sensing my nervousness, answered for me: “Not at all. Paul has no interest in singing.”

My attendance at St. Patrick’s was ultimately unhappy for me and unhappy for them. I lasted just a year. The final straw involved a Spanish teacher known as Biddy who I was convinced put lines through my homework without even looking at it. When the weather was good, Biddy would take her lunch from a clear plastic Tupperware box on a park bench in the shadow of the magnificent cathedral. Schoolboys were not allowed in the park at lunchtime, but I’d found a way to mount the railings, and one day, with a couple of accomplices, I successfully lobbed dog shit into her lunchbox. Unsurprisingly, by the end of term Biddy wanted this little shit-throwing shit out of her hair, and it was suggested I might be happier elsewhere. In September, 1972, I enrolled at Mount Temple Comprehensive School.

Mount Temple was liberation. A nondenominational, coeducational experiment—remarkable for its time in conservative Ireland. Instead of an A class, a B class, and a C class, the six first-year classes were D, U, B, L, I, and N. You were encouraged to be yourself, to be creative, to wear your own clothes. And there were girls. Also wearing their own clothes.

It took two bus rides to get to Mount Temple, a long journey into the city center from the northwest side and then out to the northeast. Unless you cycled, which is what my friend Reggie Manuel and I began to do. It was on one never-ending incline of a hill that we learned how to hold on to the milk van. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt as free as I did on those days cycling to school with Reggie. If the weather meant we couldn’t cycle all the time, leaving us to the drudgery of the bus, compensation would come on Fridays, when we would stop in the city center after school to visit the record store Dolphin Discs, on Talbot Street. This is where I first saw albums like the Stooges’ “Raw Power,” David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust,” and Lou Reed’s “Transformer.”

The only reason I wasn’t standing in the record store at 5:30 P . M . on May 17, 1974, is that a bus strike meant that we’d had to cycle to school. We were already home when the streets around Dolphin Discs were blown to bits by a car bomb in Talbot Street, another in Parnell Street, and another in South Leinster Street, all within minutes, a coördinated attack by an Ulster loyalist extremist group that wanted the south to know what terrorism felt like. A fourth explosion struck in Monaghan, and the final death toll stood at thirty-three people, including a pregnant young mother, the entire O’Brien family, and a Frenchwoman whose family had survived the Holocaust.

That same year, in September, we celebrated my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. They danced and sang Michael Finnegan’s reel. My mum’s da, “Gags” Rankin, had such a high time that his children worried he’d wake in the night and not make it to the bathroom. They left a bucket beside the bed. And my grandfather left this life kicking that bucket, with a massive heart attack on the night of his wedding anniversary.

Three days later, at the funeral, I spot my father carrying my mother in his arms through a crowd, like a white snooker ball scattering a triangle of color. He’s rushing to get her to the hospital. She has collapsed at the side of the grave as her own father is being lowered into the ground.

“Iris has fainted. Iris has fainted.” The voices of my aunts and cousins blow around like a breeze through leaves. “She’ll be O.K. She’s just fainted.” Before I, or anyone else, can think, my father has Iris in the back of the Hillman Avenger, with my brother Norman at the wheel.

I stay with my cousins to say goodbye to my grandfather, and then we all shuffle back to my grandmother’s tiny red brick house, 8 Cowper Street, where the tiny kitchen has become a factory churning out sandwiches, biscuits, and tea. This two-up-two-down with an outdoor bathroom seems to hold thousands of people.

Even though it’s Grandda’s funeral, and even though Iris has fainted, we’re kids, cousins, running around and laughing. Until Ruth, my mother’s younger sister, bursts through the door. “Iris is dying. She’s had a stroke.”

Everybody crowds around. Iris is one of eight from No. 8: five girls and three boys. They’re weeping, wailing, struggling to stand. Someone realizes I’m here, too. I’m fourteen and strangely calm. I tell my mother’s sisters and brothers that everything is going to be O.K.

Three days later Norman and I are brought into the hospital to say goodbye. She’s alive but barely. The local clergyman Sydney Laing, whose daughter I’m dating, is here. Ruth is outside the hospital room, wailing, with my father, whose eyes have less life in them than my mother’s. I enter the room at war with the universe, but Iris looks peaceful. It’s hard to figure that a large part of her has already left. We hold her hand. There’s a clicking sound, but we don’t hear it.

My father was a tenor, a really good one. He could move people with his singing, and to move people with music you first have to be moved by it. In the living room, standing in front of the stereo with two of my mother’s knitting needles, he would conduct: Beethoven, Mozart, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing Richard Strauss’s “Four Last Songs.” Or “La Traviata,” eyes closed, lost in reverie.

He is not precisely aware of the story of “La Traviata,” but he feels it. A father and son at odds, lovers torn apart and reunited. He senses the injustice of the human heart. He is broken by the music.

After my mother’s departure, Cedarwood Road becomes its own opera. Three men used to shouting at the television now shouting at one another. We live in rage and melancholy, in mystery and melodrama. The subject of the opera is the absence of a woman called Iris, and the music swells to stay the silence that envelops the house and the three men—one of whom is just a boy.

My brother Norman has always been a fixer, an engineer, a mechanic who could pull things apart and put things back together. The engine of his motorcycle, a clock, a radio, a stereo. He loved technology and he loved music. A large chrome Sony reel-to-reel tape player took pride of place in our “good room,” and Norman was enterprising enough to figure out that the reel-to-reel meant he didn’t have to keep buying music. If he borrowed an album from a friend for an hour, it was his forever.

Because Norman, seven years older than me, was already a working man when I was in Mount Temple, the reel-to-reel was my only company when I got home from school. Some late afternoons I’d arrive so hungry but soon forget who and where I was. I’d stand in front of the stereo, just like my father, and let the house burn down while I listened to opera. Rock opera: “Tommy,” by the Who. Charcoal smoke would fill the kitchen and seep into the living room.

Norman taught me to play guitar. He taught me the C chord, the G chord, and, much more difficult, the F chord, which requires holding down two strings with one finger. Especially difficult when the strings are quite a way from the fretboard, as they were on Norman’s rather cheap guitar. But with his guidance I learned to play “If I Had a Hammer” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” I worked out how to play “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Dear Prudence,” and “Here Comes the Sun” on my brother’s guitar.

Norman and I fought a lot. He’d come home from work and I’d be watching the telly, not doing my homework, not having prepared the tea. He would give me some lip. I would return it. One of us would end up on the ground.

He had a bad temper, but he was a clever boy who, like his da, should have gone to university. He’d won a scholarship to an institution called simply the High School, a prestigious Protestant secondary school that leaned in the direction of maths and physics but was best known as the alma mater of William Butler Yeats. But Norman never felt very welcome there with his secondhand uniform, his secondhand books, and the secondhand religion of his Catholic father. He was upbeat by nature, except when the melancholy had him. Then it really had him.

The quality of my schoolwork had improved when I’d first arrived at Mount Temple, and I’d done better there than I had at St. Patrick’s, but when Iris died I lost all concentration. Teachers lamented my scrawly handwriting, noting that my father’s letters to them about me were in such beautiful calligraphy. While I loved poetry and history, I didn’t feel as clever as my friends. I was afraid deep down that I was average. I even stopped playing chess, which I loved, because I’d begun to think of it as “uncool.” And I had no mother to tell me that nothing cool was “cool.”

My da had taught me to play chess one summer in the seaside town of Rush, just outside Dublin on the north coast, where Grandda Rankin had turned an old railway carriage into a summer chalet. There was nothing much to do at “the hut,” save for a few card games that didn’t interest me. I was interested in my da, and if he wasn’t golfing or reading or hanging out with his brothers-in-law I would try to catch his attention. I remember walking the pier and feeling the warmth of his hand on my neck.

At first I thought he was letting me win, but eventually I noticed that he wasn’t. This was how to take his attention off whatever he was thinking about and put it on me. To best him, to beat him! Bob didn’t like losing, and maybe that’s where I learned that I didn’t, either.

Bob loved music, but, in tune with his wife, he never suggested we get a piano. Nor did he ever ask me about how my music was coming on. He talked about opera, just not to his sons. For years after Iris died, he would serenade rooms of relations with Kris Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times.” I still wonder if he was singing it from my mother’s point of view: “I’ll get along, you’ll find another.”

He once told me that I was a baritone who thinks he’s a tenor. One of the great put-downs, and pretty accurate. I, too, had the seeds of a performer, and, above all, performers don’t like to be ignored. Maybe Bob didn’t take me too seriously as a teen-ager because he could see I was doing a great job of that myself. But I can still hear his voice in my head, especially when I sing.

In those days, when I remembered to eat, I’d return from Mount Temple with a tin of meat, a tin of beans, and a packet of Cadbury’s Smash. Cadbury’s Smash was astronaut food, but eating it did not make me feel like Elton John’s Rocket Man. In fact, eating it was a lot like not eating at all. But at least it was easy. You just put boiling water on these dry little pellets, and they would shape-shift into mashed potato. I’d add them to the pot in which I’d just cooked the tinned beans and the tinned meat. And I ate my dinner out of the pot.

I still don’t enjoy cooking or ordering food, which may go back to having had to cook my own meals as a teen-ager. That was when food was just fuel. We used to buy a cheap fizzy drink called Cadet Orange because it had enough sugar to keep you going but was so foul you would want nothing else down your throat for hours. I’d drink it after I’d spent my food money on something more important—Alice Cooper’s “Hello Hooray,” for example. Sometimes such a purchase—Santana’s “Abraxas” or Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid”—required my investing the whole family’s grocery money. On those occasions, I confess, I’d sometimes have to borrow the entire grocery list from the shop, and fail to give any of it back. It was easy, apart from a loaf of sliced bread, which was difficult to hide up your jumper. But I didn’t feel good about it, and by the age of fifteen I’d put away a life of crime.

In 1975, Norman got a job at Dublin Airport. Airports in the seventies were even more glamorous than color television, especially if you were a pilot. Norman had applied to be a pilot, but his asthma disqualified him from the trainee program, and instead he got work in Cara, the computing department of Aer Lingus. Computers, Norman told himself, were even more glamorous than airports, and he committed to learning to fly small airplanes, just as soon as he’d made some money.

Thousands of Irish plane twitchers would turn up at Dublin Airport each weekend to see flying machines defy gravity, taking off for somewhere else. Every flight was a reminder that there was a way out of Ireland if it was needed. In the fifties and sixties, more than half a million Irish people bought themselves one-way tickets out.

The good fortune for Da, Norman, and me at 10 Cedarwood Road, just two miles from the end of Runway 2, was that Norman managed to talk his bosses into allowing him to bring home the surplus airline food. The meals were sometimes still warm when he carried them in their tin boxes into our kitchen, to be heated in the oven for twenty-three minutes at three hundred and sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit. This was exotic fare: gammon steak and pineapple, an Italian food called lasagna, or a dish in which rice was no longer a milk pudding but a savory experience with peas. I told Norman that this was the worst dessert I’d ever had.

“It’s not dessert, and by the way half the world eats rice every day.”

Norman knew stuff that other people didn’t. If my father and I were proud that my brother had relieved us of the need to buy groceries or even to cook, after six months the aftertaste of tin was all we could remember. At night, I took to eating cornflakes with cold milk.

I thought another culinary salvation had arrived, this time at Mount Temple, when the end of the lunchbox era was announced. Imagine a fanfare of trumpets and cheering at assembly—that’s how excited we all were at the dawning of the age of school dinners. But I was punching the air only briefly. The school dinners, the headmaster explained, would not be cooked in the school canteen. It wasn’t big enough. Instead, they would be arriving by van in tin boxes . . . from Dublin fucking Airport! They would be heated, he announced proudly, at three hundred and sixty-five degrees for twenty-three minutes in new ovens the school board had paid for.

I had never been on an airplane, but already my romance with flying was over. Airplane food for lunch and airplane food for tea was more than any budding rock star could handle. In time, with my band, I would take to the skies, and on those early Aer Lingus flights I would look out the window and try to see Cedarwood Road. As I finally left this small town and small island and rose above these flat fields, my mind filled with memories of the phone box on the street, teen-agers with broken bottles and hearts, sweet and sour neighbors, and the vibrant branches full of cherry-tree blossoms outside our house. At which point the air hostess would arrive and place one of those little tin trays right in front of me. ♦

This is drawn from “ Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story .”

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Bono interview: ‘I have spent my life looking for the blessing of father figures’

In an exclusive interview about his upcoming memoir, the u2 frontman talks about the loss of his mother, his long marriage to ali, the brother he didn’t know he had, and u2′s complex relationship with ireland.

Bono appears at our table, passing through a buzzing Dublin restaurant at lunchtime to a booth reserved by a window for coffee and deep conversation.

There is no fuss and not much notice from other diners. It is a scene of indifference, except for one woman who approaches to compliment him on his recent meeting with students at his alma mater, Mount Temple Comprehensive, the north Dublin school where U2 was formed.

At home, the band’s frontman – dressed in rock-statesman black with his lion’s mane red hair and signature coloured glasses – likes it this way: largely unnoticed in the background.

“I like that Ireland has a more horizontal relationship with U2,” he says.

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This is one of the reasons Bono and Ali Hewson, his wife of 40 years, live in Dublin with their family and chose to raise their children here.

“I am very distrustful of vertical relationships – hence my marriage, hence being in a band. I don’t want to have a boss. I don’t want to be a boss,” he says.

I am not sure it is helpful for Ireland to have an unusual relationship with success, but it’s kind of helpful for bringing up a family

The singer is sitting down for the second of two long interviews with The Irish Times, one a Zoom call from New York and the other an in-person face-to-face in Charlotte Quay restaurant, a short walk from the old Windmill Lane Studios where U2 recorded some of their biggest albums. This is home territory.

He is here to talk about his memoir – Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story – the story of his life and music, his family and friendships, told through 40 U2 songs, each a chapter.

[  Exclusive extract from Bono’s autobiography: “Ali would have been happier with a simpler life than the one we’ve ended up with”  ]

Bono admits he has been “sh**ting a brick” in advance of publication of his first book next month, but he intends to approach the coming weeks like a travelling salesman, following in a line of many on his mother’s side of his family. This is new ground, however. Before, he would sell songs, albums or concerts, or ideas as an activist.

“Now, I am a bookseller,” he says.

He accepts the book may not land well with some at home. The “horizontal relationship” also comes from being cut down to size from time to time, and the singer is very conscious of Ireland’s fickle relationship with him and the band.

“It might be healthier the way it is. I am not sure it is healthier for the begrudgers. I am not sure it is helpful for Ireland to have an unusual relationship with success, but it’s kind of helpful for bringing up a family,” he says.

Fame, at times, does not sit easily, even at home. Bono recalls with some humour his youngest son John asking him on the school run: “Would you mind dropping me off at the corner?” The school the four Hewson children attended, Dalkey School Project, was “like a Mount Temple for primary” and “very right on”; it was “just not impressed in the best possible way”, says Bono.

Bono: 'There were times when I was home and I wasn’t. I was somewhere else in my head. And that nearly drove Ali away.' Photograph: Linda Brownlee

In U2′s early days, he used to take it as “the greatest compliment” that the band would “annoy the face off people”, he says. Little has changed in more than four decades: he is still fine if people are annoyed seeing the same face and hearing the same voice after all these years.

“I think I might quite like the ‘I’ve had enough of U2; it is the same players on the same team as it was in the 80s; it doesn’t matter if they are bringing home the silver’,” he says.

He is at peace with the sick-of-the-sight-of-them view some have.

“And f**king now we have the f**king ME-moir!” he says, mimicking an imaginary Dublin street critic mouthing off about the arrival of his “buuuk (what I wrote me-self)”.

The book pulls back the curtain on what transformed an “unexceptional baked-bean boy from Cedarwood Road” into a globe-trotting rockstar; what turned Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen jnr into U2; and what makes the lead singer tick still.

I wrote the book to explain myself to myself and to my family, to my friends and to describe what I have done with my life and [my] family, what I have done with their lives because they ‘permissioned’ me to be away from home and from them

The book is deeply personal, searingly honest and at times laugh-out-loud funny. It reads like an anatomical lesson; he cuts himself open for all to peer inside.

“Anatomical is a good word because it’s not confessional,” he says.

“It is much more the anatomy of a songwriter and a singer and a hooligan and a pilgrim and a husband and a father and all that.”

He sees the book as “a cross-sectional” look at himself as both artist and activist, showing how he “jumped the barricade” in his political campaigning against HIV/Aids and poverty, and contrasting the “dull life of an activist” with “the more exciting” life of the rock star.

“I wrote the book to explain myself to myself and to my family, to my friends and to describe what I have done with my life and [my] family, what I have done with their lives because they ‘permissioned’ me to be away from home and from them,” he says.

[  Bono: In quotes and pictures  ]

The book is a warm tribute to his wife Ali whom he met at age 12 at Mount Temple and with whom he has four children: activist and entrepreneur Jordan (33), actor Eve (31), Elijah (23), lead singer and guitarist of rock band Inhaler, and rugby player John (21). The book explores the “grand madness” of their marriage and the pressures she experienced from having to share a husband with three men and a global fanbase.

“Ali covered for me at home. It is a love letter to her, but I want my children to know what I was doing with myself. I got to spend a lot more time with my kids than most because when I am home, I am really home. When we were away because U2 had such good fortune, we could bring our children with us. So I don’t feel they lost as much as they could have, but they lost some of me and that is why I wrote the book,” says Bono.

He attributes the strength of their four-decade marriage to a mix of “friendship and romantic love”. As a couple, they had passion but also friendship that was “slowly evolving”, he says. At times they would each seek a more modest life to “spend more time growing with each other”.

Bono: 'Friendship can outpace even romantic love, and in those kinds of friendships sometimes you are not seeing fireworks, there is a kind of low hum of respect. But when you have friendship and romantic love, that is the thing.' Photograph: Independent News and Media/Getty Images

“But I wasn’t as modest, and I definitely failed to appreciate how much my life as an artist and an activist were being covered by my partner and though when I was home I was really at home, there were times when I was home and I wasn’t. I was somewhere else in my head. And that nearly drove Ali away. But the two of us have, at different times, had our love tested, and the sense that one will get the other home overpowers all other desires,” he says.

For a man who has conquered so much but who can also divide opinion, publishing such a personal account raises a question: why put so much of himself out there and risk further incoming strife? He admits he has had to adopt defensive positions in the past.

“I put my fists up too quickly, and to be defensive is not attractive. There is a pugilist in there on every issue, but it is just because I am expecting the blows,” he says.

Bono concedes there is “a bit of rope-a-dope” about publishing this personal a book, and admits he is having to drop his guard and accept a certain vulnerability.

Bono: 'I just longed for the attention of my father, and I have some lovely memories; it wasn’t all combative.' Photograph: Linda Brownlee

He recalls a straight-talking conversation with a sage Scottish friend:

“He said: ‘Now, you do know, Bono, that there are people out there who don’t like you.’”

“And I said: ‘Yep.’

“And he said: ‘You do know with this book that you have made it very easy for them to hurt you.’

“And he said: ‘Well if you are fine with that, you are okay.’

“And I am,” says Bono.

The book starts with a near-end. He reveals for the first time the full extent of the health scare he suffered in 2016 but kept private: a blister on his aorta that is about to burst, and heart surgery in a New York hospital. It was one of several health setbacks in recent years.

“I have had a few hints. I had the divine elbow a few times. This was the big wake-up call. I have gone in search of a simpler life but I haven’t really surrendered to the consequences of that yet,” he says.

The wound that was opened up by my mother’s passing so quickly ... became this hole, this void, that I filled with music

But it is an earlier event that shaped Bono most: the sudden death of his mother Iris when he was 14. In the wake of her death, his house stopped being a home and became a house of three males who shouted at each other. He, his late father Bob Hewson and older brother Norman never spoke of her again. That loss, he acknowledges, fired some creative sparks.

“These things that shape us are huge gifts in the end. At least they were to me because the wound that was opened up by my mother’s passing so quickly ... became this hole, this void, that I filled with music. Though the family seemed to disappear in that moment, I started finding other families: Ali’s family, the band, alternative families. In that sense, I am an easy read. You can see what happened,” he says.

Bono says his mother’s loss subconsciously fuelled U2′s early songwriting highs. I Will Follow, from the band’s debut album Boy, was the “suicide note” of a boy who seeks his mother and is willing to follow her, even into the grave. The song was written in an old cottage, where the band were rehearsing, near her grave.

Iris is 100 yards over the wall of the rehearsal room. I have never visited her grave

“Iris is 100 yards over the wall of the rehearsal room. I have never visited her grave. I am talking about her now in this song because the memories are all there. You have to trawl for them. If you don’t, they are somewhere else and they can cause trouble,” he says.

Long-running tensions between Bono and his father are well captured in a single, cutting put-down uttered by Bob, an opera lover, to his son, whose career rested on the power of his voice: “You’re a baritone who thinks he’s tenor.”

“I was going to call the book that, and it is such a perfect description of me. It is accurate as well as a really fun diss,” says Bono.

Fatherly compliments were rare in the Hewson family. Did Bob ever tell him he was proud of him and all his success? “He did, he did,” Bono says, softly. “Some of the humour here from him is mischief.”

In trying to understand their relationship, Bono turns to the zany musings of friend and Dublin film director Jim Sheridan, a man he describes as “a psychological genius”. Bono impersonates Sheridan like a Sean O’Casey character, showing off his wicked mimicry skills. Sheridan sees the operatic Bob-versus-Bono battle as “patricide”, says Bono, passing off Sheridan’s gravelly accent: he takes the thing Bob wanted to do – to sing – stealing his voice, while “son blames father for the loss of mother and the end of his home life”.

The opera took a late twist when, in 2000, Bono learned that his cousin was, in fact, his brother: Scott Rankin, the former stockbroker’s analyst-turned-State official. Bob had an affair with his sister-in-law, Bono’s aunt Barbara, when the singer’s mother was still alive. Iris never knew.

[  Bono’s ‘secret brother’ breaks his silence: ‘It made no sense to keep this hidden any longer’  ]

The disclosure came after Bob was diagnosed with cancer a year before his death in 2001. One of the most dramatic episodes in the book is when Bono confronts his father about whether he truly loved his mother.

It is also startling that Bono instinctively knew the revelation about a half-brother before it landed. “The truth is with Scott we felt like brothers long before we knew we were. I love Scott and his mother Barbara. I must have known that something was up and I must have held my father responsible for kind of making my mother unhappy in the way kids just pick up things,” he says.

Bono thinks that maybe his father is the reason he remains worried about whether people are listening to U2.

“There is a part of me as a performer that is annoyed when we are playing Croke Park and a single person decides to take a piss during this song ,” he says, referring to any song. It’s not just megalomania, but “hypersensitivity” around whether people are paying attention, he says, and he believes this must go back to Bob.

“I just longed for the attention of my father, and I have some lovely memories; it wasn’t all combative. Music was the thing that soothed his aching heart. It sounds like a line from a country song. But it’s actually opera I am talking about. That is why he was attracted to the opera, because he was one, and I suppose he had the voice and this is how he gave it to me. It is never the route you expect,” he says.

I didn’t put any photographs of any famous people in the book. I don’t want it to be a celebrity memoir

Father figures are a running theme in Bono’s book, which features several encounters with music royalty: challenging Bob Dylan to a game of chess at Slane Castle; David Bowie wandering around the Dockers pub on the Dublin quays in an electric-blue suit; or Paul McCartney driving Bono around Liverpool and pointing out the newsagent’s where he had his “first real conversation” with another musician named John Lennon over a shared bar of chocolate.

[  Bono and Paul Muldoon get personal about their fathers  ]

Bono says he was “very careful about my famous friends”, and struggled with the idea of including them in the book.

“I didn’t put any photographs of any famous people in the book. I don’t want it to be a celebrity memoir. I would rather be famous and not be a celebrity if that were possible. In some geographies that is easier than others,” he says.

In the end, he cast aside his “intellectual vanity”, as he felt the people he met such as Dylan, Johnny Cash, Frank Sinatra or Luciano Pavarotti had influenced him because they were “luminous minds”.

“I have spent my life, in so many ways, looking for the blessing of father figures,” he says, though he admits he could never imagine Sinatra ever giving him a hug. “He did better than that – he poured me a drink,” he says of a memorable, drunken encounter with the legendary crooner.

“I just thought that if they – and the pursuit of them – shaped my life, I have to put them in the book. What is it about older males that I would seek out their company, not just their songs? Of course, it’s easy to read now,” he says, in another nod to Bob.

Nothing makes sense about U2 and our relationship with Ireland. We were and still are a social experiment

Another relationship, U2′s complex one with Ireland, is explored in a chapter hung on Sunday Bloody Sunday, their most political song.

[  An Post Irish Book Awards: Bono, Graham Norton and Kellie Harrington shortlisted  ]

“Nothing makes sense about U2 and our relationship with Ireland. We were and still are a social experiment,” Bono says. “It is like Edge’s line – he can be very, very dry – ‘if people don’t like U2, they are just not trying hard enough’.”

The band is the makings of a joke, as Bono sees it: “An Englishman, a Welshman and two Irish men go into a bar and one of the Irishmen is a Protestant and one of them is a Catholic, and even the one that is a Protestant is also a Catholic – it’s just not what you would expect.”

I thought it was kind of interesting that we didn’t fit into the normal cliche of what an Irish band or Irish artist should look like

Like all good jokes, he sees a serious undercurrent beneath. He believes U2 could have emerged only from a school like Mount Temple, itself a social experiment in his view.

While “the father thing” moulded him, he says he puts women in his life “on a pedestal”, something Ali pushes back on. “She refuses that with her best line: ‘Don’t look up at me, don’t look down at me, look across at me – that’s where I am.’ She doesn’t want to be on a pedestal.” He extends the analogy to Ireland, saying he puts the country on a pedestal “a little bit too”, evoking her feminine being in mythology as “Cathleen Ní Houlihan and all that”.

“I thought that U2 could be part of helping shape the country, and I thought it was kind of interesting that we didn’t fit into the normal cliche of what an Irish band or Irish artist should look like. I thought it was interesting that it was so diverse,” he says.

He believes the band’s mix of backgrounds and individual theologies does not fit easily into any of Ireland’s tribes.

The fists go up around the criticism of U2′s decision to move one of its companies to the Netherlands to save tax. Bono says in the book that some found it “unpatriotic”. The band “dug our heels in”, he says, but he concedes he can see “our stubborn streak at play”. Still, he argues that if Ireland could brand itself as “tax competitive”, then why couldn’t the band?

“Tax competitiveness is at the heart of Ireland’s industrial policy, and it’s really worked. Is it a bit patronising that artists shouldn’t be able to add and subtract? Or activists? You can have high ideals in your activism and your music, but you have to have a lower IQ when you are in business? I find it a bit patronising,” he says.

[  Bono: ‘We pay a lot of tax. We’re very proud to pay a lot of tax’  ]

One, the non-profit campaign group, and its predecessor DATA (Debt, Aids, Trade, Africa), were co-founded by Bono and activist Bobby Shriver, with the objective of eliminating extreme poverty and disease in Africa. They were part of successful efforts to lobby the George W Bush administration and the US Congress in the 2000s to cancel more than $100 billion (€101.5 billion) owed by African countries in international debts.

But he accepts that fighting poverty and disease in the developing world involved close-quarters contacts with divisive political figures – the American “neocons” in the White House, for example – and that this carried a reputational risk for U2.

Punk rockers kick in doors; they don’t hide behind them. However, this is precisely what the U2 singer says he does every September with the One campaign. On the fringes of the United Nations General Assembly, when world leaders descend on New York, he says he and his band of activists “hide behind doors” and nab powerful people as they go between meetings. Bono the activist makes no apologies for this strategy, but concedes it has been costly for the band.

Bono: 'It has been very difficult at times to stay together. There’s always a moment when somebody is about to fall out of the boat and we managed to get them in.' Photograph: Linda Brownlee

“There was risk and there was cost, and for some people it was too much, for some of our fans. But then something flipped and for a brief time anyway, I think the U2 audience felt: ‘Oh, we are having an effect here through our guy, meaning we are not just talking and shouting our heads off about stuff. We are actually doing something. We are actually part of something’,” he says.

The desire “to get s**t done” for people who don’t have access to corridors of power was the overarching motive behind his activism. Needing to know the arguments against what he was agitating for meant “spending time in the company of the so-called enemy”. This left some of his closest friends with “deep and serious questions about the company I was keeping”.

“There are people with deep convictions who respectfully disagree with this approach. And I respectfully disagree with them. But I get where they are coming from. But they know I am not a poser. They know this is hours and days and weeks and months of work, and they know that I come out with a cheque,” he says.

[  Bono reveals he has a half-brother from his late father’s extramarital affair  ]

While the band did not know the process behind the strategy, Bono says they were “loosely supportive but excruciated” by some of his engagements with the enemy.

The four-man U2 team, with cabinets of silverware behind them (170 million records and 22 Grammys), is of course still the same team that formed in 1976, despite the potentially career-ending injuries and addictions and near-break-ups, all well chronicled in Surrender. Bono says the band do not look at it “with anything other than wonder” that they have “stayed together for 10 years, let alone 40”.

“It has been very difficult at times to stay together. There’s always a moment when somebody is about to fall out of the boat and we managed to get them in. But at some point somebody might just say: I just want out, or they are being thrown out of the boat because it’s too hard to deal with them. It would be almost impossible for that to happen because we just go after each other. We never give up on each other,” he says.

The recording of U2 is like trying to catch lightning in a bottle. It is almost impossible and most of the recordings feel somewhat flawed to me, certainly my own role in them

He acknowledges that, as men get older, personalities get “a little brittle” and moving around each other is “not as easy”. For Bono, finding new creative highs requires the fists to go up again.

“The real worry is when you stop fighting. That is when you are in trouble. The cost of trying to make those songs or to go there, it has to be gloves off,” he says.

Bono’s persistent, hard-on-himself restlessness to push himself and the band creatively permeates his memoir, and remains strong as ever in person.

“The recording of U2 is like trying to catch lightning in a bottle. It is almost impossible and most of the recordings feel somewhat flawed to me, certainly my own role in them,” he says.

As for the songs, he stands over them, and he is starting to appreciate the old albums more. He looks back on some such as Boy, the debut, and wonders: “Where did that come from?”

What’s next? The band wants to make an “uncompromising, balls-to-the-wall, transcendent rock’n’roll album, with unreasonable guitars, like properly aggressive as the times deserve”, he says. He wants the next album to recreate the band’s live experience in the studio. He wants to start recording by the end of the year, after a 14-city US and European book tour. The Edge, he says, is “as restless as me now”. He believes the band may still have their best album in them, but getting it out might “cost us a lot”.

I like a bit of belligerence in a rock band, and the fact that we won’t go away is part of the fun of it for me

“The question we have got to ask ourselves is: are we ready to pay that cost, and the cost will be in relationships?” he says.

“Are we going to go in there and give it all of our life, because that’s what art demands in the end? And I want the answer to that question to be yes, and I haven’t really figured out what that means for the rest of my life. But that will be the second book.”

If the 62-year-old Bono could say anything to his 14-year-old self, young Paul Hewson, struggling with loss, he says it would be: “Keep going – you’re right. Use your naivety. Use your black and white view of the world, because soon it will be colour, and full-colour bandwidth.”

Bono’s restlessness continues. He is quite happy to keep annoying people, in full colour, with this new book and the promise of more albums.

“U2 shouldn’t make it too easy to be elbowed off the stage ... I like a bit of belligerence in a rock band, and the fact that we won’t go away is part of the fun of it for me.”

Quickfire Bono…

… on the u2 song that saved him:.

Every Breaking Wave from 2014 album Songs of Innocence: “It’s like a life ring. You are saying goodbye to a life that you could have had maybe. It is wonderfully uplifting… I think it might be our best song in 20 years.”

… on love and marriage with wife Ali:

“Friendship can outpace even romantic love and in those kinds of friendships sometimes you are not seeing fireworks; there is a kind of low hum of respect, but when you have friendship and romantic love, that is the thing.”

… on family:

“There are no straight families. What’s that John Cleese book, Families and How to Survive Them.”

… on his father Bob:

“He used to get give me a fiver at Christmas or a pair of socks, which is really funny.”

… on U2 bass player Adam Clayton and overcoming addiction:

“Adam had his moment of surrender, to save him from himself and drink and drugs, and he became this very fine, sophisticated person who will be there for you, who will call you if you’re stuck… he is a fine example of how we can turn our life around.”

… on Ali’s first response to a draft of his memoir:

“I had to get permission from the missus. It was amazing. She came back with spellings. Like, what? There was one thing she wanted me to take out that was too private.”

… on The Edge’s view on Bono’s memoir:

“Edge seems to be very sort of just very Edge-like in his comments about it. He likes people to see the singer in his band with more dimension. I says to him: ‘You mean dementia.’”

… on retrospectives:

“We are planning something special for [the 1991 album] Achtung Baby, not a tour but something extraordinary. It is important to do retrospectives for any artist, but not too many. I have just spent a few years in the past and I am very keen to get to the future.”

… on being a singer and reinterpreting old songs in new recordings:

“I never really thought of myself as a singer, so now I do and a song can mean something completely different just by the way you sing it.”

… on bands and money:

“Paul McGuinness [U2′s manager] was always saying that it is money that breaks up bands, not musical differences usually. So we have to pay attention to these things.”

… on activism:

“There is a certain vanity to agitprop which we have to own up to. It can look good on a rock band having certain views and we did talk a little bit about choosing your enemies carefully because they, in a sense, define you.”

… on the Government increasing this year’s overseas aid budget by 17 per cent:

“I am really proud of the country… The UN and every country is cutting their aid budget. Ireland is increasing it. We haven’t forgotten who were by who we are.”

… on religion and the church in Ireland:

“I do read scriptures and I do try to follow a path. I fall off it mostly, but it is okay for people to be angry with the church. It’s okay for people to be angry if they’re believers in a God that can allow an aggressive takeover of the church by a dark patriarchy.”

Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story by Bono will be published on November 1st by Hutchinson Heinemann. You can read an exclusive extract from it here . Bono will appear at the 3Olympia Theatre in Dublin on November 21st as part of the Stories of Surrender book tour

Simon Carswell

Simon Carswell is News Editor of The Irish Times

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By the Book

The Book That Hastened Bono’s Puberty, in a Good Way

“I got a copy of Edna O’ Brien’s ‘The Country Girls’ growing up, which hurried my puberty to a place where I thought differently about girls and women,” says the singer and frontman for U2, whose new memoir is “Surrender.” “I still do.”

Credit... Rebecca Clarke

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What books are on your night stand?

I do not have a rock ’n’ roll clock — it’s embarrassing, but I mostly get up before the Edge goes to bed, and it is early, early morning when I read. That said, I am enjoying reading Anne Enright’s “The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch” in the dark on my iPad. It’s a lot of what I like and don’t: conquests sexual and actual, a banquet of taste and touch, the perfume and acrid smells of the noble rot corrupting humbler sensibilities rather than the other way around. Fiction written from a woman’s point of view, even from such a salty character, is good for me. Eliza is a bold Irish woman who begins her conversation and steep social climb in 19th-century Paris, and hovers like a queen bee over Paraguay, a country I have only visited through this book. I’ll be going back to see if it survived.

A book that’s never off the night stand is “The Message,” a translation of the Bible by the late American scholar and minister Eugene Peterson. I go back to it again and again, beguiled by the musicality of the language and the clarity of the translation. Some days I read it, other days it reads me.

Not on my night stand but on my earbuds is Edward Enninful’s “A Visible Man.” I’m only a third of the way in, but he has a unique voice to explode clichés.

What’s the last great book you read?

In my early 20s I developed a love of “portfolio fiction,” from the furrowed highbrow of Milan Kundera’s “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” to the thin smile of Tom Robbins’s “Jitterbug Perfume.” Colum McCann’s “Apeirogon” too, even if that is not an accurate description of the category. I love timeline transportations. I enjoy tangential views of a core theme. I not only discovered the word “Apeirogon,” I rediscovered murmuration as a most powerful symbol for the “times that are a changin” shape. Motorbikes, medical science, political poetry, ornithology — including a stomach-churning account of President Mitterrand’s where McCann runs with the legend he ate an ortolan bird, inhaling its guts with a cloth over his head. If I am allowed Raymond Carver-level short story writers, then “Dark Lies the Island,” by Kevin Barry.

Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?

“My Name Is Asher Lev,” by Chaim Potok. All art is religious to me, even bad art is revealing. It will be the only real glance we get into the state of our soul until that can be measured. U2 early on faced a crisis of conscience regarding our devotion to the divine — the divine as expressed by a certain strain of religious thought, or, as expressed in each other and our audience. We chose the latter, and as an activist, on that same path I’ve always tried to honor the divine dignity of the sick, the hungry and those oppressed by extreme poverty. Turns out the paths may end up in the same place. Asher Lev serves his faith in his painting.

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how) .

I was diagnosed with glaucoma and have been wearing colored specs to mitigate the malady and add rock star affectation. It means I need a lens, so iPad and Kindle work for me when reading, but not so well outdoors, where I love audiobooks. I can tell this format is developing as an art form. A podcast like Dave Chappelle’s “Midnight Miracle” is a great example of how text, conversation, music and atmospherics collide and collage perfectly. For my memoir I have attempted to layer in remixes and re-imaginings of U2 music with speeches and sound effects. I found a very clever fella called Scott Sherratt who wanted to make the “Sgt. Pepper’s” of audiobooks for me. I’m not sure what it is, but if you are on the subway or a hike, in a car or hiding under your bed, it’s certainly a brave as well as an immersive experience to let me crawl through your cochlea and whisper, growl or belch my words at you.

What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?

At the moment, Martin Wroe’s “Julian of Norwich’s Teabag,” it’s a book of poems and prayers. I’m dipping into it every few days.

What book should everybody read before the age of 21?

One of the first songs we wrote as teenagers was “Shadows and Tall Trees” — a title borrowed from William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies.” Our first album was called “Boy,” in genuflection to it. Like George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” this is a book that moved in with me as a teenager and has never moved out.

What book should nobody read until the age of 40?

“The Book of Limitations” — yet to be written but crucial.

Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?

Foreign correspondents, especially those covering war zones. The uncovering of truth in a post-truth world where truthiness seems to have stepped in for facts. Masha Gessen’s writing on Putin is extraordinary.

Have any books influenced your artistic development as a songwriter or a musician?

It was in the City Lights bookshop in San Francisco where I discovered Kerouac’s “On the Road,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg’s “Howl” and “America,” all of which heavily influenced “The Joshua Tree” — as did Sam Shepard’s plays, which I read in the old Tosca bar across the road. I had so much coffee I imagined I saw Tom Waits playing pool with Francis Ford Coppola with opera on the jukebox — maybe I did. Charles Bukowski taught me that nothing is as filthy as antiseptic writing that edits itself; or as he put it to me once, nothing worthwhile “was ever written in paradise.” On that we disagreed.

Who are your favorite musician-writers? Your favorite memoir by a musician?

Art Pepper’s “Straight Life,” where I discovered truth outclassed style and vernacular was the king’s English at the right table. When I heard Bruce Springsteen’s music I reread John Steinbeck — when I read his memoir “Born to Run,” I re-listened to Patti Scialfa’s “Rumble Doll.” A couple of other memoirs I held close during the writing of my own were Dave Eggers’s “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” Patti Smith’s “Just Kids,” Viv Albertine’s “Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys” and Pete Paphides’s “Broken Greek.”

What are the best books about music you’ve read?

Very little scholarship or even good writing on the psychology of singers onstage and off: the ego imploding as well as exploding — that’s a confession and a request.

What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

Everything in “We Don’t Know Ourselves,” Fintan O’Toole’s magnum opus/personal history of generational change in Ireland. Really great on the troubles in the church as well as the state. Not much on music although he’s a fan of Horslips not U2, which I found both encouraging and hurtful. I don’t know Fintan well, but I wanted to after reading what amounts to a portrait of a family as much as the country.

Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

Over time I’ve read more nonfiction, which I’m hungry for, to educate myself on new ideas I’m curious about, or things that I want to understand better. “Where Is My Flying Car?,” by J. Storrs Hall, is a recent find on how some unstoppable ideas get stopped.

I avoid the self-help genre, though to learn why I’d probably have to read more of them.

What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift? And the most inappropriate book you’ve ever received?

The book I often give as a gift is Seamus Heaney’s “Human Chain,” his final collection. The last poem, “A Kite for Aibhín,” feels like a premonition of his untimely, unexpected passing. I asked Seamus to sign quite a few for me as gifts, and his wife, Marie, used to joke the unsigned copies were more rare.

I got a copy of Edna O’ Brien’s “The Country Girls” growing up, which hurried my puberty to a place where I thought differently about girls and women. I still do. It was banned in Ireland when it was published. I have received some steamy self-published fiction as gifts from fans.

Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain?

Screwtape in C.S. Lewis’s “The Screwtape Letters” — I channel his devilish spirit in someone I become onstage called MacPhisto, who can speak things I could never even think.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

My friend Niall Byrne, from two doors up on Cedarwood Road, and I competed to see who could learn to read the youngest, but it was probably around 4 when I appreciated language. I was briefly put in charge of the library in our primary school as encouragement. It felt to me like a jukebox does now.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

Edna O’Brien, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett to change the subject to rugby.

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

I always finish them, I just read faster.

What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?

“War and Peace,” though I loved Tolstoy’s “Resurrection.”

What do you plan to read next?

“Finding Solace,” by Agnes Nyamayarwo. Agnes is a nurse from Uganda I met in 2002. Hearing her tell her story changed my life, and I’m one of many.

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Bono on the birth of U2, that iTunes album and Live Aid: ‘There’s only one thing I can see when I watch it: the mullet’

In an exclusive extract from his memoir, the singer looks back

“A nything strange or startling?” That’s how my da, Bob, opens our conversations. We’d meet in our “local” pub in Dalkey, Dublin. Finnegan’s is its own country with its own laws and customs. Time is said to change shape on crossing its door. I have experienced that. It’s a constitutional monarchy with Dan Finnegan the head of state, his sons effectively running the government with his eldest, Donal, the prime minister. Donal is 6ft 4in but, depending on the hour and the state of the state, can appear 6ft 7in. I would not want to mess with Donal Finnegan.

Dan Finnegan loved my da. They shared a love of opera and stage musicals, and Dan recognised when another prince was present, one who could actually sing. On the occasion when my father silenced the place by singing The Way We Were followed by The Black Hills of Dakota, Dan looked over at me with something like pity, and I imagined him speaking under his breath, “Think how far you’d have come if only you had your father’s voice.”

Sundays at midday used to be quiet in Finnegan’s. The dark oak and the blue flame over the gas-burning coal fire flickering in the corner. Not a “snug” in the literal sense of a closed-off area in an Irish pub, but it might as well have been. It drew us closer to each other, Bob and I.

“Anything strange or startling?”

The Catholic orders Bushmills Black Bush, a Protestant whiskey from County Antrim in the north of Ireland. We stare at each other. Talk around each other. Occasionally, we talk to each other. Bob is going through some personal stuff that he is here not to talk about. He is also not well. I didn’t know how not well.

I was also having a little scare. They caught something in my throat and wanted to biopsy it. It turned out to be nothing important, but it was a sobering experience. I was crossing the 40th-birthday threshold, the halfway mark of a good life, and, for the first time, noticing my mortality. And those of the people I loved. Like Michael Hutchence. Like my da.

Bob still played the hard man, but the pride was there. Like the smile on his face when he was waving his fist at me from the mixing desk in Houston on the Unforgettable Fire tour in 1985. I had turned the spotlight on him from the stage. “Ladies and gentlemen … appearing for the first time in these United States, more importantly, his first time in the Lone Star State of Texas … will you please welcome my father, Bob …” The sound of the crowd like a 747 taking off over his head. A sound the size of Texas. It was a big moment.

We were left on our own in the dressing room after the show. He reached out his hand to me, looking up with blood orange eyes. Could this be an even bigger moment, I thought to myself. Am I about to receive a compliment from my da?

“You’re very professional,” he said, very professionally.

Over time he’d become comfortable with his son being loved and loathed, which is the price of popularity in Ireland. He had his own friendships. He had the musical society. He had golf. He found it amusing that I’d done so well because it was Norman, my ambitious brother, the entrepreneur, who was always going to do well. And he thought it hilarious that I was throwing cash away as fast as I’d earn it. And that I kept making it.

“When are you going to get a real job?” he asks me with a wink. He still gives me a fiver for Christmas.

Are we becoming friends? At least we’re meeting. Talking. I turned the tables one Sunday in 1999.

“Anything strange or startling?” It’s the first time I’ve asked him his own question.

“I have cancer,” he deadpanned.

Huge boulders fall on your head just like that, from some unseen mountain when you’re not looking up. When you’re not looking anywhere. The change in someone else’s life will utterly transform yours, even though your life is not quite the point here. Is it? This is the moment when Bob Hewson describes his own situation as “the departure lounge”. I am not ready to give up on the man I’m just getting to know. I’m not ready to be orphaned. Is anybody? I don’t know if I was much help to Bob Hewson that day, though, self-reliant as he was, I doubt he was looking for help from me.

What is the relationship between sex and death? The instinct to proliferate our DNA is at its strongest when we fear the end of our line. A partner passes, a parent, a child, and the next thing you know your own body screams for life. Through Bob’s illness, my wife Ali and I opened two new chapters in the book of Bob: his first grandson, Elijah Bob Patricius Guggi Q, born in 1999, and his second, John Abraham, born in 2001.

D uring his last days, in the summer of 2001, we were touring Europe, and after shows I would fly home and be the night watchman at his hospital bed, sleeping in his room on a mattress the staff set up for me. Beaumont hospital was so close to Dublin airport that often I’d be sitting there in silence an hour and a half after the roar of an encore. Next morning, we would chat with our eyes or with words, depending on how sick he was. On these hospital night shifts, I drew him while he slept. It helped me to stay close to him, wriggly writing as prayer. To draw someone’s face, you really get to know them. It sounds uncomfortable, but it wasn’t.

When Norman arrived to take up his shift, Bob and I both knew everything would be OK. Even if it wasn’t. My brother was more helpful to my father in these dark, difficult days. Even had I been able to be there more, I don’t know if I was equipped for the messiness of somebody dying in front of me. Not as useful as my brother, full stop. Since I can remember, Norman had always fixed everything. Toys, train sets, bicycles, motorcycles, radios and tape recorders. Not this time.

Bob Hewson was a recording of many lives lived, and now we were losing the chance to access a library of information that might help us explain ourselves better. To listen for answers to so many questions. Questions about our mother. About long-ago family trips where the family hadn’t seemed to be the reason we were there. About the back pain that had Bob surly and disengaged. The guilt he held inside his singer’s head. About all the rage this appeared to raise in his younger son.

We would not press play any more. The right-hand reel was emptying and the tape set to flap about until someone finally pressed stop. Norman couldn’t fix this. But Norman was a constant; he made things better by being there.

When my da started slipping away, we were close enough friends for me not to feel abandoned, but there was always a hint of that in his independence. Patricide is what they call the son’s killing of the father, but what if, as my friend Jim Sheridan – film director and psychological genius – suggested, “the son, deep down, believes the father was responsible for the untimely death of his mother? It’s ridiculous of course, but emotions don’t have to make sense; they just have to make themselves known!”

Then that rage is a roar, all right. A rage that first fills up the lungs, then gives tempo to the pulse as blood begins to sprint through veins. A roar that can fill stadiums, fill thousands of hearts while emptying its own. A rage that will bully bullies and thump photographers who are just earning a crust by trying to steal one of your moments. A rage that can throw itself off balconies and into the arms of a crowd. A nuclear rage that can power a rock band or leave it in meltdown. How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb we called an album a few years later.

Good question, Jim. I’ve spent a life trying to understand my own rage and if it’s possible trying to rewrite it. Some of it had to do with depending on other people, but some of it had to do with my father. Some of it is righteous, but some of it is volatile and extrusive.

After Bob passed away, Ali thought my agitation was getting worse and I was becoming a little more aggressive in my relations with people. Perhaps I could do with the cross-questioning of a therapist. I dodged that suggestion, but, perhaps unconsciously, I opted for another kind of inquisitor. I hadn’t anticipated, when I signed up for the Rolling Stone interview with its legendary editor and publisher, Jann Wenner, that I would be lying on the psychiatrist’s couch, but, heh, his interviews with Bob Dylan and John Lennon had changed me as much as some of their songs had.

Wenner dug deep into my relationship with my father. At the end of a few long sessions he surprised me with an insight that all my prayer and meditation had missed. “I think your father deserves an apology,” he scolded me. “Can you imagine this story from his perspective? Your father loses his wife and he’s left to bring up the two kids and one of them is charging in his direction, coming for him all guns blazing. One of them is going to take him out by achieving all the ambitions he was afraid to have.”

Easter 2002. Ali and I visited the little chapel in Èze, France, a fishermen’s church with a hilltop view that has seen it all. From the baroque pulpit a lone arm sticks out of the wall holding a cross, and a fishing boat hangs from the ceiling. After the service – sometimes improved, I find, if you don’t speak the language that well – I returned to the pews on my own. I sat there and apologised to my father, Bob Hewson. I had forgiven him for his own crimes of passion, but I had never asked his forgiveness for mine.

I’ll never know if it was related to me asking for his forgiveness in that little chapel, but after my father died, something changed. I felt I got an extra couple of notes on my range; I felt I was becoming a real tenor as opposed to a pretend one. I could ring those high notes like a church bell, as I had never hit them before. It makes no scientific sense, of course, but I’ve heard it said that when somebody close dies, they leave you a kind of passing gift, some invisible will where you inherit a special blessing. Bob Hewson’s final gift to me was to enlarge the one he gave me long before. I was now a true tenor, no longer a baritone who only thought he was a tenor.

When Norman and I proudly carried Bob’s coffin out of the Church of the Assumption in Howth, the congregation of old friends and family were singing The Black Hills of Dakota. At the reception in the Marine hotel, a truck pulled up outside from County Antrim and offloaded 100 miniature bottles of Black Bush whiskey. At first I thought it was a promotion of some sort, but no, it was nothing other than a random act of kindness north to south, Prod to Catholic. The universe of Bob Hewson behaves like that.

‘Quite a few wannabes had responded to Larry Mullen’s invitation on the school notice board’: forming U2

“Drummer seeks musicians to form band.” How casually our destiny arrives. Quite a few wannabes had responded to Larry Mullen’s invitation on the school notice board, and now, classes out for the day, we were all packed in the oven that was Larry’s kitchen. How did we fit all the drums, the amps, and the apprentice rock stars into such a small room that first time we got together? Guitar and bass might have been squealing for attention with their amplifiers and distortion pedals making loud arguments for being there, but it was the drums that filled both physical and musical space.

On that first Wednesday after school it felt as if no one was in tune but Larry, who appeared quite at home around all this metallic chaos. Well, he was at home. It was his kitchen. Everything I still love about Larry’s playing was present then – the primal power of the tom-toms, the boot in the stomach of the kick drum, the snap and slap of the snare drum as it bounced off windows and walls. This indoor thunder, I thought, will bring the whole house down.

Soon I noticed another noise, an exterior one, the somewhat high-pitched sound of girls giggling and shouting outside the window. Larry already had a fanclub, and over the next hour he would offer us a lesson in the mystique of the rock star. He turned the garden hose on them.

Adam Clayton was there on bass. I couldn’t quite make out what he was playing, but he looked the part. David Evans, whom no one had yet named the Edge, had the coolest aura of anybody. He didn’t have to be in tune with anyone else, because he was in tune with himself. In the room briefly was our friend Neil McCormick’s brother, Ivan, Larry’s friend Peter Martin, who owned a pristine white Telecaster replica that looked as if it had just come from the shop window (he was happy enough to lend it to me, but was probably not so happy about my fingers bleeding all over it), and David Evans’s older brother, Dik, a well-known brainbox. Dik and Dave were so clever that they built an electric guitar from scratch. So clever that they used to try to blow each other up with chemistry experiments and, according to their nextdoor neighbour Shane Fogerty, did blow up the Evans garden shed one day. They had a reputation as weirdos – pleasant weirdos, but weirdos nonetheless.

A dam might have been the most fun at school, but he was the first person to be serious about our band. His posh accent and air of casual confidence got him off the hook for all kinds of unusual behaviour in 1970s Dublin. When he didn’t have the cash for his fare, he would offer the bus conductor a “cheque” – meaning his name and address on a blank piece of paper. Often he was thrown off anyway, but some drivers were so impressed by his creamy tones they let him take his free ride.

A natural entrepreneur, Adam organised our earliest shows and signed up Steve Averill, the singer of the infamous Irish punk band the Radiators from Space, to be our mentor and come up with a better name for our band than the Hype. Steve was a neighbour of Adam’s and Edge’s in Malahide and, despite the punk rock attitude, the nicest man on Dublin’s Northside. He would become critical in art directing the visual language we developed over decades, but he started the job just by being big brotherly to Adam and finding us our name.

There it is, a letter and a number, perfect to print large on a poster or a T-shirt. If I think about it as a spy plane, as in the U-2, I like it. But if I think about it as a bad pun, as in “you too”, I don’t. I don’t think I voted for it, but I certainly didn’t stop it. I’m one in four, and a real rock’n’roll band is not run by the singer. Led maybe, but not run. I definitely stopped the Flying Tigers, which was Steve’s second suggestion.

‘I find it excruciating to watch’: Live Aid

Wembley Stadium, July 1985. Live Aid. A gigantic moment in the life of U2. In the life of so many musicians. A transformation in how to think about pop music being of practical help in the world. For the record, I don’t think pop music has any obligation to be any more help than a three-minute rush of pure joy, an unexpected kiss of melody, a sung and swallowed capsule of truth-telling. Sweet- or sour-coated.

All that being said, there is also a history of music in service of the greater good, a magnificent testament to the ideals and steeliness of musicians like George Harrison organising a concert for Bangladesh . But never before had there been a gathering quite like Live Aid, raising money to support Ethiopians in another famine. A global audience, a stage on two continents, and an unprecedented superstar lineup that would ensure 16 hours of high ratings.

What are the odds of two anti-poverty campaigners being born a few miles from each other and both in rock’n’roll bands? The truth of it is that Bob Geldof opened the door and I walked through. He showed me, as an Irish person, that ideas get more authority the better they are described. We knew him first not as an activist but as lead singer in the Boomtown Rats, Southside posh boys pretending to be rough while we, the younger upstarts, were Northside rough boys pretending to be posh. Well, two of us were, anyway.

Bob Geldof was as gifted with words as any virtuoso offering their talents to the main stage on that day in London’s Wembley or Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium. He is Miles Davis, Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and that is just in conversation. His is a genius of vocabulary and communication. The man could puke language and it remains eloquent. On screen and in print, Bob lets off language like a hand grenade, the more explosive the better. Jagged consonants break up the dull thud of vowels landing on some dumbfounded pundit.

“Fuck the address. Go to the phone number. Give us the money, there are people dying now, so give me the money.”

When I have occasionally tried to follow in the footsteps of his invective, I’ve usually ended up sounding childishly rebellious and inarticulate. A runt student at the foot of a colossus. But the real expletives, as Bob told anyone who tuned in to Live Aid, were the statistics of how many people were dying unnecessarily.

As for the show itself, influential though it was in the arc of our band, I confess that I find it excruciating to watch. It’s a little humbling that during one of the greatest moments of your life, you’re having a bad hair day. Now, some people would say that I’ve had a bad hair life, but when I am forced to look at footage of U2 playing Live Aid, there is only one thing that I can see. The mullet. All thoughts of altruism and of righteous anger, all the right reasons that we were there, all these flee my mind, and all I see is the ultimate bad hair day.

‘ Giving away music for free to everybody – what’s the worst that can happen?’: a deal with Apple

In October 2004, a month before our single Vertigo was released, Edge, our manager Paul McGuinness, [producer and record executive] Jimmy Iovine and I made a visit to Steve Jobs. We had a hunch that we thought might benefit both Apple and U2.

Steve lived with his wife, Laurene, and their three kids in a low-key Tudor-style house on a prosperous street in Palo Alto, California. Their Anglophilia also inspired a cottage garden full of wildflowers and stuff you could eat, with a gate opening yards from a front door he never locked.

Apple had a history of groundbreaking commercials, and their latest iPod spots were modern DayGlo pop art. This new song Vertigo, we suggested, was a perfect fit for one of those ads. If we could agree terms. There was a small complication in that our band doesn’t do commercials. Never had. A decision of principle with a price tag that was rising. Over quiche and green tea Steve explained that he was flattered but didn’t have the kind of budget that a band like ours would expect.

“Actually, Steve,” I said. “We don’t want cash. We just want to be in the iPod commercial.” Steve was thrown. The spots contained only the dancing silhouettes of music fans, their heads holding those iconic white earbuds, white arteries pumping the music from tiny MP3 players now called iPods.

“Maybe it’s time to shift the emphasis to artists as well as fans,” Edge added. “Don’t you think we’d look quite good in relief ?”

after newsletter promotion

Steve, intrigued, said if that was the deal, he didn’t have to think twice, but he’d need to run it by the creative team.

“There’s one other thing,” added Paul McGuinness. “Although the band are not looking for cash, some Apple stock, even a symbolic amount, might be a courtesy.”

“Sorry,” said Steve. “That’s a dealbreaker.”

“Well,” I tentatively suggested. “How about our own iPod? A customised U2 iPod in black and red?”

Steve looked nonplussed. Apple, he said, is about white hardware. “You wouldn’t want a black one.” He thought for a moment. “I can show you what it would look like, but you will not like it.”

When, later, he showed the design to us, we loved it. So much that he’d ask Jony Ive, the company’s design genius, to look at it again, and OK, maybe even experiment with a red component on the device, too. To reflect our Atomic Bomb album cover.

The iPod was about to turn Apple from a medium-sized world-class hardware and software player into a global Godzilla. Paul would always rue losing the stock argument – not that Steve was ever going to discuss it – but, in truth, we were fortunate to ride the Apple wave through that period. The fantastically kinetic commercial brought the band to a younger audience and thousands of people bought the U2 iPod just because it wasn’t white. Apple was on a ride to infinity and beyond; we were just lucky to hitch a lift. You couldn’t buy a ticket.

“Free music?” asked Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, with a look of mild incredulity. “Are you talking about free music?”

Ten years had gone by since the Vertigo ads; we were in his office in Cupertino, California – Guy Oseary, our new manager, me, [Apple executives] Eddy Cue and Phil Schiller – and we’d just played the team some of our new Songs of Innocence album.

“You want to give this music away free? But the whole point of what we’re trying to do at Apple is to not give away music free. The point is to make sure musicians get paid.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t think we give it away free. I think you pay us for it, and then you give it away free, as a gift to people. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

Tim Cook raised an eyebrow. “You mean we pay for the album and then just distribute it?”

I said, “Yeah, like when Netflix buys the movie and gives it away to subscribers.”

Tim looked at me as if I was explaining the alphabet to an English professor. “But we’re not a subscription organisation.”

“Not yet,” I said. “Let ours be the first.”

Tim was not convinced. “There’s something not right about giving your art away for free,” he said. “And this is just to people who like U2?”

“Well,” I replied, “I think we should give it away to everybody. I mean, it’s their choice whether they want to listen to it.”

See what just happened? You might call it vaunting ambition. Or vaulting. Critics might accuse me of overreach. It is.

If just getting our music to people who like our music was the idea, that was a good idea. But if the idea was getting our music to people who might not have had a remote interest in our music, maybe there might be some pushback. But what was the worst that could happen? It would be like junk mail. Wouldn’t it? Like taking our bottle of milk and leaving it on the doorstep of every house in the neighbourhood.

Not. Quite. True.

On 9 September 2014, we didn’t just put our bottle of milk at the door but in every fridge in every house in town. In some cases we poured it on to the good people’s cornflakes. And some people like to pour their own milk. And others are lactose intolerant.

I take full responsibility. Not Guy O, not Edge, not Adam, not Larry, not Tim Cook, not Eddy Cue. I’d thought if we could just put our music within reach of people, they might choose to reach out toward it. Not quite. As one social media wisecracker put it, “Woke up this morning to find Bono in my kitchen, drinking my coffee, wearing my dressing gown, reading my paper.” Or, less kind, “The free U2 album is overpriced.” Mea culpa.

At first I thought this was just an internet squall. We were Santa Claus and we’d knocked a few bricks out as we went down the chimney with our bag of songs. But quite quickly we realised we’d bumped into a serious discussion about the access of big tech to our lives. The part of me that will always be punk rock thought this was exactly what the Clash would do. Subversive. But subversive is hard to claim when you’re working with a company that’s about to be the biggest on Earth.

For all the custard pies it brought Apple – who swiftly provided a way to delete the album – Tim Cook never blinked. “You talked us into an experiment,” he said. “We ran with it. It may not have worked, but we have to experiment, because the music business in its present form is not working for everyone.”

If you need any more clues as to why Steve Jobs picked Tim Cook to take on the leadership of Apple, this is one. Probably instinctively conservative, he was ready to try something different to solve a problem. When it went wrong, he was ready to take responsibility. And while he couldn’t fire the person who put the problem on his desk, it would have been all too easy to point the finger at me. We’d learned a lesson, but we’d have to be careful where we would tread for some time. It was not just a banana skin. It was a landmine.

‘If I’d stuck to the cocktails, all would have been well …’: getting to know the Obamas

I’ve known Barack Obama since he was a senator. At first I found him a little guarded, but later understood it was just his manner. During his presidency, I came to know him a little more; became aware of a deeply ingrained integrity, saw the softness behind the seriousness. Listening with him to some early mixes of new U2 songs, I was taken by his intellectual curiosity as to how music was put together. More writer than politician, but not narcissistic like us songwriters, I noticed how profound was his commitment to his family, and theirs to him. Michelle was the definition of what the hip-hop entrepreneur Andre Harrell described as “lioness energy”. Protective of her family and their ideals in the extreme, she and Ali were always going to get on – neither willing to let her life be defined by her partner.

The Obamas’ was a soulful White House but more than that a rigorous and reasoned one. “No Drama Obama” was the West Wing trope.

Michelle and Barack Obama would leave office with a quiet dignity, the major controversy of their tenure the outrage they caused simply by arguing that all Americans deserved equal access to health care. The Affordable Care Act, “ Obamacare ”, would not be everything the 44th president wanted, but it would be transformative for so many lives, unless, of course, someone tried to destroy those freshly cemented foundations.

Did anyone appreciate quite what a loss the departure of the Obamas would be to the world? Our family, forgetting we were Irish, took it as a personal loss. At a last lunch at the White House with just the two of us, I got to thank him properly for following through on President Bush’s breakthrough Aids work. He would add an extra $50bn to Bush’s $18bn. Presidents normally want ownership of such expensive items. Writing the cheque to continue your predecessor’s legacy shouldn’t be extraordinary, but it is. He brushed off my thanks, but then the man who had a photograph of the Rumble in the Jungle hanging in his office (Ali standing over Foreman) landed one final, mortal blow.

44: “What’s the maximum number of terms you can run as the singer in U2, though? Ha-ha!”

Me: “Every new record is an election, I always say. Two crap albums and you’re out.”

T here were eight of us in the private quarters of the president and first lady as their eight years were coming to an end. Because the kids were a little older, Michelle and Barack more frequently invited friends over for dinner. If I’d stuck to the cocktails, all would have been well, but I allowed myself a glass of wine with the meal. Or was it two?

Have I mentioned I like to drink wine? This comes with a warning. I am officially allergic to it. I am allergic to salicylates, allergic to salicylic acid, which is found in everything from fruit to aspirin to tomato sauce. Which is found in red wine and explains why a big night that includes pizza, red wine and an aspirin may mean my head will swell up and my eyes disappear. Ali says that I should take a hint, but instead I take an antihistamine. If I don’t, if I drink without the right medication, I can go right out. Sound asleep. Wherever. I’ve slept on car bonnets and in shop doorways. I once fell asleep on the lighting desk at a Sonic Youth gig. It doesn’t matter where I am. I could be in the White House.

Being precise, 44 does not drink like an Irish person; 44 likes a cocktail. If only I’d stuck to the cocktails.

As I started to fall asleep, I excused myself, and what happened next is a little blurry, but, according to Ali, it took about 10 minutes before the leader of the free world asked her, “Bono’s been gone a while. Is he OK?”

“Oh yes,” she said dismissively. “He’s probably gone for a sleep.”

“What do you mean? He’s gone for a sleep? Where?”

“Well, he normally finds a car, but I wouldn’t know where he’d be now. Don’t worry, it’s usually only 10 minutes. He’ll be back.”

“Hold on a second,” interrupted the president. “Hold, hold, hold on. You think he’s gone somewhere for a sleep?”

“Yes.” Then, sensing his concern, she said, “He didn’t sleep on the flight from Dublin. I’ll go and find him. Don’t worry about this, Mr President.”

She got up to go, but he followed her. “I have to see this. Where could he be?”

Ali said, “I haven’t a clue.”

The president replied, “He was asking me earlier about Lincoln’s speech, the Gettysburg Address.”

Good instinct. They walked into the Lincoln Bedroom, and there I was, out cold, head in the bosom of Abraham Lincoln, on his very bed. “Falling asleep in the comfort of our freedoms,” as I spun it afterward.

The president woke me up, and as I came around, I tried to laugh as hard as he and Ali. He doesn’t for a minute believe I have this allergy. He thinks Ali made this up to cover for me. He tells people he can drink me under the table. Rubbish. But he does make a strong martini.

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On the Shelf

Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

By Bono Knopf: 576 pages, $34 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Like a great many famous people who go by just one name, Bono isn’t really known for subtlety. As the lead singer and public face of U2, the biggest rock band on the planet during much of their existence, he fills stages and records with a largeness of self. He’s never been shy about wanting to change the world (not that there’s anything wrong with that). He has so much juice that he convinced Apple to flood every iTunes user with the 2014 U2 album “ Songs of Innocence .” He’s kind of a big deal.

So it’s a pleasant surprise to discover that his first book, the musical memoir “ Surrender: 40 songs, One Story ,” is defined largely by humility. This is an introspective story written by a man whose spirit is never far removed from the sadness and grief of his childhood; the hunger, literal and figurative, of a teen wannabe rocker; and the gratitude of one who worked his butt off and made it to the top. Some have speculated that a ghostwriter is responsible for these pages. His publishers say no, and I believe them. The tone feels too honest and direct, the details and memories too sharp. And he apologizes for that whole iTunes thing.

Here is Bono on that all-important transporter of bands the world over: “The van is a time machine, the perfect size for the fledgling rock ‘n’ roll community: some musicians, a tour manager, a roadie or two, sometimes a manager. Later it may grow wings and become a private plane, but it will always feel roughly the same size as the van.”

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“Surrender” is more a van of a book than a private plane. It shrinks more ego than it inflates. Bono makes no bones about his outsized ambitions, but there’s always a fallible human being behind the big plans and then the superstardom. Sometimes he even sounds a wee bit embarrassed about his fame and fortune. He comes by his well-chronicled activism and philanthropy through what you are compelled to conclude is a hard core of sincerity.

Born Paul David Hewson in 1960 — his friend, the artist and musician Guggi, first called him Bono Vox, after the hearing-aid shop Bonavox, before shortening the nickname — Bono grew up middle class in a Dublin suburb, the son of a Catholic father and Protestant mother. He had a bit of a temper, which flared more often after his mother died of a cerebral aneurysm when he was 14. He describes a household of three men — himself, his father and his older brother, Norman — incessantly yelling at each other because that’s all they knew how to do: “Three men dealing with their grief by never talking about it.” But he learned to write songs about it, from “Iris (Hold Me Close)” to the auspicious first song to make its way onto a U2 album, “I Will Follow.”

However you feel about the bombastic stadium light shows of the later years, it’s a kick to picture the members of U2 making grilled cheese sandwiches on a portable heater and playing gigs to audiences of zero. At one sparsely attended show Bono heckled some sharp-dressed patrons from the stage, not knowing they were industry types who wanted to check out this buzzy new band.

“Surrender” reminds us that many of U2’s heroes were punk, and that before they became pop stars they were very much a post-punk act — although, for Bono, the band’s roots lay in altogether different soil. “U2’s music was never really rock ‘n’ roll,” he writes. “Under its contemporary skin it’s opera — a big music, big emotions unlocked in the pop music of the day.” Anyone who has thrilled to the emotional spectrum of “Where the Streets Have No Name” would find it hard to disagree.

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“Surrender,” however, is by no means operatic. There’s a casual charm to the memoir, a feeling of being led through caverns of story by a guide with some things to get off his chest. While describing the production of the band’s breakthrough third album, “War,” for instance, our narrator interjects that he’s not always wild about being in the studio: “This is not an environment conducive to art. The room feels more like an operating theater than a stage, surgeons conferring on how best to fix the limp in question.” This is the rare rock star memoir written by a rock star who, you get the impression, could have been a writer — or at least might have wanted to.

Bono married his high school sweetheart, Alison Stewart, and they had four kids; there’s something of the regular dude about him, except for the hobnobbing with presidents and receiving invitations from Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and that sort of thing. Bono has never been a favorite of the “Shut up and play” crowd, but there is nothing in U2’s music that suggests innocently standing by. For every love ballad there’s a “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” a mournful yawp on the Irish Troubles that was actually written by U2 guitarist the Edge. In other words, call him what you want — he’s never inconsistent.

U2 fanatics might already know much of the material in “Surrender.” For the rest of us, there’s something to discover in every chapter. Bono has a gift for making even the unattainable seem relatable. He’s been accused of having a messiah complex; some of the book’s most arresting sections deal with his lifelong commitment to Christianity. But the believer who emerges from these pages springs from tenets of his faith in short supply today. He’s humble, even self-effacing. He might be fun to have a beer with. He is very much of this Earth, even if on occasion he might seem to float above the water.

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Vognar is a freelance writer based in Houston.

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The Too-Muchness of Bono

In Dublin with the irrepressible U2 front man

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B ono was 14 when his grandfather died. His family was at the cemetery burying him when his mother, Iris, fainted. His father, Bob, and older brother, Norman, took her to the hospital to have her checked out, and Bono went over to his grandmother’s house, where the family was gathering.

A little while later, one of his uncles burst in, wailing: “Iris is dying. Iris is dying. She’s had a stroke.”

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It was at that instant, Bono says, that his home disappeared. A hole opened up within him. Bono is now 62 and reflecting on how many rock stars lost their mother at a crucial age: John Lennon, Johnny Rotten, Bob Geldof, Paul McCartney—the list of the abandoned goes on and on. Their mothers’ deaths left them with this bottomless craving. “People who need to be loved at scale, with 20,000 people screaming your name every night, are generally to be avoided,” Bono says with a laugh. “My kind of people.”

His mother lingered on for a few more days after the stroke. Bono and his brother were ushered into her hospital room, and they held her hands while the machine keeping her alive was flicked off.

Then Bono, his father, and his brother returned home and almost never spoke of her again. They barely even thought of her, at least for years. “It’s not just she’s dead; we disappeared her,” Bono says.

His father sunk into his opera. He would stand in front of their stereo, surrounded by the strains of La Traviata , lost to the rest of the world. Bono would watch him, unable to get to him. “He doesn’t notice that I’m in the room looking at him,” Bono writes in Surrender , his entrancing new memoir.

They no longer had a home, just a house. Bono blamed his father for his mother’s death. “I didn’t kill her; you killed her, by ignoring her. You won’t ignore me,” is how Bono puts it in the book. The three men who used to scream at the TV now scream at each other. Their passions are operatic. Bono’s living off cans of meat and beans and these little pellets of mush that turn into a kind of mashed potato when boiled. During these years he is drowning, clutching at anything to survive. His self-confidence drains away. He starts struggling in school. He wants to feel special, but there’s no evidence that he is. He desperately yearns to have his father pay attention to him. He finds he can win that attention only when they argue and when they play chess together. He can’t get his father’s attention unless he beats him at something.

His father had a beautiful tenor voice, but he protected himself from disappointment by not allowing himself any dreams about a musical career—and then his great regret in life was that he didn’t have the courage to try to pursue one. No wonder music would be exactly the thing Bono would want to go into, to succeed where his father didn’t, to make his father see him. “There’s a little bit of patricide” in the book, he admits to me. “If you ask yourself the question How would you take this man down? the answer would be, Become the tenor that he wished to be . Of course!”

Years later, Bono’s musical dreams all came true. But his father remained permanently irascible. One night U2 was playing a big arena in Texas and Bono flew his father to America, where he’d never been, to watch the concert. After the show, his father came backstage, looking emotional. Bono thought something profound was about to happen—the father-son connection he’s been waiting for all of his life. His father stuck out his hand. “Son,” he said, “you’re very professional.” He’d hit the limits of what he could express.

For Bono, getting in touch with his mother became a middle-age quest. When U2 was starting out, they rehearsed in a cottage built into an outer wall of the cemetery where his mother was buried. Bono worked on a song called “ I Will Follow ,” about a boy whose mother dies. The boy is telling her he will follow her into the grave. It never occurred to Bono that this song might be autobiographical. It never occurred to him to visit the grave of the woman who was lying about 100 yards away from where he was singing; he didn’t even think of her. “That’s the thing about sublimation. It’s almost the farthest we go to bury who we are,” he says now with some wonder.

Not until three decades later did he finally face her absence and what it did to him. In his 50s, he was able to write the lyrics for a song called “ Iris (Hold Me Close) .” One of them goes: “The ache / in my heart / is so much a part of who I am / Something in your eyes / took a thousand years to get here.”

I tell you all of this because there is something about him I’m trying to understand—I’ll call it his “muchness.” There is just a lot to the guy—so much driven intensity; so much sensitivity, anger, joy, and propulsive energy. If you watch U2 perform , you see three guys playing their instruments in a cool, understated way, and then this short, crazy Irishman climbing frantically around the stage. Spend any time with him offstage, and he is fantastically entertaining, filling every room with stories and argument. He’s a maximalist at nearly everything he does.

Musically and in his activist life, Bono exhibits a pattern of overreaching, his lofty goals sometimes exceeding his grasp. One grand project after another—gigantic concert tours, economic development in Africa, addressing the AIDS crisis. (Fighting AIDS and global poverty are his two biggest causes.) Years ago, he was a guest columnist for The New York Times . I used to tell him, “It’s not ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday.’ It’s just a column. Keep it pointed and prosaic.” I think he had trouble adjusting to the concept.

Some people find his muchness annoying and pretentious. He says that people are frequently telling him, “Just cool your jets, man. Just chill the fuck out.” But as he writes in his book, “It’s hard for me to turn myself off.”

Where does all of this come from?

One theory is that the fusion reactor within him was produced by the traumas of his youth. He’s yearning to fill the holes—the death of his mother, the absence of his father. By this theory, the story of Bono is one of scarcity, the story of the lifetime he’s spent trying to find the love that was ripped away.

Bono himself seems to accept this theory. Success is an “outworking of dysfunction,” he argues in the book, “a reward for really, really hard work, which may be obscuring some kind of neurosis.”

But people who operate out of a scarcity mindset usually have their resentments on full display. As far as I can tell, Bono doesn’t have a resentful bone in his body. Scarcity people never seem fully happy no matter how much they achieve. Bono is generally happy, energized, enthusiastic.

So perhaps the source of Bono’s energy and unrelenting drive may not be scarcity, but abundance. The guy had a rotten childhood, but since then he has been blessed with just about everything life can offer. Perhaps he is simply manically excited to take advantage of it all.

While I spent a few days with him in Dublin this fall, an old book came to mind. It was an analysis of American culture called People of Plenty , by the late historian David Potter. The core argument made by the school of historians Potter belonged to is that America’s natural character is defined by abundance. The European settlers who first came to the country found forests stretching on forever, flocks of geese so large that they required 30 minutes to take off. All of this possibility drove the settlers sort of mad. They found themselves walking more in a day than they had ever imagined, dreaming dreams bigger than they had ever imagined. These immigrants, the ones who weren’t brought here in chains, turned entrepreneurial, disordered, antic, religiously zealous, morally charged, messianic, and perpetually restless. They measured their life by how much they had grown and how far they had climbed. They were propelled by a central contradiction: They had this intense spiritual drive to complete God’s plans for humanity on this continent—and they also had this fevered ambition to get really rich. They were propelled by a moral materialism that would never let them rest.

One day I was riding around Dublin with Bono in a tiny Fiat, and the thought occurred to me: Bono’s a little like that . He may be Irish, but he’s got a lot of that loud, American, go-go type in him—part messiah, part showman.

We are sitting in Mount Temple, the school he attended during his teenage years. It is as generic and tattered a building as you can imagine, walls of cinder block painted bright colors. It was built by the World Bank at a time when Ireland was still the kind of poor country that depended on the World Bank.

Bono shows me the bulletin board where Larry Mullen Jr. tacked the notice that read Drummer seeks musicians to form band —the notice that produced U2. Bono shows me the music room where U2 first practiced together. It’s just a bunch of high-school chairs and desks with a metal case for instruments in the back and a beat-up piano in the front. Bono plays me a snippet of a Sinatra song.

“Something happened here,” Bono says. “Something was going on.” It certainly was and it certainly did. You can source Bono’s life to the psychic loss of his parents, or you can source it to what came next. Bono may have been a basket case at 14, but by 18 he had found the five people whom he would spend the rest of his life with—Jesus Christ; his wife, Ali; and his bandmates, Mullen, Adam Clayton, and David Evans—and he met them all at this school. He joined his band and started dating his wife in the exact same week. For a teenager who seemed to be drowning, he did a fantastic job of finding companions for life. Who manages to do all that by age 18?

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This was in the mid-1970s, the age of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols , the high-water mark of punk rock. Bono and his gang were punk rockers. They wore kilts and bomber boots, mohawks and buzz haircuts. At some point in high school, they came across this radical Christian group called Shalom. Bono’s father was Catholic, and his mother had been Protestant, and he wanted nothing to do with the Church, or the vicious tribalism that was hurtling Ireland toward civil war. But this fringe Christian collective was different. Its members were suspicious of materialism. They put the poor at the heart of their faith. Their Jesus was this badass Jew who took on the establishment. “They lived like first-century Christians,” Bono recalls. “And we thought: That’s pretty punk . And they seemed to accept who we were. We thought, Wow, this is great .”

I ask him, wasn’t becoming Christian in the 1970s kind of uncool? “We were on a whole other level of uncool. We genuinely thought cool was uncool.” Bono’s point is that you can’t experience God while being cool—it takes pure abandon, the raw act of exposing yourself. That, he explains, is what makes faith like rock and roll.

Bono scrambles our categories. We’ve all inherited a certain culture-war narrative over the past 50 years. Rock and roll is on one side, along with sex, drugs, and liberation. Religion is on the other side, along with judgmentalism, sexual repression, and deference to authority. But for Bono, Mullen, and Evans—the U2 members who became and remain Christians—punk rock and the radical Christ are on the same team. (Evans became known as The Edge. Bono, born Paul David Hewson, was given the nickname that eventually became his stage name—shortened from Bono Vox of O’Connell Street—by his best friend since childhood.) The three of them embraced a faith that simply bypassed the encrustations of 2,000 years of religious civilization and returned straight to Jesus: the helpless baby who was born on a bed of straw and shit; the wandering troubadour who put the poor, the marginalized, and the ailing at the center of his gaze; the rebel outsider who confronted the power structures of his society and took them all on at once. This alternative form of Christianity is something that, say, American evangelicals could have adopted. But mostly they did not.

The boys formed their band, went through the hard apprenticeship of rejection that all teenage bands go through, and then finally got to make an album, Boy . Most rock albums, especially in those days, were about rebellion, coming of age, savvy knowingness, but this was an album about innocence, about seeing with the eyes of a child. U2 was announcing that the band was going to be in this world, but not of it.

From that first album, U2’s strengths were evident. “Where others would hear harmony or counterpoint,” Bono writes, “I was better at finding the top line in the room, the hook, the clear thought.” Through the next couple of decades, the band turned out hit after hit, and although Bono is always saying how punk he is, I just hear popular, mainstream rock: “With or Without You,” “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “Beautiful Day.”

The band’s other great strength is the pseudo-religious power of their concerts. Bono was influenced by an obscure book called The Death and Resurrection Show: From Shaman to Superstar , by Rogan P. Taylor, which argues that modern performance culture has its ancient roots in shamanism. When we go to a concert, we enter the presence of a mystic who interacts with the spirit world and brings spiritual energies into the physical one. “We’re religious people even when we are not. We find ritual and ceremony powerful,” Bono says. “We were always interested in the ecstatic. I think our music reflects that.”

B oy was a success, and the band was on its way. But then The Edge, the lead guitarist, declared that he needed to quit. He told Bono he didn’t see how they could be both believers and in a band. He didn’t see how they could be global stars and fulfill the humbler “calling to serve a local community.” The world was so broken and needed love; what good could a few songs do? Bono, experiencing some of the same doubts, replied, “If you’re out, I’m out.”

Their manager, Paul McGuinness, who had just signed a bunch of contracts for their coming tour, was astounded. “Am I to gather from this that you have been talking with God?” he asked skeptically. Yes. “Do you think God would have you break a legal contract?”

But it was something else that really kept the band together. The Edge began to write “ Sunday Bloody Sunday ,” calling for an end to sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. With that song U2 saw how rock could be not just an expression of what was going on in their lives, but a vehicle to help heal a broken world. They would be missional or not at all.

The band stayed together, but the tension The Edge identified has never gone away. How do you reconcile the humility of faith with the egotism of superstardom, the purity of the Holy Spirit with the material excess of show business, the drive to achieve musical greatness with the posture of surrender to grace?

Bono’s memoir can be read as a spiritual adventure story, a Pilgrim’s Progress with superyachts and supermodels (or as Bono jokes, “The pilgrim’s lack of progress”). On the one hand, it is called Surrender , and this act of surrendering himself to a higher love remains a guiding hope in his life. “I’d always be first up when there was an altar call, the ‘come to Jesus’ moment,” he writes in the book. “I still am. If I was in a café right now and someone said, ‘Stand up if you’re ready to give your life to Jesus,’ I’d be first to my feet. I took Jesus with me everywhere and I still do. I’ve never left Jesus out of the most banal or profane actions of my life.”

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On the other hand, he also walks around with the most gargantuan worldly ambitions burning in his chest. From the beginning, Bono wanted U2 to be like the Beatles and the other great bands. “Megalomania started at a very early age,” he jokes. “It’s unbelievable. God almighty.” All these decades, Bono and his bandmates have been relentlessly chasing the perfect rock-and-roll album, the perfect show. He now admits this often made him impossible. Throughout the years, Bono insisted that U2 produce a new sound with every album, as the Beatles had. In the book he describes U2’s creative process in great detail, and it’s basically a series of scenes in which Bono is haranguing his mates: “Too familiar!” “Making a band, breaking a band, remaking a band.”

This grand ambitiousness has meant that they’ve taken a lot of musical risks, not all of which have paid off. Or as Bono puts it in Surrender , “Our best work is never too far from our worst.” During one reinvention moment he asks himself, “Why would I put everything at risk again? What’s got into me? What gets into me?”

I ask Bono about his core motivator. Is it the quest for achievement, for intimacy, for fame? “I’m ‘I don’t want to blow it’ motivated,” he says. “I’ve got these incredible opportunities and I don’t want to blow it.” He emails me a few days later to make the point that the enemy of greatness is not crap; the enemy of greatness is “very good.” You have to hammer, exhausted, through “very good” to get to greatness.

This ferocity is often hard on those around him. One day Bono worked himself up into such a rage that The Edge had to punch him on the side of the head. “The friendships in the band have been ins and outs for sure,” Bono says. “I have been insufferable at times. Pushing them and prodding them. Not wanting to blow it.”

I ask him whether the rage he keeps talking about is against only the injustices of the world, or also directed at the people he loves. “Both, sadly,” he says. “And I’ve had to apologize to my bandmates for the hectoring they’ve received over the years.” Has he brought his rage home to his family? “I have lost my temper a few times as a father.” (He has four children, all adults now.) “And that has brought me deep shame. But I’m that guy. I’m a bit wound up.”

The band’s worldly ambitions paid off in the most spectacular way. By the time U2 was rich and famous, Bono had entered the lofty height of celebrity—a life that doesn’t look much like the radical simplicity of the first-century Christians. He’s got a villa in the south of France. He’s friends with Christy Turlington and Brad Pitt. One time he was at a small White House dinner party with Barack Obama and, after an allergic reaction to some red wine, he left the table in the middle of the meal to take a nap in the Lincoln Bedroom. Another time Mikhail Gorbachev showed up at his front door in Dublin carrying a giant teddy bear. And another time he thought he’d peed his pants while sitting on Frank Sinatra’s couch. The stories in the book can be sidesplitting.

Bono’s social energy is on par with all his other kinds of energy, and as he speaks you realize the guy knows everybody—Bob Dylan, Pavarotti, Billy Graham, and Larry Summers; the pope, George W. Bush, Allen Ginsberg, and Quincy Jones. He’s so famous himself, he’s not name-dropping; he’s just thrilled to meet people. I have a theory that celebrities love to hang out with one another because deep down, they are still the sad outsiders they were in high school, and they’re thrilled that these cool people want to hang out with them.

Rowing for heaven by day and drinking with superstars by night—Bono’s spiritual adventure is the greatest high-wire act in show business. You can’t help wondering which way he’ll go. Will he be ruled by his rage or his compassion? Can he find inner stillness amid the raucous go-go of his life? Can he keep his focus on the celestial spheres when the people on the beach at Nice are so damn sexy? Can he die to self, or has his permanent tendency toward self-seriousness and pomposity become too great? If the guy is so concerned with his soul, why did he spend so much time writing about his hair? The ultimate questions at the center of it all are the same ones that have haunted American history: Can you be great and also good? Can you serve the higher realm while partying your way through this one?

Three things save him. The first is his wife, Ali . She is the star of the memoir, light and warmth, solidly grounded, deeply souled. Ali’s the one who tells him when he’s becoming too self-serious and losing his sense of mischief. She’s his emotional foundation and spiritual partner. “Ali will let her soul be searched only if you reciprocate and she is ready for the long dive,” Bono writes. “Best to arrive at her fort defenseless to have half a chance at challenging her own unbroachable defense system.”

Their home near Dublin has a gigantically long kitchen table made from a tree trunk that hosts dinners of 20 to 30 people, with dancing, drinking, and arguing about world affairs past 1 a.m. The place has the spirit of the perfect Irish pub. “It turns out I’m oriented toward horizontal relationships rather than vertical ones,” he says. His home is communal. His band is communal. His philanthropic work is communal. His life is rooted in peer relationships.

The second thing that saves him is his activism. About a decade ago, I went to a U2 concert. As I drove home, one of Bono’s people called me and asked if I wanted to hang out with him at his hotel. This is my dream: hanging out with a rock star after a concert. I got to the hotel bar and there was Bono, an archbishop, some World Bank economists, and a West African government official. We ended up talking about developing-world debt obligations until early in the morning.

Celebrity activists are in bad odor these days. Who cares what privileged superstars think? Bono has certainly fallen into many of those traps, but he is also a celebrity activist like no other. He knows who the deputy national security adviser is. He knows who the staff on the Senate Appropriations Committee are. He shows his face not just at large televised events, but in one-on-one meetings lobbying House staffers and mid-level White House officials on developing-world debt relief and money for drugs to combat HIV. “One of the greatest characters in my life over the last twenty-five years has been the capital city of the United States of America,” he writes.

He may be a mystic shaman on the concert stage, but his view of social change is unromantic; he knows that it starts with relentless pressure. (One day Bono was haranguing George W. Bush because AIDS medications weren’t getting to Africa fast enough. Finally, Bush interrupted him: “Can I speak? I am the president.”) It’s about long, tiring negotiations and compromise—stale coffee and, as he puts it to me, “damp cheese plates, soggy sandwiches late at night.” And it’s about rejecting fundamentalism in all its forms, religious or ideological. Stay flexible; make constant, steady progress.

Bono has been ruthlessly single-minded. He will meet with anybody who can help those causes, no matter how noxious to him they might be on other subjects. The most famous example is his successful campaign to woo Jesse Helms to support aid to Africa.

In Surrender , Bono relays a story, told to him by Harry Belafonte, that explains his methodology. When Bobby Kennedy was appointed attorney general, the civil-rights community was deeply suspicious of him. Martin Luther King Jr. hosted a meeting where the other leaders trashed Kennedy as an Irish redneck who would set back civil rights. King slammed his hand on the table and asked, “Does anyone here have anything positive to say about our new attorney general?” No, that’s the point , the others said; there’s nothing good about his record . King responded, “I’m releasing you into the world to find one positive thing to say about Bobby Kennedy, because that one positive thing will be the door through which our movement will have to pass.” They found that RFK was close to his bishop—and through that door they converted him into a great champion for civil rights.

Bono is often teased about his activism— I’m going to save the world, and I don’t care how many magazine covers I have to be on to do it . But this work has been a useful unfolding of his faith. “Your faith is an action,” he tells me. Preach the Gospel, but only use words if absolutely necessary. His activism has been the way he can take the fame life gave him and turn it into a useful currency. “While I hope God is with us in our mansions on the hill or holiday homes by the sea,” he writes, “I know God is with the poorest and most vulnerable.”

His activism has also connected him with one of his enduring loves: America. At a time when many of us Americans feel a sense of national decline, Bono has a bracing alternative view. “America might be the greatest song the world has yet to hear,” he told an audience of Americans at the Fulbright Association in March. “It’s an exciting thought that after 246 years of this struggle for freedom, after 246 years of inching and crawling towards freedom, sometimes on your belly, sometimes on your knees, sometimes marching, sometimes striding—this might be the moment you let freedom ring.”

The third thing that has saved him has been his holy longing, or, as he might put it, God’s longing for him. Bono’s soul is perpetually aflame, and this drives him forward, nurtures his growth and his heavenly aspirations.

Bono has reached a point where he feels grateful for his father. In Surrender , Bono paints a warm, sympathetic portrait of the old man—who was in his own way a charming, talented guy who suffered a loss he could not process, who had his 14-year-old son coming at him with “guns blazing.”

These days, Bono—this noisy and garrulous man—craves silence. He points out that Elijah had to go to the cave to hear God, and God was heard not in the thunder and the wind but in the sound of silence. All of his life, he has reinvented himself. Now he thinks it may be time to do it again. “Music might be a jealous God. It was always the easiest thing for me. I wake up with melodies in my head,” he says. “But now I feel more like: Shut up and listen. If you want to take it to the next level, you may have to rethink your life. ”

What does that look like? “The flag of surrender has come around again for me.” What does surrender mean exactly? “It’s just out of my reach. I’m getting to the place where I do not have to do , but just be . It’s trying to transcend myself. It’s like my antidote to me. The antidote to me is surrender.”

The ending of his book is a beautiful evocation of peace—a riotous man’s homage to stillness. He writes the book in lyrics, not paragraphs: “The wound of my teenage years that had become an opening is now closed / the search for home is now over / it is you / I am home / no longer in exile.” Can a guy like Bono really achieve stillness? Especially when he has so much yet to say?

It’s hard to know the answer to that. At one point he told me that throughout his whole life, he’s been searching for home, and that lately he has come to realize that home is not a place, but a person. I neglected to ask the follow-up question. Is that person Ali? Jesus? Any random soul he happens to be in front of that day? Maybe all of the above.

This article appears in the December 2022 print edition with the headline “Bono’s Great Adventure.”

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Bono is the frontman and lead vocalist of the Irish rock band U2. He's also known for participating in global charity efforts.

1960-present

Who Is Bono?

Bono is an Irish musician who joined the band U2 while he was still in high school. THe band's sixth album The Joshua Tree , made them international stars. Bono has used his celebrity to call attention to global problems, including world poverty and AIDS. Bono was named a "Person of the Year" by TIME magazine in 2005, and Queen Elizabeth II made him an honorary knight in 2007.

Born Paul David Hewson on May 10, 1960, in Dublin, Ireland, Bono is the son of a Roman Catholic postal worker and a Protestant mother—who died when he was just 14. He joined the band U2 in October 1976, when he was in high school and was dubbed "Bono Vox" (good voice). He was made frontman for the Irish rock band though his singing at the time was less compelling than his stage presence.

Success With U2- 'Joshua Tree'

U2 began touring almost immediately and released its first album, Boy , in 1980. In 1987, they released the Grammy-winning The Joshua Tree , their sixth album and the one that catapulted the band—and its outspoken frontman—to stardom. Subsequent albums secured U2's reputation for range and innovation, including 1991's industrial-sounding Achtung Baby , 1993's funkier-edged Zooropa and the techno-influenced Pop (1997).

U2 has returned to its modern rock roots with 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind . Creating simple but powerful music, the group scored with such tracks as the soaring "Beautiful Day," which won Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Song of Year. How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004) also fared well, both commercially and critically. Its two leading singles, "Vertigo" and "Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own," made strong showings on the charts and won several Grammys.

In March 2009, the band released No Line on the Horizon , which reached the top of the American pop charts. It featured such popular songs as "Get On Your Boots" and "Magnificent." To support the album, Bono and the rest of the group toured extensively.

Music for Activism

Throughout U2's career, Bono has written most of the band's lyrics, often focusing on untraditional themes like politics and religion. In fact, social activism has always been close to the singer's heart, and he has used his music to raise consciousness with performances at Band Aid, Live 8 and Net Aid, among others.

In 2006, U2 joined forces with the punk-influenced band Green Day to record a cover of the Skids' "The Saints Are Coming" to benefit the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The next year, Bono and the rest of U2 contributed the title track to Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur .

Starting the Organization One

In 2005, Bono and his wife Ali Hewson established EDUN, a socially responsible clothing line. While it is a for-profit enterprise, its mission is to foster "sustainable employment in developing areas of the world, particularly Africa," according to its website. Bono was named a "Person of the Year" by TIME magazine for his charitable work that same year, along with Bill and Melinda Gates. Across the Atlantic, Queen Elizabeth II made him an honorary knight of the British Empire in 2007.

Composer, Producer for 'Spider-Man'

Bono eventually turned his sights towards Broadway. Along with U2 bandmate The Edge, he worked on music and lyrics while serving as producer for the live theatrical show, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark , which opened in 2011. The musical, originally directed by Julie Taymor, had a tumultuous road to its opening, with Bono and Taymor falling out and later becoming embroiled in legal battles over copyright infringement and contractual stipulations.

'Songs of Innocence' Release with Apple

In early 2013, Bono announced that he and his band were working on another album tentatively called 10 Reasons to Exist, which was later released in the fall of 2014 as Songs of Innocence .

In collaboration with Apple, the band released Songs of Innocence for free on iTunes and streaming services iTunes Radio, and what was at the time, Beats Music. But the album's release came with controversy; many customers were unhappy that it was automatically downloaded into their music libraries without their consent, while some musicians were concerned that giving an album away for free sent the wrong message.

Despite the criticism and receiving mixed reviews, the album got a nod from Rolling Stone as the best album of 2014. It was also nominated for Best Rock Album at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards.

Wife and Children

Bono and his wife, Ali, have been married since 1982. They have two daughters, Jordan and Memphis Eve, and two sons, Elijah and John Abraham.

QUICK FACTS

• Birth date: May 10, 1960
• Birth City: Dublin
• Birth Country: Ireland
• Astrological Sign: Taurus

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Bono Book: The Biography of Bono Paperback – October 25, 2022

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