Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

by Bono

Long before my teenage life would be crushed and uplifted by the two great forces of girls and music, I developed a secret life with local chess players. Niall Byrne, from two doors up, Joseph Marks from Cedarwood Park, two brilliant boys. And fun too. As we got better, it became harder to find good games, so we started playing in adult chess tournaments. It doesn’t take a psychological genius to figure out why adult slaying was a thrill beyond any other. I loved going up against grown-ups who would start out dismissively reading their newspapers—so beneath them to be playing children. Lightning chess was a favorite. To be sitting there at age ten, annoying the face off people five times your age, chasing them around a chessboard. That was a whole other order of fun. It was dawning on me that while I could do stuff quite easily that a lot of people found hard, I found difficult a lot of stuff that others found easy. I’m not sure if it’s dyslexia, because I’d had no problems reading, but while I was doing okay at school, I was starting to get anxious that I wouldn’t excel. My quality of work had improved when I’d first arrived at Mount Temple, and I’d done better in class than at St. Patrick’s, but when Iris died, I lost all concentration. Teachers lamented my scrawly handwriting when my father’s letters to them about me were such beautiful calligraphy. They asked why I hadn’t noticed leaving complete sections out of essays or why I could do higher maths but not lower. I wa...

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 next-door neighbor Shane Fogerty, did blow up the Evans garden shed one day. They had a reputation as weirdos—pleasant weirdos, but weirdos nonetheless. On the Guitar My first memory of David Evans is a geometrical one. The angular face on this boy who was leaning up against the wall of the Mall at Mount Temple, plucking a complicated guitar line from a progressive rock group called Yes. He didn’t look Irish, he didn’t look Welsh—although Wales is where he came from—he looked like a Native American. Or at least my idea of what a Native American looked like. His hair was brushed forward, and he was beginning, I guess you’d say, to get cool. In 1976 he was fifteen, a year younger than me. He was in class with Ali, and it was said they were the best in their year.

Adam dodged difficult students and teachers with the same strategy. Perfect manners. He would read English novels in French class and drink coffee during maths from a flask he kept in his satchel. “Unteachable” was one teacher’s reaction. “Too smart for the school curriculum” was another, and likely truer, analysis. Adam was going to be serious about art and life but certainly not school. School was for fun. Rare is a man so at home in his own body, equally celebrating or mocking all bodily functions, and particularly delighted with his own penis.

U2. 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 really 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.

Covers we weren’t very good at playing. It is not an exaggeration to say U2 began to write our own songs because we couldn’t play other people’s.

We were in London only because Paul had said we weren’t ready for him to bring our music here, and we decided we’d do it ourselves. So, now that the Holy Spirit had found me and Ali our lodgings, all I had to do was to generate some critical acclaim. And get signed. And find a cool producer. And I had seven days. I headed to the West End and the first-floor offices of Record Mirror near Shaftesbury Avenue. I bluffed that I had an appointment. Me: “I’ve come to meet Chris Westwood.” Receptionist: “Oh yeah, hold on a second.” I couldn’t quite believe it when Chris Westwood, one of the writers whose stories we read every week, came out to reception. This was more straightforward than I’d anticipated. Me: “Chris, I loved your ‘In Search of the Cure’ piece. This is our demo tape; we’re called U2.” Chris: “Oh, great, thanks very much.” Me: “I’ll be back in an hour then.” Chris, looking confused: “An hour?” Me: “Yeah, we’re from Dublin and only here for a few days so I just need to know what you think. If that’s okay?” Chris, uncertainly: “Er…sure.” — I pulled off the same stunt with Dave McCullough, a well-known writer at Sounds, a more punk indie weekly. We’d been introduced to Dave through Philip Chevron, Steve Averill’s foil in The Radiators from Space, who’d recorded Ghostown, one of the best-ever Irish albums. My luck ran out at the NME, which was a shame because there were a few writers there who I so enjoyed reading.

I’m harboring some growing doubts about our prospects as a going musical concern. Terry, Ali’s da, doesn’t mind too much, but my da is more worried. The real worry is inside me, the fear that this will be another report card marked “fail.” Adam is talking about going back to London. He’d worked in a fish market and had a relative there who’s offered him a real job. There’s talk of Edge going to Kevin Street technical college. Maybe Larry would go back to his old job as a courier. The numbers didn’t add up. We couldn’t seem to earn enough to pay for a life as musicians. It was a shitty feeling. It was what failure feels like. Fail. Fail again. Fail better, says Samuel Beckett. Well, I had two out of three.

I hadn’t done drugs since sniffing Lady Esquire shoe polish when I was fifteen. I didn’t need to. I felt the pinch of wonder. I felt everything sharply, the people we met, the sensation of being in a body, of eating or drinking. I knew there was darkness in the world, but I was sure it would not overpower us; rather, we would let ourselves be overpowered by the beauty of our discoveries as we traveled through this world. Railway stations and underground trains, the commons, a magnificent oak in a park, the redbrick Victorian buildings of England and Wales, the Georgian splendor of Edinburgh, of Glasgow with its occasional black eye.

Even early in the 1980s we began to observe that the stops on our European tours appeared to be booked around the location of Michelin-rated restaurants. Query why we were playing only one night in Marseille but, say, three nights in Lyon, and Paul wouldn’t even answer the question. “By the way, have you met my friend Paul Bocuse, the greatest chef in France, if not the world?” Paul staring at us as if we were the swine he was buying pearls for. “If only,” the look on his face says, “I hadn’t left the film business.”

I hold to that line attributed to Francis of Assisi, who told his followers, “Go into the world to preach the gospel and, if necessary, use words.”

Eventually, it became too much for Edge. He couldn’t live with the apparent contradiction of being in a band finding a global audience and this humbler calling to serve a local community. He was asking himself questions about the utility of art. The Presbyterian was starting to win out over the Zen. I drove over to his parents’ house in Malahide one evening and sat down on his bed. I had a feeling he wasn’t interested in talking about how this second album, October, was coming on, but I didn’t know quite what was on his mind. I didn’t know that when I arrived, I was in a band, and when I left, I wouldn’t be. “I’ve got a problem I can’t solve in U2,” he explained. “I’m not sure I want to make music this way.” Edge is not a complainer and doesn’t do melodrama, but he was in some kind of agony. “Chris, Dennis, all of them, they’re asking questions that I just can’t answer.” “What sorts of questions?” I asked, as if I didn’t know. “About whether we can be a band and be believers.” “Ah, those questions. Look, I’m troubled too, but there’s a special feeling when we play. It’s when we stop playing I feel like shit. But I won’t say I’m not challenged by these people. I don’t have answers to their questions either.” But Edge did have an answer, a radical one. “There are so many problems, messy, complicated problems out there in the world, and maybe running away with the circus is not what we’re being called to. Or not what I’m called to do. I’ve spoken to Aislinn. She understands. ...

When I called Brian up, he was not particularly curious about our work. I don’t believe he was pretending when he said he hadn’t heard any of our songs. Evidently in a posture to turn us down, he was apologizing before the call got going, but he made one admission: a friend of his, the trumpeter Jon Hassell, had told him there was something about our band that was more than the usual colors in the rock ’n’ roll spectrum. Something different, something “other.” This apparently intrigued Brian because, as he explained, in the year 2050 people will look back on the rock era with one thought: how similar everyone sounded to everyone else. The same rough beats, the same bluesy-type emotions, and the same antiestablishment stance. I found this hard to take, knowing how very different we were from, say, Echo and the Bunnymen, let alone The Beatles. I now know it to be true. He told me that A minor to D should be outlawed in composition, before asking if we’d be interested in doing an album without any minor chords. At the very least, he said, we should make sure that the sex of the chord is not clear. He meant minor or major. I seized my chance. “But that’s what Edge does with his guitar style,” I explained. “That’s what we do as a band. We share a guitar chord, often a suspended chord, and try to avoid those obvious blues notes which put it in a minor key or those obvious major chords which make things jolly and smiley.” Brian Eno was becoming interested.

Bono pitching Brian Eno

it. I remember hearing the American evangelical Tony Campolo explaining that there are 2,003 verses of scripture that relate to the poor, that poverty is second only to redemption in the priorities of the God found in the Old and New Testaments. It’s a theme you can trace from Moses to Doubting Thomas, from the Torah through the beatitudes. Strikingly, only once does Jesus speak about judgment, and when he does, it’s about how we treat the poor: And they too will reply, “Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to You?” Then the King will answer, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for Me.”

Which explains why Ali encouraged my return to painting in 1986, a time when I was trying to fix up a wounded relationship with some of my childhood friends. I think I mentioned, or did I, that neither Gavin, Guggi, nor any of the Virgin Prunes had been invited to our wedding. The various slagging matches between the two bands had taken their toll, but Ali figured that that’s what I was missing, being slagged by my male mates, the surreal humor that had given us joy as teenagers. I missed the closeness we’d once had. If common ground couldn’t be found in music, maybe it could on canvas, which is how our Wednesday night “paint the town any color you want group” became a fixture through the recording of The Joshua Tree.

Pop was kind of a swear word at the time, and if someone bumped into an easy emotion or a too-obvious chorus, it was as if they’d brought a bad smell into the room. And with Brian Eno and Danny Lanois around nobody dared own up to the fart. “Oh my God, can you smell that? A pop song!” We abandoned “With or Without You.” The person who pulled it out of the trash was Gavin Friday, more indie than all of us and equal in sedition to the art insurrectionist that is Brian Eno. “What’s wrong with pop music?” he demanded. “Listen to the melody; it’s a classic. It’s like a Scott Walker.” The only reason it’s not working, he insisted, is that it peaks too early, that you don’t believe the singer can get to the emotion of that huge chorus so quickly. It’s an arrangement problem, he said, not a song problem.

Does a man ever feel any more useless than when he’s watching his partner give birth? At best you’re a pipe player as she goes into battle; at worst you’re the reason she’s at war.

Wim arranged for us to see an early cut of his new film, Until the End of the World, and beguiled by the title, I took it home and wrote a completely different story, a conversation between Jesus and Judas. Reading The Book of Judas by the poet Brendan Kennelly, I’d noticed how powerful it was to put yourself in such a mythic conversation. I took the money I spiked your drink You miss too much these days if you stop to think You lead me on with those innocent eyes You know I love the element of surprise.

It was “zoo radio,” the term given to shouty, manic DJs broadcasting from anything-might-happen-next radio studios, that sparked the thought of us taking our own station on the road. A TV station.

Will they sign an autograph if someone interrupts a family meal? Bruce Springsteen will always sign someone’s autograph—if they’re happy to wait for him until he’s leaving the restaurant. “It’s surprising and a little hurtful,” he smiles, “how many people don’t wait.”

We find we are talking about Edge, Morleigh’s man, who is also my man. Me: “Does Edge understand the danger we’re in?” Mo: “No, because you’re not in actual danger.” Me: “The danger of being irrelevant?” Mo: “What is relevance? You mean popularity?” Me: “Sort of, but more about being in the moment you’re in, being in the cultural moment.” Mo: “Bono?” Me: “Yeah?” Mo: “You’re not happy.” Me: “No. The band didn’t buy the vision, and even Edge seemed to disappear down a rabbit hole. We mixed ‘Discothèque’ a hundred times. Edge knows the permutations are infinite, and this time it felt like he wanted to see what infinity looked like.” Mo says nothing. Stares ahead. Me: “We haven’t got the big songs. Just interesting ones.” Mo, now looking at me, choosing not to roll her eyes: “ ‘Staring at the Sun’ is a big song with a beautiful melody. Didn’t Edge write that melody? What are your big melodies on this one?” Me: Says nothing. Stares ahead. Mo: “You’re not happy with yourself. Maybe go a little easier on yourself. And on everyone else?” Me saying nothing, feeling as if I should have gone harder. On myself. On everyone else. I’m melancholic and frustrated. Am I right in my analysis? Who cares, I’m definitely wrong in my expression of it. This is my worst side, the side of me that doubles and trebles down in an argument. The side of me that uses cold dispassionate truthfulness as a blunt instrument, a bludgeon. What am I so scared of ? I’m scared of breaking the promise we made to ...

Pandemics aside, I still embrace people when I meet them, which goes all the way back to the days of Shalom when that’s how we would say hello. I don’t know that I’ve ever shaken somebody’s hand without having to think about it.

I have a habit of playing to U2’s weaknesses, trying to make these weaknesses our strength. Was that what our 1990s had been about? Now it was time to make a record which played to our strengths, which did the things we can do that no one else can do. The things I can do that other people find a little difficult. A certain emotional candor, the uncool stuff. Brian Eno above all else believed that U2 should never surrender to cool. In terms of our emotional temperature, he told us, our music was hot, more southern than northern European. Yours is like Latin music, he’d say, the Mass, the opera, the ecstatic.

I learned a little late the wisdom in a Senegalese proverb, “If you want to cut a man’s hair, be sure he is in the room.”

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. Why health care? They understood that the right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” promised in the Declaration of Independence, was a fatuous claim without equal access to health care. The Affordable Care Act, “Obamacare,” would not be everything the forty-fourth president wanted, but it would be transformative for so many lives, unless, of course, someone tried to destroy those freshly cemented foundations.

‘If you’re not at the table you’re on the menu?’

4:30 a.m. in U2’s Big Brother House I cannot sleep because Edge is playing guitar in the room above me. An acoustic, Spanish catgut strings, it sounds like. He’d woken me just after two o’clock, but I’d fallen back asleep. Now it’s gone four, and he’s still playing the same part. I mean…the exact same part. For two hours now. The arpeggiation that carries “Song for Someone” appears to be carrying him into the land of nod. The Edge may not be casual about the instrument that made him famous. He’s not a man to “sit in” with other guitar players, but I’m here to tell the world that…he plays guitar in his sleep.

I’ve tried to be honest in these pages while respecting the perspective of these three people I love and work with. We’ve never been critical of each other in public, but it’s no criticism to say we’ve sometimes run out of love. It happens. The well of friendship can run dry in a family, a marriage, a community, a band.

Your afflictions and addictions are some kind of gift. They brought you to the empty place that you are compelled to fill. You almost want to thank them. For example, the need to be loved at scale. To have all these people every night screaming your name to feel normal is of course a little pathetic. But the best performers need their audience much more than their audience needs them. A crowd can feel that.