Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

by Bono

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.