This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Early in his career, Bono once told an interviewer about his plans for a band called You Two. He said, if we stay in

small clubs, we'll develop small minds, and then we'll start making small music. Now, that

turned out not to be at all a problem. In the course of a decade, U-2 went from playing

gigs in small places in Dublin, Ireland, to being one of the biggest bands

in the world. And Bono, the fearless and sometimes shameless leader of YouTube, became

among the most definitive rock stars of the modern era, conquering arenas and stadiums

around the globe, singing out, and often holding forth. Bano is out with a new documentary now on Apple Plus called Bono, Stories of Surrender.

And I spoke with him at the New Yorker Festival in 2022

before his memoir was released.

When you talk to people who have been in bands when they're 16, no matter what their destiny was,

they have no expectations other than to play in a bar, to maybe be the best blues band in London,

like the Stones, or whatever.

What was the ambition that was fired up in you pretty quickly once this band sort of

took shape?

Megalomania started in me at a very early age, David.

And the other part of it is desperation.

And the sense that, from my point of view, this was liberation for me.

And I had known as a child that I had melodies in my head and, you know, here and there I'd be good at school, but I was losing concentration and more interested in girls and then music and then, oh, music and girls. And a release from a release from a kind of the pain that a lot of people feel when

they don't know what it is that they might have to offer when I sang in you two, something got a hold of me and it made sense of me.

Do you think that some of that feeling, some of that passion came from the loss that you had

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