U2’s Bono Talks with David Remnick—Live

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2022

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Last month, The New Yorker published a Personal History about growing up in Ireland during the nineteen-sixties and seventies. It covers the interfaith marriage of the author’s parents, which was unusual in Dublin; his mother’s early death; and finding his calling in music. The author was Bono, for more than forty years the lyricist and lead singer of one of the biggest rock bands on the planet. As U2 sold out arenas and stadiums, Bono held forth on a range of social causes; he became “the definitive rock star of the modern era,” as Kelefa Sanneh puts it. Bono joined David Remnick at the 2022 New Yorker Festival to talk about his new memoir, “Surrender.” “When I sang in U2, something got ahold of me,” Bono said. “And it made sense of me.” They discussed how the band almost ended because of the members’ religious faith, and how they navigated the Troubles as a bunch of young men from Dublin suddenly on the world stage. Bono shared a life lesson from Paul McCartney, and he opened up about the early death of his mother. “This wound in me just turned into this opening where I had to fill the hole with music,” Bono said. In the loss of a loved one, “there's sometimes a gift. The opening up of music came from my mother.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.8	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm Kelif Asene. I'm a staff writer here at The New Yorker,
0:15.2	and I'm sitting in today for David Remnick.
0:18.2	Early in his career, Bono told an interviewer about his plans for his band,
0:22.4	U-2. If we stay in small clubs, we'll develop small minds, and then we'll start making small
0:28.8	music, he said. That turned out not to be a problem. In the course of a decade, U-2 went from
0:34.6	playing local gigs in Dublin, Ireland to being one of the biggest
0:37.8	bands in the world. And Bono, the fearless and sometimes shameless leader, became the definitive
0:43.8	rock star of the modern era, conquering arenas and stadiums around the globe, singing out
0:49.5	and often holding forth, too.
1:11.2	Bono just wrote a memoir called the New Yorker Festival earlier this month.
1:20.2	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,
1:31.2	or whatever.
1:33.0	What was the ambition that was fired up in you pretty quickly
1:38.5	once this band sort of took shape?
1:41.3	Megalomania started in me at a very early age, David.
1:48.4	And the other part of it is desperation.
1:56.7	And the sense that, from my point of view, this was liberation for me.
2:05.5	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,
2:12.4	but I was losing concentration and more interested in girls and then music and then, oh, music and girls.
2:23.5	And a release from a kind of the pain that a lot of people feel when they don't know what it is that they might
2:37.4	have to offer. When I sang in you two, something got a hold of me and it made sense of me.
	...

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