What’s in it for me? A nostalgic, witty romp through four decades of musical history.
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He’s a rock star, singer, writer, father, son, brother, philanthropist, and husband.
But more than anything, Bono defines himself as the little boy who grew up on Cedarwood Road in Dublin –and not in a fancy part of town– where neighbors’ doors were always open and friends plentiful.
Through humorous and poignant anecdotes, Bono takes us on a journey through his astonishing life, not shying away from the difficult bits.
He talks about his enduring love for his wife and best friend, Ali, and his friendships not just with his bandmates but with so many others, both famous and not.
And he tells it all with humor and modesty.
From famines in entire nations to the death of close friends, Bono mourns deep losses, but fuses the power of his grief into music and a story that will make you laugh, cry, and wonder if it’s even better than the real thing.
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May 10, 1978: That’s the day that an Irish boy of slight build and of less than 5 feet 8 inches, who had just finished reading Crime and Punishment and more importantly, finished listening to the Ramones’ “Leave Home,” turned 18.
“Cedarwood Road”: friends, family and a new name
Flush with the excitement of his creative influences and his birthday, that boy, Paul David Hewson, sat down and wrote his first song: “Out of Control.
” DJ Dave Fanning released that song for the first time the following year.
Since then, Fanning has played the first release of every new single written by that 18-year-old Irish boy, now known throughout the world as Bono, lead singer of one of the world’s most successful, prolific, and long-lasting bands, U2.
Bono’s childhood was happy at first, growing up on Cedarwood Road with his Catholic, opera-loving father and his loving, laughing Protestant mother and her large family.
He was naughty in school, got expelled, and was put in a new experimental inner-city school in Dublin that he loved.
It was a childhood spent playing chess with his father, and one spent riding bicycles while holding on to the back of a milk truck.
Good times – until the tragedy that made an indelible imprint on him struck.
When he was 14, Bono’s mother Iris died of a stroke.
The three men she left behind, Bono, his brother Norman, and his father were locked in rage and grief, unable to communicate as they were when his mother was alive to smoothen the connections.
They took their sadness out on each other.
To this day, Bono is not interested in food because he associates it with the times he had to fend for himself, eating reconstituted mashed potatoes out of a pot sitting in front of the TV, or airline meals that tasted of tin that Norman brought home from his job at the airport.
His main source of companionship was the gang of kids and families up and down Cedarwood Road.
His childhood best friend and neighbor Guggi gave everyone in the family and street fantastical nicknames.
He’s the one who came up with Bono, short for Bonovox – not for its Latin meaning – “nice voice”– but for Bono Vox of O’Connell Street, a hearing aid shop in Dublin that Guggi liked the sound of.
And since that day, Paul Hewson became Bono, a name that in four decades would be known throughout the world.
“North Star:” Bono’s childhood sweetheart and lifelong soulmate
In September 1973, Bono enters his second year at Mount Temple Comprehensive.
Seeing two pretty first-year girls walk by, he asks them for directions to the science lab.
Though they laugh at him, his eye is caught by the one with the dark curls and orange sweater.
It’s Alison Stewart, and he’s entranced by her “bookish looks.
” She’s 12 years old.
When they are older, the pair exchange a couple of kisses, but nothing serious develops yet, maybe because Bono already has an inkling that this is something special that he does not want to rush.
He wants to do this right.
Then when he was 16, something clicked.
Sitting on the back of his friend Reggie’s motorbike, Bono saw Alison crossing the school square.
He describes her as a clear cool vision that almost floated above the heat and petrol haze of the Dublin streets.
A spiritual guy who finds much inspiration in his faith, he is quick to describe such encounters in almost mystical terms.
Everything has more than one meaning for him.
He still wasn’t sure if he was good enough for her, but Reggie believed in them as a couple.
Bono formally asked Alison Stewart to go out with him the same week that he became part of U2.
They were standing at a bus stop.
They went home to his house and started to … get to know each other better on his single bed.
That’s when the front door opened, and his father unexpectedly came home.
Panicked, Bono insisted Alison hide.
She darted under the bed.
When his father opened the door, Bono told his father he was sick in bed with a sore throat.
Of course, that was the day his usually undemonstrative father decided to sit on the bed and ask him all sorts of questions about how he was feeling, as his future daughter-in-law lay inches beneath.
Not the most graceful of beginnings, perhaps, but one that would herald something beautiful.
In 1982, when they were 22 and 21, Bono and Alison, who he calls Ali, were married.
Best friends, they were naïve, idealistic, spiritual, and madly in love.
Courtesy of their record label, they honeymooned in Golden Eye in Jamaica, the house where Ian Fleming wrote the James Bond books.
Together, over the course of their four-decade marriage, they have raised four children, supported each other through careers and philanthropic endeavors, explored their faith and spirituality, and taken joy in the world together.
Bono may have lost Iris, but in Ali, he found his new North Star.
“Stories for Boys:” the beginnings of the band
Not only did Reggie play a role in getting Ali and Bono together, it was also Reggie who talked Bono into responding to a notice that another schoolmate, Larry Mullens, had posted in school.
Walking into Larry’s kitchen, the boys found it noisy with kids, drums, and amps.
A cluster of teen musicians filled the room.
Larry and his brother were looking for bandmates and as well as Bono and Reggie, the room included Adam Clayton and David Evans.
David Evans – whom the world now knows as the Edge – was even then a minimalist musical genius, one who though unschooled in theory, felt his way through chords like an alchemist seeking magic.
Even then, he was still and unflappable in a crisis with a perfect poker face.
Adam Clayton, then 15, melded boarding school poshness with an exhilarating wild-child persona into the kind of personality that charmed everyone he met – except perhaps the school administrators who expelled him for running naked through the school.
Though he wasn’t as musical as the others, he was the group entrepreneur who believed in the band, suggesting their name, printing up cards, and organizing some of their first gigs.
The boys came together loosely and began practicing in the music room of their school on Saturdays.
Eventually, Larry’s brother went off to college, and it was just the four of them: Bono, Edge, Adam, and Larry.
They picked their band name from a list of six suggestions.
It was in the music room at school that they started writing some of their own music.
It’s also in that room that they had their first audition for a television show called Young Line.
They audaciously auditioned with the Ramone’s “Glad to See You Go,” and switched it out for their own song, “Street Mission,” in the television studio.
When they started playing in real clubs and venues, they’d invite their friends and girlfriends to throng the mosh pit, shouting enthusiastically to create a vibe.
Larry and the Edge’s mother often drove them and helped pack them up, becoming their first road crew.
Traveling to London, Bono and Ali hustled like door-to-door salesmen, trying to convince record label officials to listen to one of the cassette tapes they had made of the band’s music.
After signing on for an England tour, the first music industry representative they hired double-crossed them at the last minute by cutting the bandmates’ share in half after their venues were already booked.
So they went to their families and begged for the 1,500 pounds they needed to get to London.
Despite an inauspicious start – the night before they left, the Edge went flying through the windshield of their van, and the ferry over made them all seasick – they had a good time performing.
But their shows were inconsistent and not a single label signed them.
So they began the 1980s with disappointment, but then – another fateful meeting occurred.
Dave Kavanaugh, the entertainment officer of University College, suggested the band put on a huge concert in Dublin to celebrate their triumph, even if “triumph” was a wild exaggeration.
This did the trick.
Finally, U2 was signed to Island Records.
“Where the Streets Have No Name:” A band on the rise and a social agenda
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And now they were really doing it: touring.
Crammed into a bus with their tour manager Dennis Sheehan, they drove through Europe in the early ‘80s, playing soccer stadiums and plazas.
They crossed borders and prayed after gigs.
Sharing the playbill with names such as R.
E.
M’s MIchael Stipe, inspired Bono to see the world differently.
They began heading farther afield.
American music and influences became a huge part of their musicality.
In December, 1980, U2 toured the United States.
They painted while they wrote the songs to “Joshua Tree.
” They rode motorcycles.
When a beloved friend died in a motorcycle accident, the whole group traveled with his body to New Zealand to deliver it to his parents.
They wrote “One Tree Hill” for him.
They were growing up together.
They had steady girlfriends who were also best friends, and they all got along.
Though marriage had now entered the picture, they were still a young group of friends.
They spent all their time together, making music, exploring art and religion, and indulging in old-fashioned partying.
But the outer world began to intrude.
U2’s spirituality and innocent, (mostly) unschooled intellectualism led them towards pacifism, which was interpreted as a lack of patriotism by more militant groups involved in Ireland’s political struggles.
The band did not shy away from politics.
Bono wrote “Mothers of the Disappeared” after a trip to El Salvador, where they saw a body that had been thrown out of a passing SUV, a note pinned to his chest saying, “This is what happens to people who try to bring about a revolution.
” After meeting mothers who couldn’t even retrieve the bodies of their children, Bono and Ali joined a group of American volunteers who went into the thick of the guerilla action.
What they saw made them want to tell that story, and this became “Bullet the Blue Sky.
” It was the start of a career spent criticizing US foreign policy through music.
“Where the Streets Have No Name” arose from a trip to Ethiopia at the height of the famine.
As they got bigger, more and more important people became a part of their story as collaborators – like Brian Eno and Danny Boy Lanois – or as friends.
Bob Dylan once invited Bono to play “Blowing in the Wind” with Carlos Santana.
Nervous on stage, Bono messed up the words, much to the crowd’s irritation.
But Dylan was the soul of graciousness, telling Bono afterwards: “I change the lyrics all the time.
Nothing’s fixed in time.
” The one thing they hated?
Pop music.
Their mega hit “With or Without You” was almost nixed because they thought it was too sweet.
Gavin Friday, their childhood friend and sometime collaborator arranged it into the almost operatic swelling anthem we know it as today.
“Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses:” Parenthood and a move to America
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… In the late 1980s, U2 moved to Los Angeles.
They partied.
Bought houses in the hills.
Rode motorbikes, drank tequila.
At first, they thought parenthood wouldn’t fit in with this carefree rock star lifestyle and with their creative agenda.
Funnily enough, it was a night with Quincy Jones while watching all his kids climbing all over him that made them think otherwise.
In 1989, Bono’s first daughter, Jordan, was born.
Her sister, Eve, followed in 1991.
Bono and Ali learned to be parents, and now Bono the rock star was known to jump out of the car in a traffic jam and dance to Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody.
” Their horizons expanded even more to include larger people and places, and history rubbed right up against them as it was being made.
They landed in Berlin the day the wall fell.
They took David Bowie out in Dublin.
Bill Clinton hung out in their hotel room with them.
An especially poignant visit was that of Mikhail Gorbachev to their house.
It coincided with a visit from Ali’s goddaughter, a child suffering from the aftereffects of Chernobyl, which is a cause to which Ali has devoted much of her life.
They had money and fame, but it wasn’t all a bed of roses.
Being on the road this often was hard on families.
And fame brought its share of ugliness, like when they heard about a gangster who wanted to kidnap their daughters.
When they did a live concert from Sarajevo to bring attention to the developing crisis there, they were harshly criticized for the perception of it being a publicity stunt.
Their album “Rattle and Hum” was poorly received.
Adam Clayton’s drinking got out of hand.
But they soldiered on.
In the 1990s, they turned more and more towards American music influences: Hip hop, rap, garage, grunge.
They listened to (and in some cases, befriended) the Pixies, Lauryn Hill, and the Smashing Pumpkins.
They added choreography to their performances.
Dancer Morleigh Steinberg came into the fold and not only taught them to move on stage, but fell hard for the Edge, with whom she had two children.
The ‘90s supermodel trio – Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, and Helena Christiansen – came into their orbit.
After talking to her throughout a transatlantic flight, Bono introduced Naomi to someone who had a huge crush on her – Adam Clayton.
He proposed, she accepted.
A new member of the family had arrived.
On a trip to the south of France, the group became enthralled with the area.
They bought a big pink pile of a house on the edge of the sea and have been vacationing and fixing it up together ever since.
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Ordinary Love: Return to beginnings through an extraordinary arc
… If there was a time when the rock behemoth could have come unglued, it should have been 1997’s worldwide PopMart tour.
U2 had become fascinated with dance and electronic music.
This album was a big departure not just in terms of music, but stylistically on stage.
They kicked off PopMart in Las Vegas to a terrible start.
They didn’t have enough time to practice, Jordan was bitten by a dog, and Bono lost his voice due to an allergy.
They toured to half-empty stadiums and received bad reviews.
But U2 fans know that versatility is their calling card.
The humor of Cedarwood Road carried them through the tough times and they continued exploring their musicality.
Classics like “Beautiful Day” came out of the years following the PopMart debacle.
Although by now he was one of the most famous people on earth, Bono was still humbled and awed by meeting his heroes.
He got to sing with the likes of Frank Sinatra and Luciano Pavarotti, and he never took those encounters for granted.
He worked with Steve Jobs to make the U2 iPod, and befriended the Obamas.
Philanthropy became a bigger and bigger part of his life.
He became involved with Jubilee 2000, an attempt to initiate a debt write-off to free poorer countries from economic slavery.
He read religious works.
He revisited MLK’s speeches and the writings of Gandhi and Tolstoy.
He traveled through Africa to help with the AIDS crisis, talking to everyone from Anthony Fauci to Oprah to Condoleezza Rice to get support.
With Chris Tucker and Ashley Judd, he crisscrossed America to raise awareness.
The two-year journey of the heart, soul and body would result in the commitment of the American government and Bush administration to give $15 billion for AIDS relief.
But his biggest legacy may be the creation of ONE, a multinational organization dedicated to ending poverty and eradicating preventable disease by 2030.
At the end of the book, Bono comes full circle.
His beginnings are never too far off from his mind.
It comes back to his mother Iris, her loss.
The neighbors on Cedarwood Road who were his second and third and fourth families.
His school, where he was given the freedom to learn and create.
And his best friend, who he married, and his other best friends, with whom he continues to make music today.
Final summary
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In this Blink, you’ve had a behind-the-scenes look at the creation and life of one of the world’s longest-lasting rock bands.
Lead singer Bono tells his story through 40 chapters, each guided by a song title.
He lays bare his heart and history, holding little back as he shares stories of his family, bandmates and the legions of people around the world that he calls friends.