Mercilessly Bono manages to dissect his white messiah complex

“A huge ego, that’s all I have to offer.”

Yes, he just writes it. In his memoirs, published on Tuesday, Paul Hewson (62) – better known as Bono – shows the necessary self-knowledge and tries to honestly and sincerely turn himself inside out on the basis of forty songs in no fewer than six hundred pages.

For example, the singer of the Irish rock band U2 knows exactly where his gigantic assertiveness comes from. “There are only a few ways you can turn a small child into an immersive stadium singer. You can tell such a child that it is fantastic, that the world absolutely must hear his voice, that it must not hide his genius. Or you can ignore him outright. That is probably more effective. My father’s lack of interest – a tenor! – for his son’s voice is inexplicably poignant, but has presumably been crucial.”

Bono’s coming of age is touching, because in addition to the indifferent father Bob, who hides behind “a wall of sky”, there is an even greater tragedy: that of the mother who died much too early. Bono is fourteen when mother Iris suddenly dies and things get even colder in the small working-class house under the kerosene fumes of the Dublin airport. “10 Cedarwood Road was no longer a home after Iris’ death,” he laments. “I’m stuck in a house where three men who used to yell at the television are now yelling at each other. We live a life of anger and melancholy, a life of mystery and melodrama.” Meanwhile, the IRA drops bombs.

steal food

Only Jesus, brother Norman’s tape recorder, the records Bono buys with the household money (which then requires him to nick his daily diet of mashed potatoes with beans and canned meat) and high school sweetheart Alison Stewart (whom he will marry shortly afterwards and is still together) offer comfort. When Larry Mullen Jr. then a note hangs on the school bulletin board (“Drummer seeks musicians to form band”) and bassist Adam Clayton and guitarist Dave “The Edge” Evans show up to an audition in Mullen’s kitchen, the destiny is complete.

Playing covers is not easy, but fortunately these are the heyday of punk. “I can say without exaggeration that we started writing our own songs with U2 because we couldn’t play others.” When Bono orders The Edge to emulate the sound of a dental drill pulverizing a spine, it delivers the first monster hit: ‘I Will Follow’.

He compensates for his creative shortcomings (“as a musician my ambitions are greater than my possibilities”) with enormous enthusiasm. He always manages to surround himself with the right mentors (singer friend Gavin Friday, manager Paul McGuinness, producer Brian Eno) and wraps the press around his finger. With the same peddler mentality with which he once peddled around with calendars (which had already passed for two months), he now approaches star reporters from music magazines and shoves a demo under their noses. “I went round the houses again and was a hustler again.”

U2 will grow into a rockmastodon that effortlessly fills stadiums with bombastic spectacle shows. The band does not play ‘rock ‘n’ roll’, judges the singer, but ‘opera with a contemporary twist’. It is necessary that it almost always sounds grand and compelling: “I live in my songs, and then it is nice if there is enough space.”

Yet that victory march is increasingly becoming a struggle to remain relevant. Under Bono’s manic leadership, the band constantly has to resist (or adapt to) new musical trends like grunge, hip-hop or dance – even if it comes with artistic or personal breakdowns: The Edge starts to feel religious remorse, Clayton becomes addicted, Mullen feels constantly threatened by drum machines.

But after all the “rut and chagrin” there is always a new success record and the foursome can for the umpteenth time “turn stadiums into spaceships that transport the audience to another universe”. And he doesn’t care that the singer, like so many famous colleagues, may be small in stature: “The stage is our platform sole.”

‘Pacifist in the Pentagon’

However, those soles are increasingly appearing on the world stage, where Bono grows into a benefactor and professional activist who joins even his worst enemies to fight AIDS and poverty. He is successful, but his role as a “pacifist in the Pentagon” leads to skewed looks from the other band members. After all, they also see: the more Bono means to the world, the worse things are going for U2.

In the autobiography, too, his political role increasingly overshadows music. After the umpteenth look back at the umpteenth conversation with the umpteenth world leader and the lament that Michael Gorbachev/Bill Clinton/Barack Obama/Nelson Mandela/Desmond Tutu/Steve Jobs/Bill Gates is a top guy and that he is eternally grateful for the friendship, the name U2 suddenly: “that other band, remember?”

Bono is way too long anyway. It seems as if his literary ambition has made him deaf to the echo pit that the book sometimes is: the number of disturbing repetitions and unnecessary chatter stories is overwhelming. Deleting two hundred pages would have resulted in a much better book, but apparently the writing table lacked the strict producer who does keep U2 sharp in the studio.

thank god is Surrender not become Bono’s own hagiography. He regularly goes through the dust (but about the unsolicited iTunes album Songs Of Innocence, not about U2’s ludicrous flight to tax haven the Netherlands). But it’s an unexpected relief to see He-Who-Shuns-The-Great-Gesture-Never-Shuns mercilessly dissect his “swollen self-image” and “white messiah complex.” And with the knowledge of today, even Bono understands why his father used to ignore him: Maybe Bob didn’t take me seriously as a teenager because he saw that I took myself too seriously.”