Of course it starts with the heart. With what else? This little big singer has often referred to the music of his band U2 as “open heart surgery”, one tour was called “Into The Heart” and generally with the Irish it’s always about the fact that only the heart can find the light in the dark.
It is remarkable that Bono’s autobiography begins with such a shocker: at the end of 2016, the metaphor above became reality for him, he lay on the operating table in New York for eight hours, it was close. This introduction is clever, because if you like Bono, you’ll be very happy that he’s still around. And if you don’t like Bono, you’ll find all the points of criticism confirmed in the 670 pages anyway: incorrigible idealist, hypocrite with a messiah complex and so on.
Luckily, Bono is also a great storyteller, he finds the right balance between openness and distance, a lot of self-irony and the occasional sly one. He can write in such a way that you can hear him speak – this natural flow is not given to all rock stars, otherwise many autobiographies wouldn’t be so boring if they weren’t taken over by ghostwriters right away.
Bono always sees himself as part of a larger whole
Bono is well informed about himself and his shortcomings, here for every self-adulation there are at least two self-doubts. And he plays to what is perhaps his greatest strength: loyalty. The further you read through your life – often with leaps in time, because “Surrender. 40 Songs, One Story” takes the liberty of not reporting strictly chronologically – the more one gets the feeling that the musician would be unthinkable without The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. (“a neighborhood artist”) and the Man not without his wife, Ali (“half a man”). Bono always sees himself as part of a whole – amazing for an egomaniac.
So it’s not the huge performances and the encounters with Angela Merkel or the Pope, with Frank Sinatra or Bill Gates that make the book so special – even if it’s funny how Bono gets lost in 10 Downing Street after Tony Blair asked him to find out for himself. (A security guard eventually helps him.) And it’s entertaining that he’s still suffering from having a bad hair day at Live Aid 1985 of all places. (“Okay, some say yes, I have a bad-hair life …”) He doesn’t avoid the business crises (tax haven stuff, the stupid deal with Apple) any more than the many meetings with US presidents, but they are not the core of this narrative (and sometimes a bit long-winded).
It’s the little moments where love is between the lines: when Bono looks back on his teenage days with Ali and admits he’s into girls “who look like they’re doing their homework.” Or how U2 started writing their own songs because they were too bad to imitate other bands well.
U2 as a shield for Bono
A concert from 1987 seems to be exemplary, at which Bono received death threats beforehand and was so scared during “Pride” that he could only finish singing the anthem to Martin Luther King with his eyes closed. When he opened them again, he noticed that Adam Clayton had been standing in front of him the entire time. The band members have always been shields for each other and of course the man at the center needs the most help.
Bono keeps coming back to his parents and analyzing their relationships with one another. With the death of his father, he believes, even his voice changed: “Now I was finally a real tenor, not a baritone who thinks he is a tenor.” The core of love, he once wrote, is defiance for him. There’s a lot of both in Bono’s life.
Three favorite mnemonics from “Surrender”
- “A compromise is expensive. No compromise is even more expensive.”
- “I’m selling songs, ideas, our band, and when I’m particularly good, hope.”
- “Love is stronger than anything that stands in its way, but one thing is certain: there is a lot that stands in its way.”
And one insight from The Edge – about people who don’t like U2: “They just don’t try hard enough.” The same goes for Bono and this book.
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