On Power, Privilege and Performance: Bono & Jefferson Hack in Conversation

“I was born with an eccentric heart” is the opening line of Bono’s memoir, Surrender. It’s not the set-up for an elaborate joke, but instead prefaces a critical and surreal moment where we find Bono fighting for his life in Mount Sinai Hospital, New York in 2016. It’s also the opener to a high-speed first chapter, which sees Bono slipping in and out of a drug-induced consciousness to memories of losing his father, and the first pensive opening night of the Songs of Innocence tour, where he describes the band’s pre-gig prayer ritual and ends the chapter with the lines: “I am leaving home to find home. And I am singing”.

Loosely structured around 40 songs, the memoir is a non-linear, wonderfully chaotic look at how a singer who sees top-line melody in everything has managed to bring together the worlds of family, lyric-writing, showmanship, activism, business, and close personal friendships into one worldview. In the end, Bono sees little to no difference between creative living and creative work, even if it comes at a personal and professional cost.

The media has rarely been kind to stars who poke at the establishment and ask questions that go far beyond the realm of entertainment. Cancel third-world debt? Provide free Aids medication to Africa? Fight extreme poverty with the nonprofit One.org? Champion the mullet? How dare he! Despite what the haters may say, Bono’s goals for social change are genuinely eye-opening. After all, who would have predicted the mullet would make such a fashionable comeback in the past few years? Activism, bad haircuts and pop stardom were murky bedfellows in the 1990s and 2000s, but in the last decade – with the climate emergency and wealth disparity getting bigger – it’s important that the major influencers of popular culture play a role in creating positive social change. On a serious note, Bono’s unpopular (for some) but effective playbook may well become the modern template for negotiating radical change; he tells the story of a lightbulb moment when American singer and social activist Harry Belafonte schooled him on the art of compromise and “the search for common ground that begins with the search for higher ground”.

Surrender is also a love letter to Ali Hewson, whom he asked out on a date during the same week when the band held their first-ever rehearsal. As the book dives into Bono’s issues with low self-esteem butting up against a messianic lead-singer complex, we see him reveal his anger, frustration, and shortcomings through deep personal and spiritual crises – most of which are exorcised through lyric writing and performance. Songs can save you but they can also break you, as we come to understand when tensions rise within the band during the recording of Achtung Baby. It’s amazing how close to death Bono has really been; staring down the barrel of guns in Somalia, fighting the odds on the surgeon’s table – it’s a miracle he’s lived to tell the tale.

The book is packed with stories, from casual business hook-ups with Steve Jobs, being woken up from a nap by Barack Obama, drinking sessions with Frank Sinatra, hanging out with Michael Hutchence and the H-Bomb (Helena Christensen), and being reunited with teenage friends left by the wayside. But the best story in the book is the lifelong love of Bono and Ali, mother to his four children, Eve, Jordan, John and Eli. At the end of our interview, Bono provides a long analogy of scuba-diving to describe how they have held each other through tough times, although I prefer Ali’s witty one-liner, which describes a relationship that has survived and endured over 40 years: “Life’s too serious to be serious” – probably one of the best summaries of how the family has managed to keep it real in their surreal and wonderful world.

Jefferson Hack: You’ve done something impossible with this book, which is to hold a mirror up to yourself and look beyond the image.

Bono: Narcissism is a part of who we are as writers, whether it’s pop songs or memoirs. Navel-gazing is a mental health hazard. [Laughs] This author certainly got a little bored with the subjects of his own memoir by the end of it. Patti Smith told me that Sonny Mehta, who was the reason I wrote the book, was the most incredible editor and that if he wished to work with me, I should do so. He explained to me that, in a memoir, you will imagine that the most revealing parts of your autobiography will be your descriptions of yourself, but they will not. The most revealing parts of any memoir are your descriptions of others; that’s where we will glimpse you. I’d never heard that.

JH: Was there anything unexpected that happened as a result of putting pen to paper?

B: I wrote the book for a few reasons, but one of them was to prove that everything in your life should be on the canvas, it should be part of the picture as an artist. Your activism, anything you do as a father, partner, hooligan, activist, even your commercial life. You should be looking to achieve a creative life rather than just creative work, they should be the same.

I came up with this word ‘actualist’ – well, I thought I’d made it up and then I found it in the dictionary – when I was trying to explain what I am. It sounded very pretentious, but actually, I just like to get shit done rather than just talk about it.

JH: I love this passage at the start of the book, where you talk about the band as men who met as boys and how there’s a broken promise at the very heart of rock and roll, which is that you can have the world but then the world will have you. I wonder whether the camaraderie between the four of you, which is something I haven’t witnessed in any other band, has prevented that from happening – or is it just this idea that love – “love is the temple, love is the higher law” [lyric from One] – that has stopped that from happening?

B: It’s a furious love, though it’s a humiliating love at times. You’ve been around the band too and you know that it’s not a lovey-dovey love; it’s not always a warm fuzzy feeling. Jon Pareles said to me once, “You’re very delicate and polite in the extreme around each other. Is that the kind of mood people have in close quarters in a prison where they don’t want the knife fight to break out?“ At times it can be [like] that, and I suppose the U2 story is a social experiment. The U2 story doesn’t make sense, hardly at all, because these people shouldn’t even be in each other’s eyeline, let alone in a school, let alone in a band. So yeah, that at times has created some cultural clashes.

JH: There are some subtitles in the book like Creeping Privilege and White Messiah Syndrome – why did you feel it necessary to tackle those?

B: Creeping Privilege is a great phrase by Seamus Heaney from From the Republic of Conscience. You try to remember the person who brings you your plate of food in the restaurants or who drives the taxi or whatever it is. You try to remind yourself that you’re in unusual territory, and that you must walk lightly in it. Over the years, you just gather this sense of entitlement and it must be dealt with.

White Messiah Syndrome is just so obvious. Any good frontman needs a messianic complex – that goes without saying – but a white messiah complex is really dangerous, especially if you’re campaigning for universal access to Aids drugs, or increased aid flows from G7 countries to the poorest countries on the planet. Because lives are dependent on these resources, you think you’re there helping God across the road like she’s a little old lady. And it’s like, “God, I’m here. I can help. I can help. Yes, I can help.” It’s not that simple.