Transcending the boundaries: This is who I am, says Bono
Rock star, activist, Irishman – Bono’s Stories of Surrender is an intimate documentary about family, grief and the liberation found in music. It’s about who the U2 frontman really is and what he really values.
Bono was jubilant and emotional at the Cannes premiere of his highly personal documentary Bono: Stories of Surrender, holding his wife Alison Hewson’s hand and thanking his four children and his U2 bandmates and manager Paul McGuinness, for a life well lived.
“You wrote this story,” he said. Naming daughters Jordan and Eve and sons Jordan and Elijah, he noted: “You wrote the story and you continue to write your own story. I’m very proud of you. The Edge (Dave Evans) wrote this story, Adam (Clayton, bassist) and Larry (Mullen Jr, drums) wrote this story. McGuinness wrote this story. We’re still writing it; it’s still a work in progress.”
Born Paul Hewson in 1960 in Dublin, Bono had initially written a 2022 memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story. To mark its publication the U2 frontman devised a one-man show described as “an evening of words, music and some mischief” and embarked on a tour of intimate gigs throughout the US and Europe. In 2023 he teamed up with Australian director Andrew Dominik to recreate a filmed version of the show at New York’s historic Beacon Theatre.
Apart from a dynamic closing moment, Dominik shot Stories of Surrender in black-and-white as he did with 2016’s One More Time With Feeling, focusing on Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. (Dominik also collaborated with Cave on 2022’s This Much I Know to be True, which was largely shot in black-and-white and drew on the death of Cave’s son Arthur.)
Bono says Stories of Surrender, which he co-wrote with Bill Flanagan, is an attempt to cast off the mask of fame and reveal his true self. We see the singer, dressed in a black jacket, black pants and orange-tinted glasses, perform songs and tell of his life, recalling his mother Iris’s death from a brain aneurysm when he was 14 and his fractured relationship with his hard-to-please opera-loving father, Brendan, a wannabe singer.
Bono’s saving grace was meeting Alison, whom he’d known since they were 12. They got together three years later. “She was a 15-year-old girl who had faith in me, she encouraged my dreams,” he says.
Incredibly, he notes how he joined up with guitarist Dave Evans (Edge), bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr to form U2 in the same week. The band would achieve huge success, selling 170 million albums and winning a record-breaking 22 Grammys.
In 1983 U2 had a huge hit with the politically charged Sunday Bloody Sunday, focusing on the violence in Northern Ireland. Two years later they sang at Live Aid, which raised US$250 million to feed starving refugees in Africa. “Where you live should not decide whether you live,” he says in the show. “Lives matter, justice matters.”
‘I didn’t think I could be a father because I didn’t think I’d been much of a son’
While he admits to being overpaid and overfed—”hypocrites get a bad rap”, he muses -he recalls the difficulties in his life. In 2016 a congenital heart condition almost killed him, but then the film becomes about his father. He left home at an early age to escape him. “I don’t know if I forgive my father. Surrender does not come easy.”
But then he wonders if their fractured relationship was his fault. “I didn’t think I could be a father because I didn’t think I’d been much of a son.” In any case he says, “I craved my father’s attention and he didn’t hear me, so I sang louder and louder.”
Bono now recognises that his father was grieving and was unable to support him through his mother’s death. His father would not even mention her death in their Dublin home.
He recalls his brother Norman giving him a guitar. “I was singing Ramones’ songs in the living room around my 18th birthday and all my Da (father) wanted to talk to me about was getting a job. He didn’t want to know about rock and roll.”
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Later in life he would meet his father on Sundays in a Dublin pub. By this time Bono was famous and while he could recognise his father’s pride – “I heard your song Pride on the radio the other day and I might have felt some”, he recalls his father saying – he notes how he was only able to see him as a friend after his death from cancer in 2001.
Still, he has some fond memories like when his father Brendan, an anti-royalist, met Princess Diana and was star struck. “Eight centuries of oppression melted away in eight seconds!” Bono chortles.
Bono’s activism is also dealt with in the film and he later told one interviewer: “You know, even the change, the world stuff, comes back to me trying to impress my father.
“Now here I am with stories of surrender. The word surrender sounds preposterous in a moment when it seems like the planet is determined to set fire to itself. We’re closer to a world war than at any time in my life. We have to evolve past violence. So that’s my position, and I held it when I was 23 and was laughed and mocked. That’s okay. John Lennon was prepared to look ridiculous for peace.”
At the Cannes premiere, Bono commended Plan B for producing the documentary.
“I want to thank Brad Pitt for not showing up, because he would steal the show,” he said with a chuckle.
He also addressed the late Steve Jobs, the Apple founder whose company helped finance the film. “I visited Steve Jobs down the coast not so long ago and he was a man who had grown such a gigantic company. You treated me so tenderly. Imagine (Apple) paying for us to go to Italy to shoot that fantasy scene about my father.”
Bono also thanked Sean Penn, who was in the audience and had brought Ukrainian soldiers to the ceremony.
“If I was in the trenches, like real trenches, as opposed to ones on a movie set, I’d want to be with Sean Penn in those trenches,” Bono said.
He also thanked the musicians on stage, cellist Kate Ellis and harpist Gemma Doherty, who breathe fresh life into U2 hits including Sunday Bloody Sunday, Beautiful Day and Pride (In the Name of Love).
Lastly, Bono thanked director Andrew Dominik: “Oh my, he’s not here, he’s working,” Bono said, attempting an Australian accent. “Andrew, I love your vision, and I can’t believe you got those performances out of me and thank you for that.”
Bono: Stories of Surrender streams on Apple TV+ from May 30.