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Bono turns his head and pulls off his tinted glasses, the profile of his aquiline nose and hint of stubble on his chin drawing your attention.
“If I turn to the left, I’m younger,” he says over a video call. “And that’s the person who played Bono.”
He twists his neck the other direction, the shimmering ocean of the French Riviera behind him.
“If I turn to the right, I’m older. I’m the person who played my father,” he says. “For such a demonstrative performer as I am with U2, (I learned) that just turning your head is enough.”
Bono is seated in a hotel suite in Cannes, preparing for the city’s famed film festival to premiere “Bono: Stories of Surrender” the next night. It’s set to debut on Apple+ on May 30.
It’s a striking film – black and white and exceedingly vivid – and, like the memoir it pulls from, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,” is alternately stirring and poignant, heartbreaking and wickedly funny and, as with all things Bono, deeply philosophical in an Irish-bloke-knocking-back-pints-at-the-pub kind of way.
Before the book became the film, it inspired Bono’s one-man stage show, “Stories of Surrender: An Evening of Words, Music and Some Mischief…,” performed in select cities around the world in 2022-23, including a mini-residency at the Beacon Theatre in New York.
In his 25 performances, Bono – one of the most mega of music stars on the planet – played to intimate theater crowds a fraction of the size of the stadiums U2 commands and learned that sometimes the most gripping props are an empty chair and a spotlight.
“There’s a sense of undressing yourself in taking off the armor and your sword and your shield and just letting people in,” Bono, 65, says. “I can pull off the swagger. I can do the macho thing. I’m Irish. I can give you lots of that. But at this point, I just thought it would be better to be closer to who I am when I’m at my most insecure, I suppose.”
Bono says he’s ‘done singing about all the dead people I was close to’
Throughout the almost 90-minute film, Bono touches on the tenets of family, music, faith and charity.
He opens with the devastating and dramatic tale of his 2016 surgery to repair a potentially fatal aortic aneurysm, leaping on a table that will become symbolic for many reasons in the show. He shares the unfathomable story of his mother collapsing at her father’s funeral and dying that day from an aneurysm when Bono was only 14.
Close-ups of his visage amplify the lived-in lines that crease around his eyes when he smiles. “The face, after a while, it just is a map. It tells a story of where you’ve been,” Bono says from France, adding that director Andrew Dominik encouraged him to embrace his sincerity by reminding him, “The lens will know if you’re lying.”
He weaves in U2 songs including “Vertigo,” “City of Blinding Lights,” “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “Where The Streets Have No Name,” reimagined inventively by producer Jacknife Lee, who plays in the onstage shadows along with cellist Kate Ellis and harpist Gemma Doherty. Using empty chairs as stand-ins, Bono unwraps his U2 mates Larry Mullen Jr., Adam Clayton and his brother in all but name, the Edge.
But the star of the show isn’t Bono, says Bono. It’s his father, Bob Hewson, whose emotional distance and hard-shelled manner shaped his son.
“He’s got all the best lines!” Bono says with a smile before imitating Bob, who died in 2001, bellowing at him as a teenager, as he does with that subtle head turn in the show. “ ‘You. You’re the baritone who thinks he’s a tenor,’ ” Bono sneers before pulling out of character.
“I ended up, as much as loving my father, I ended up liking him,” Bono says. “That’s a beautiful thing, to end up closer to him. My mother, I’ve always felt close to. I’d just wished I’d known her and because my father or any of us never spoke of her after she passed, I lost all of those memories. The book was an attempt to retrieve memories of her and I’m still getting some of them returned to me.”
He leans back and clasps his hands with a slight laugh.
“But I think I’m done now singing about my dead ma and my dead da, all the dead people I was close to. Edge says, ‘Nostalgia is a thing of the past, Bono.’ And I agree. U2 are getting ready for the future and this is, well, a privilege to be given a chance to record this most intimate story that, in a way, the band wrote. Edge wrote this story. Larry, Adam, (wife) Ali wrote this story, not just my father and mother. So now it’s time to face the future and dance.”
New U2 music ‘sounds like the future’
That future for U2 has ignited anticipation from fans eager to hear what the band creates, now a year removed from their groundbreaking residency to open the Las Vegas Sphere.
Mullen, who was sidelined for the Vegas run to recover from neck surgery, is “back from his injuries, that’s for sure,” Bono says. “I’ve never seen him play like this. He’s at his most innovative, I would say.”
While there is no timeline or specific blueprint about the stylistic leanings the band is crafting, Bono mentions “the songs we’re making presently sound like the future.”
Edge, he says, is “determined to take the guitar into the future.” And as for Clayton, Bono jokes that U2 has to make another record “just to get Adam off Gardeners’ World,” the long-running BBC gardening show where Clayton showcased his shovel skills last year.
Bono shares an anecdote that he was standing next to Clayton when the latter received a text from JJ Burnel, a punk legend and bassist for the London band the Stranglers. U2, it turns out, played on a bill with the band in the ‘70s, but because Burnel refused to wear a button stating “U2 can happen to anyone,” Bono and the boys robbed their dressing room.
Bono cackles at the memory.
“JJ was a tough guy and a genius bass player and he’s texting Adam 40 years later to say, ‘So excited to see you on Gardeners’ World tonight.’ I said to Adam, ‘this is a long way from punk rock,’” Bono says. “And Adam went, ‘No, it isn’t. Doing precisely what you want to do is the most punk rock thing we can do.’ ”
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