When Bono hits the road for a tour, he usually brings along about 200 trucks, a stage that weighs roughly 170 tons, hundreds of employees, and three high-school buddies named Adam, Larry, and Edge. But when he went out in early 2023 to promote his memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, he brought little else besides a table and chairs, a fake beer, and a keyboardist, cellist, and harp player.
The shows were a unique hybrid of rock concert and one-man Broadway-style production in which Bono paid loving tribute to his wife, Ali Hewson, his three bandmates, and his late father, Paul Hewson, pausing often to perform U2 classics like “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “With or Without You” and “I Will Follow” in radically stripped-down fashion.
The tour only hit a handful of markets around the world, and never played to anything larger than a theater, so the vast majority of U2 fans had no ability to experience it. That’s finally changing on May 30 when the film Bono: Stories of Surrender lands on Apple TV+. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier in the month.
In the middle of a very busy press day at Cannes, we had 18 minutes with Bono to chat about putting together his first solo show, the new documentary, the status of U2’s long-awaited new album, and the health of drummer Larry Mullen Jr., who missed out on the band’s recent Sphere residency to recover from an injury.
Most book tours, even for really high-profile ones, are just a series of public interviews and readings. What made you want to do something so radically different?
You’ve put your finger on it. The stage play came out of a desire to not be on a promotional book tour, and to keep my own interest in it. I didn’t know I could do it. And to become other people was a bit of a holiday for myself, number one. But then to play my father with the turn of my neck, turn of my head…to play Luciano Pavarotti was quite the challenge. And then I turned our rock & roll band into three chairs and a table.
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You’re accustomed to a pretty big stage, a pretty big production budget, and all sorts of props. This time around, you had very little. It must have forced you to get creative considering those limitations.
That’s right. There’s maximalism of the U2 show in every which way to this table and chairs. If I wasn’t Irish, it would be pretentious to talk about Krapp’s Last Tape and Samuel Beckett. But there’s a simplicity that I enjoyed learning, or relearning, you might say, because in our early days, the sort of fireworks were just the mood you were in. The pyro was jumping into a crowd, and all that excitement that that would cause. I started to get into gestures and understanding how powerful a simple gesture could be. A movement of the hand. A turn of the head. Staring at a single person in the crowd.
Going back to your teenage years, you’ve never really done a full concert without the other guys in U2. Did you have any trepidation about going onstage on your own?
I was terrified. But I seem to enjoy that. My drug of choice is putting myself in a place where I’m not comfortable because I feel I learn the more when I’m there. And I also am a student of performers who wish to break the fourth wall. Iggy Pop, for me, was just a master. He’s a master of unpredictability. Spontaneity. A master of stepping inside a song, and becoming the song.
But then there were actors like Mark Rylance. I went to see Mark Rylance in [the play] Jerusalem. I couldn’t believe it. And I felt this confrontational performer.
Patti Smith. You see it in her. She isn’t comfortable on an elevated stage. One show I saw Patti Smith Group, and she entered from behind, fought her way, elbowed her way, through the crowd. And got up on stage. What an entrance.
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I tried it in reverse in my twenties. But I like those performers that you feel could break through the fourth wall, could sit on your lap, could bite you, could rob you, could mug you, could make love with you, could chase you down the street, could break your heart. I wanted to see if I could be that kind of a performer.
Did you see Bruce on Broadway or any other recent one-man shows to get some inspiration for how to do this?
I saw Bruce on Broadway. I mean, every time I see Bruce, it changes my life in some way. The opera, for instance. He’s Irish-Italian. He gives you the permission to go to the opera. “Jungleland.” That’s an opera right there. I saw him twice on Broadway, and I knew I’d better come up with something different because I couldn’t touch that. I just tried to create these different characters and play them.
You’re backed by keyboardist Jacknife Lee, cellist Kate Ellis, and harp player Gemma Doherty during the show. How did they help you reshape the songs and approach your music in a different way?
Jackknife is a bit of a genius. Edge is in awe of his arrangements. Only Edge, by the way, wouldn’t be thinking, “Where’s the guitar in this?” Edge just doesn’t think like that. He’s just like, “Wow. That’s another feeling that the song now has.”
I got the privilege to sing “Sunday Bloody Sunday” to [Doherty] from Derry who was a child of the peace process. She’s from that town. She’s playing the harp, and she’s an innovator. She’s got a bit of a punk spirit, too. And so she’s adding distortion to the harp, and she’s a great singer.
That version of “Sunday Bloody Sunday”…I’m scared I’ll never reach it again because it just took me somewhere else. I felt like Nina Simone walked through the room, and I was like, “Wow.” Kate Ellis, I think it’s Philip Glass who said this is one of the most astonishing cellists he’d ever worked with. I was surrounded by greatness.
But I still have this random thing before I go onstage. I can be really easy and walk onstage and feel confident about the night and look forward to it, or I want to throw up in the bathroom. I don’t seem to be on top of that, even in my sixties. And when I get a break, which is coming up apparently in the next few months, I might need to go and see a shrink. I might need to lay down on that couch. But I suppose the audience is the shrink here. I mean, if I think about it, that’s what I do.
The show is a tribute to your father in a lot of ways. Did you do that to pay him back for everything he did for you?
Certainly. I think I wanted to get closer to him, and I ended up doing just that. Well, he ended up the star of the show. He had the better lines. It made me laugh. And playing him night after night…and then just those put-downs. And I’m saying, “You know Pavarotti rang the house, and he’s looking for a song?” “Did he ring the wrong number?” He was funny. I understand him better.
Your old editor, Jann Wenner, sent me on this road. He was the one 20 years ago, after one of those Herculean interviews you do with Rolling Stone where you guys put us through our paces, and it was days that felt like weeks and weeks that felt like days. And eventually he said, “I think you owe your father an apology.” And I was like, “What? I’ve just been telling you how difficult he was.” He said, “No, no, you’ve just been telling me how difficult you were.” When I apologized to my father, it changed a lot for me. Unfortunately, he wasn’t around.
You literally speak in his voice, sit in his chair, become him onstage. That’s a pretty powerful thing. I’m sure it was cathartic.
I don’t know enough about the theater to know if this has been done before, but maybe I should put a health warning on it. I’m not sure we’re covered. But you know what? There was a part of me that was just more concerned that people just laugh at my jokes.
Do we trust people who aren’t funny anymore? I’m not sure. And people don’t come to U2 shows for belly laughs. But I’ve never been in a great conversation that hasn’t had one.
Andrew Dominik is the director of the movie. What approach did you want him to take in capturing this show?
He made a movie called Chopper, and it’s one of my favorite films. And it starred Eric Bana when Eric Bana was a comedian. Not the Eric Bana that we know now. Clearly, he was great at working with non-actors. He worked with Nick Cave, so I knew he understood music.
I’d met him and liked him. We shared social circles. He makes my wife laugh out loud quite a lot. He has actual deafness and some convenient deafness. When we’d be discussing a scene or whatever, if he didn’t like what I was saying, he’d be like, “I can’t hear you, mate.” But I’m grateful to him. I’m so grateful to him because he got those performances out of me. I don’t know how he did that. And his lighting. And with Erik Messerschmidt as his DP and a whole host of other brilliant people around us, we got this thing.
It doesn’t look like we just came to record that show. He said, “Look, it’s another art form, Bono. And you’ll have to let me take it into a different place.” I said, “Well, I just want the stage show.” “You have to let me take it into another place.” And I don’t know if it ever got to the place he wanted me to go, but I’m very proud of the work we did together.
The last album of new U2 songs was eight years ago. It’s the longest gap ever between albums. The fans are getting restless. What can you tell them to keep their spirits up?
Well, they’re right. And nostalgia is not to be tolerated for too long, but sometimes you’ve got to deal with the past in order to get to the future and to the present. To get back to now is our desire. Get back to this moment we’re in. We’ve been recording. And it sounds like future to me. We had to go through some stuff, and we’re at the other end of it.
How is Larry doing? Is he playing with you guys in the studio?
We’ve been playing in the room together, the four of us. And I can tell you he is completely through whatever storm of injury he’s been through. His playing is at its most innovative. He’s just all about the band. He doesn’t want to talk about anything else, which is kind of amazing.
By the way, being a band in a room where each individual musician has a role that’s singular and collective is so rare because music is assembled these days. And even some of our music we have assembled, and we’ll do that again, but to try and capture a moment of a rock & roll band in full flight is at the heart of this record that we’re making that we’ve recorded, but we are not finished.
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Do you know when it might be finished?
No.
I’m getting the hook here, so I’ll end with a question about Pop. The 30 year anniversary is coming up. Will we get a Pop 30 box set?
Well, I never thought about that. Actually, I’m sure somebody clever has thought of that. But if they have, I’m not aware of it. And the film of the PopMart tour in Mexico is one of the most extraordinary U2 shows ever. I love the imagery around that album. And the only thing that album wasn’t was pop.
