Surrender: 40 Songs One Story
Bono
So this is the rehabilitation of the much vilified, intolerable terrible singer Bono. "Oh", says the sceptic, "Maybe we misjudged him". Maybe you did.
He's always had a sense of humour, a self-deprecation that says he is fully aware of his absurdity. He turned it into an album and a tour with Achtung Baby and ZooTV. "I'm ready, ready for the laughing gas, I'm ready for what's next" rages the intro of Zoo Station as he goosesteps from behind the industrial-sized TVs. The heart on his sleeve, working in African aid-camps - it was always pretty pompous, wasn't it? And yet it wasn't an act, it was merely the warm up for his workings inside American politics, getting an audience with the Pope, raising billions for those in poverty through no fault of their own. He simply felt the world was a mess and he was in a position to try to help a bit.
Is that such a crime?
The origin story is pretty well known - 16 year old Larry puts up an ad on the school noticeboard - "drummer wants to join band". They were terrible musicians, unable to play other people's songs so wrote their own. There was always a messianic zeal, not for action against poverty but.... well, what? What was it about those gigs that went from 9 in a pub to 90,000 in a stadium that felt so urgent, so important? A Christian band who - somehow - had punks singing psalms on their way home. Were they tapping into the eternal? As I saw them at the Hammersmith Palais in 1982, it sure felt like it. The image is seared into my brain that I saw from the balcony of a floor made of people jumping up and down as one for the entire gig - anyone stupid enough not to go with the flow would be simply ripped to shreds. And the reason this scrawny 15 year old had retreated to the relative safety of the balcony.
I'd love to be scrawny again.
Anyway. Think what you like about Bono's singing voice (he's far from keen himself), but there's nothing wrong with his literary voice. Every sentance of this 500 page book feels poetic, crafted (and skillfully undermined for comic effect). We meet his childhood friends who all lived in their fictitious Lypton Village. We meet Michael Hutchence, Steve Jobs, Nelson Mandela, George Bush, Johnny Cash - personal stories. We bask in the south of France, are haunted in African refugee camps, crash at the White House and walk the same Dublin streets he has his whole life. One regular family Sunday the doorbell rings and his wife Ali answers. It's Michael Gorbachev. "Oh shit, I forgot to tell you" says Bono to Ali. That right there tells you much of what you need to know about Bono's life.
It's fascinating. It's deeply personal, with no squeamishness talking about his faith, quoting the New Testament liberally, his relationship with his father and mother Iris who died when he was 14, the 50 year love affair with his wife Ali, warts and all. In his After Words, he writes "Jordan, Eve, Eli and John gave me permission to write about their lives" (his 4 children). "I believe there's a good chance that Ali will at some point".
He's funny.
He talks about money and - yes- tax. And inflicting an album on Apple users they didn't want.
In 2022, Larry's school band still has the same members, the singer even has the same childhood sweetheart as his wife. It's inspiring to me to see religious faith be the driving force for good when we so often see it as a motivation for horrors. I love the sonic diversity of the band, from Out Of Control to New Year's Day to Angel Of Harlem to Sweetest Thing to Zooropa to One to With Or Without You to Song For Someone. The many faces of U2 are all here. But even if you don't care so much for the band as I do, if there's something about this small mad with big ideas that remotely interests you, I can recommend Surrender wholeheartedly.
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Bono then turned the book into a one-man show which got some rapturous reviews. Of course a film crew were there to document it, and the results are out now.
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Bono: Stories of Surrender
Apple TV+
5 minutes in, and I think - oh boy, this is gonna be insufferable.
Bono's poetic writing works very well on the page. But there's no avoiding the man when it's now him on stage, an awkward combination of monumental ego and soul searching presented for public consumption. If the man rubs you up the wrong way, there's nowhere to hide. In the opening minutes we are offered a very theatrical retelling of the time he nearly died from heart trouble in 2016, segueing into a first song.
Oh boy.
I very nearly gave up there and then. But I thought I'll give it a few minutes more and stayed to the end. Perhaps its the perfect opener - if you make it through that, the whole theatrical and personal schtick kinda locks into place. The music - preformed by a trio of cello, harp, percussion and synths - works seamlessly and the re-imagining of the back catalogue makes much more sense on stage than on record. It glues it all together.
Pretty much all great artists turn their pain and sorrow into art somehow. It's just not usually this on-the-nose. But for me it worked. Those closest to him seem to have been distinctly unimpressed with his artistic or philanthropic achievements, and that's interesting. When you've helped feed the world, conquer AIDS and simultaneously been in the biggest band in the world and it's seemingly STILL not enough for approval from your Dad, it's quite a leveller between artist and audience.
Much that was in the books - and I understand in the show - didn't make the final cut, but it's the right length at under 90 minutes. I found myself drifting, but in a good way - the confluence of art, humour and pain was potent enough for me to reflect on my own private journey, with this band always somewhere in the background.
