Surrender makes for an instructional title to Bono’s memoir. There’s a lot to surrender to in this book, the first by the lead singer of arena-rock giants U2. It’s over 550 pages; the prose veers from profound to clunky; there are extended diversions from U2 to talk about his family and his political work; passages praise figures including George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Bill Gates; and, on top of it all, the chapters are accompanied by 40 charmingly lo-fi sketches. Sure, Bono has earned the right to write his memoir however he pleases — he’s one of rock’s best singers and songwriters and has lived a full life. But if you’re not ready to take that leap of faith, don’t worry: We’ve found what you’re looking for with 13 of the best U2 stories Bono reveals in the memoir.
U2 faked their first audition with a Ramones song.
Surrender makes clear early on that Bono had that bravado from U2’s first days. One example: the band’s first audition, for a children’s-TV program called Young Line, in 1978. U2 had original songs at the time, but the band had been arguing about what to play — so when the producer asked for an original, Bono passed off “the not-very-but-quite-famous Ramones tune ‘Glad to See You Go’” as a U2 cut. The band made it onto the show, where they played “Street Mission,” an early song of theirs. “No one noticed,” Bono writes. “Another miracle attributable to Joey Ramone.”
Bono wanted John Lennon to produce Boy before he died.
Speaking of confidence, how’s this? Bono had been writing a letter to Lennon in 1979, months before his assassination, to ask him to produce the band’s debut album, Boy. “We’d written a song called ‘The Dream Is Over’ sparked by his throwaway explanation of the demise of the Fab Four. Now, as our dream was beginning, the Beatles’ dream was over,” Bono explains. Instead, 1980’s Boy began U2’s early partnership with Steve Lillywhite, who also produced the two following albums, October and War.
The Edge thought God wanted him to quit U2 — but their manager said he didn’t.
U2’s struggles to square their Christian faith with their rock-star life, especially in the early years, have been well documented. But Surrender sheds more light on the moment when their guitarist, the Edge, felt God was calling him to quit the band before the 1981 release of October. Bono decided he wouldn’t stay in the band without the Edge, but what ultimately kept them together was a quick-witted response from their longtime manager, Paul McGuinness (an atheist). Here’s how Bono tells it:
We went to see Paul, who heard us out. There was a pause, the room quieted, and then Paul spoke.
“Am I to gather from this that you have been talking with God?” he asked.
“We think it’s God’s will,” we earnestly replied.
“So you can just call God up?”
“Yes,” we intoned.
“Well, maybe next time you might ask God if it’s okay for your representative on earth to break a legal contract?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“Do you think God would have you break a legal contract? A contract that I have signed, on your behalf, a legal contract for you to go on tour? How could it be possible for this God of yours to want you to break the law and not fulfill your responsibilities to do this tour?
What sort of a God is this?”
Good point. God is unlikely to have us break the law.
Edge agrees and argues he was always looking for some kind of signifier to go on.
Brian Eno won’t talk about “riffs” — but will talk about sex.
Studio genius Brian Eno was initially skeptical of working with U2 and, Bono claims, said he hadn’t heard the band’s music before Bono asked him to produce 1984’s The Unforgettable Fire. Eno was eventually convinced when Bono agreed to attempt “an album without any minor chords.” In the studio, Bono writes, Eno had a specific way of talking about music. “Brian abhorred ‘muso’ talk,” he writes. He’d call riffs “figures” and preferred the term “sonics” over sound. As for what he had no issues discussing? “Brian loved to talk about sex, not in any locker room way — which we thought of as uncool — but in a scientific way,” Bono continues. That dirty lad would go on to make a pristine masterpiece of The Joshua Tree in 1987 and continued working with U2 through the 2009 album No Line on the Horizon.
Jimmy Iovine talked U2 out of using “Where the Streets Have No Name” in that car commercial.
Another story Bono retells is of the band receiving a $23 million offer from a car company looking to use “Where the Streets Have No Name” in an ad spot around 2000. He famously turned down the offer — at the advice of Interscope co-founder Jimmy Iovine, of all people, he writes. Bono remembers Iovine saying, “You can take the deal. But you just have to prepare for that moment when you say ‘God walks through the room’ being known instead as ‘Oh, they’re playing that car ad.’”
Flood once convinced U2 to perform a studio session naked.
A producer with unconventional methods is nothing new. But this is still quite the picture: Bono recalls Flood, one of the band’s core producers, once suggesting they record a session while naked “to inject the moment with levity.” The band (and production team!) performed with nothing but gaffer tape over their “bits and pieces” — “All in the cause of art, you understand,” Bono writes.
Bono considers “Mysterious Ways” the band’s “sexiest” song.
And he credits the sound to the Edge’s fascination with funk and dance music. “These new demos had the joy that we looked for in our music but with a funkier bottom end,” Bono writes. As for his favorite single? “Vertigo,” “even though it’s a long way from a pop song.”
Jeff Koons almost designed the cover of Pop.
For U2’s controversial 1997 album, the band drew inspiration from Andy Warhol and tried to work with an artist who they saw riffing on his Pop Art, Jeff Koons. “I loved his daring and kind of biting humor,” Bono writes. When they met Koons, he spoke “in precise, academic tones” as he presented the band with his concept for the album cover: four kittens in socks hanging on a clothes line to represent each band member. “We wait for him to laugh. The signal that we could,” Bono writes. “He doesn’t. He’s dead serious.” The band didn’t go with the idea — but looking back now, Bono calls it “brilliant.”
Iovine didn’t like Pop, either.
U2 have made their disappointment with their ninth album known. And they weren’t the only ones. “Jimmy Iovine corners us; he says that the moment an artist changes is the moment they stop putting the recording first,” Bono writes of one harsh critic. “He thought Pop might be the most expensive set of demos in the history of music. The demo didn’t deliver.”
U2’s acoustic “Ordinary Love” performance at the Oscars was “last minute” — and controversial.
When U2 returned to the Oscars for their second nomination, for the song “Ordinary Love” from the Nelson Mandela biopic Long Walk to Freedom, they worked for weeks to plan a U2-size performance. Then, Bono writes, they changed their minds “at the last minute,” instead choosing to do the song acoustic. (That performance isn’t available on YouTube, but there is a similar one from The Tonight Show.) “Among the fanfare and parade of the most popular awards show on earth, perhaps we could prick the showbiz bubble and create a more meditative moment,” he reasons. Bono calls the performance his “favorite version” of the song, but not everyone agreed. “One producer thought not and pulled a ‘You’ll never work in this town again!’ on us,” he writes. “After all this time it was quite sweet to hear one of those lines.”
Bono used to play Barack Obama new U2 songs.
Bono’s experience in the rock world would help him succeed at politicking in his second career as an advocate for AIDS relief. (He might be the only person to bond with noted conservative John Kasich over Radiohead, he reveals in Surrender.) After meeting Barack Obama as a senator, Bono would become friends with him during his time in the White House — even playing him mixes of new U2 songs (to lobby for inclusion on his playlists, surely). “I was taken by his intellectual curiosity as to how music was put together,” Bono writes.
McGuinness had a perfect comeback to hearing Bono was courting Guy Oseary as a new manager.
McGuinness stopped working with U2 in 2013 but not without some final jabs at the band. When Bono told McGuinness that Guy Oseary, Madonna’s manager, was willing to work with U2, he replied characteristically. “Would Guy Oseary understand that you can’t manage U2 on a BlackBerry?” he said, per Bono. “That managing the four of you is not managing Madonna. That it’s managing four Madonnas.” Since then, Oseary has managed five Madonnas — U2 and the woman herself — after Live Nation acquired both his company, Maverick, and U2’s management company, Principle Management.
And yes, Bono takes “full responsibility” for giving you that album against your will.
Here’s the one you’ve been waiting for: Years after releasing an iPod with Apple, U2 returned to the company with the idea to distribute their 2014 album, Songs of Innocence, on every Apple device for free. “What’s the worst that could happen?” Bono remembers thinking, comparing the album to a bottle of milk the band left on Apple users’ doorsteps. “On September 9, 2014, we didn’t just put our bottle of milk at the door but in every fridge in every house in town,” he writes. “In some cases we poured it onto the good people’s cornflakes. And some people like to pour their own milk. And others are lactose intolerant.” Bono says he takes “full responsibility” for the stunt, not the rest of the band, Oseary, or Apple CEO Tim Cook (who, he notes, “never blinked” when it was poorly received). “The part of me that will always be punk rock thought this was exactly what The Clash would do. Subversive,” he writes. “But subversive is hard to claim when you’re working with a company that’s about to be the biggest on earth.”
