FILTER BOOKS
Cringe Benefits
Name-dropping, yarn-spinning, meditating, excruciating: U2’s singer’s action-packed memoir. By Danny Eccleston.
Hewson Family Archive (3), Patrick Brocklebank
Surrender
★★★★
Bono
HUTCHINSON HEINEMANN . £25
THE DAMP feeling between his legs woke Bono from his slumber, followed quickly by a fast-dawning terror. Had he wet himself? Had he wet himself on Frank Sinatra’s settee?
The moment encapsulates the charm of Surrender – the U2 singer’s memoir resounds with the clang, bang, smash of VIP name-dropping, but is undercut with constant admissions of the writer’s uncoolness and capacity for cringe. In the end, Bono, smashed on Rat Pack-sized Scotches, had just spilt his drink, but still: Frank Sinatra’s settee.
At over 550 pages long it is not a humble thing, but Bono’s book – part ballad of the band, part personal-growth handbook – is a confession of sorts. He concedes the 1997 PopMart tour’s parody of consumerism was tin-eared; if only they’d finished the album instead. There’s remorse, too, about stepping away from his friend Michael Hutchence and partner Paula Yates in their druggy decline. And despite U2’s united front at the time, he’s big enough to take full responsibility for the non-voluntary download to 700 million Apple iTunes accounts of 2014’s Songs Of Innocence LP. “The part of me that will always be punk rock thought this was exactly what The Clash would do,” he writes. “Subversive. But sub-versive is hard to claim when you’re working with a company that’s about to be the biggest on earth.”
Meanwhile, access to the inside of the U2 ‘machine’ reveals much of its precarious-ness and humanity. Shalom, the charismatic Christian group to which Bono, Edge and Larry Mullen once belonged, is explored in detail, the moment Edge reveals he’s quitting the band to follow a more outwardly religious path vividly relived. Likewise, it’s one thing knowing Bono’s on-stage introduction to Sun-day Bloody Sunday – “This song is not a rebel song…” – dismayed Irish Republicans; it’s another to be pitched headlong into the jeopardy it actually entailed, in Dublin, in 1983.