“I found this out only last week at a funeral, that I was baptised a Protestant as well as a Catholic,” U2 frontman Bono told an audience at Dalkey Book Festival on Sunday evening.
“My mother was a Protestant, my father was a Catholic,” he said, adding that at the first opportunity his grandmother put him under the kitchen tap to “baptise” the Protestant infant a Catholic. That was the start of a lifelong relationship he would enter with God and church.
“My friend Gavin Friday says the [Catholic] Church is the glam rock of religion ... with smoke bombs going off,” he told an amused audience. “Lots of U2 songs are prayers as it happens.”
Last November, Bono released his first book, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story. Chronicling the charismatic star’s life from his childhood – then only known as Paul Hewson – until the present day, Surrender is an earnest but self-aware guide to the rock star’s life.
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His lyrical style lets the reader into the death of his mother when he was just 14, Hewson’s first kiss with the woman he later married (Alison Stewart), how he got the nickname Bono, why U2 prays before every gig and how emergency heart surgery in recent years rocked his world.
The tell-all book is unashamedly Bono. He’s sincere in his beliefs and not afraid to preach his truth to others: on stage, on the page, or in this case The Church of the Assumption.
Outside on Sunday evening, U2 fans lined up against barriers brandishing their already mangled copies of Surrender – less the hardback cover – presumably waiting for an autograph. Queues stretched around the church and snaked through the lawn.
A packed hall of literary enthusiasts and rock n roll types, with presumably a fair few Bono fans dotted around, were in the Church of the Assumption on Sunday evening for the 78th and final event of the four-day annual festival. All eyes of the room faced the ornate stone altar lit by bright pink lights, but the focus was on the small stage front where the bright minds of the evening would exchange ideas.
Economist and Irish Times columnist David McWilliams moderated a discussion between fellow columnist Fintan O’Toole and Bono. In his own unique memoir, We Don’t Know Ourselves, O’Toole invited readers into his world through a personal history of Ireland since the year of his birth in 1958, two years before Bono.
“Fintan has used his story to tell Ireland, and I have used Ireland to tell mine,” Bono told the crowd, but as the conversation began with the 1960s, it soon veered naturally off course.
“I write to know the world better a bit, but mostly it’s just narcissism ... Everybody knows how singers tune up. It’s an old joke: Me me me me.”
O’Toole quipped back: “To say a rock star is narcissistic is a tautology.”
“I was the uncoolest boy on the planet,” O’Toole said as he recalled his child said of growing up in the 1960s. The author spoke of his upbringing in contrast to the rather punk origins of his fellow speaker on stage. As the pair recounted the story of modern Ireland, O’Toole coloured in the political atmosphere in the 1980s and the downfall of the Haughey era in Irish politics.
Bono later added: “[My book] is taking navel gazing to a whole new level.”
U2 were the first big global stars to stay in Ireland in the 1980s at “a time when the most exciting place in Ireland was the queue outside the American embassy,” O’Toole said. “It felt like Ireland was going through a collective psychological breakdown ... You then have this complete breakdown from the promise of modernity. Massive unemployment, massive emigration.”
After O’Toole opined that writing and singing is an alternative to violence, Bono responded with a story about one of his first gigs when he lost control and picked a fight. A different time for the man who now believes: “Music is just a much better way of saying f**k off.”
“Being around in music for some time you can either be a character or become a caricature,” Bono said, and for a personality few on this island refrain from having an opinion on, after the release of his memoir it’s back to the people to decide which Mr Hewson has become.
