Bono

• 1. Introduction

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  Bono, the lead singer of U2, took his name from the sign of a hearing aid shop in Dublin. The shop was called Bonavox, and it stood just off O'Connell Street, the city's principal thoroughfare. The word comes from the Latin for good voice. A friend named Guggi handed him the nickname, and the boy born Paul David Hewson did not like it at first. Once he learned the translation, he accepted it. By the age of 14 or 15 he was Bono, and close family, friends and bandmates still call him that today.

  It is an odd start for a man whose voice would later fill stadiums, and the oddness runs through the rest of his story. How did a Dublin teenager end up fronting a rock band that began with a notice on a school bulletin board? Why would a singer be found in the offices of politicians and presidents, arguing about debt and disease? And what do the people who distrust that crusade, and the money around it, have to say in reply?

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• 2. Cedarwood Road

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  Paul Hewson was born in the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin on the 10th of May 1960. He was the second child of Iris, born Rankin, and Brendan Robert Hewson, known as Bob. His brother Norman was eight years older. When Paul was six weeks old, the family moved to Cedarwood Road, in the area between the suburbs of Finglas and Ballymun, and he grew up in that house.

  Religion in the Hewson home ran on two tracks. Iris belonged to the Church of Ireland, while Bob was a Roman Catholic. His parents had agreed that the first son would be raised Anglican and the second Catholic. The plan did not hold. Paul still went to Church of Ireland services with his mother and brother, and his father sometimes took him to Mass at the nearby St Canice's. He attended Glasnevin National School, a Protestant primary school, rather than the local Catholic-managed one in Ballymun.

  Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, David Bowie and Marc Bolan of T. Rex were his teenage idols. After a year at St. Patrick's Cathedral Grammar School, he moved to Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Clontarf, which accepted pupils of every denomination.

  The 10th of September 1974 changed the house on Cedarwood Road. His mother died that day, three days after a ruptured cerebral aneurysm struck her at her father's funeral. Several U2 songs circle that loss, among them "I Will Follow", "Mofo", "Out of Control", "Lemon" and "Tomorrow". Bono later recalled being alone in the house much of the time. He would knock on neighbours' doors instead, calling on the Hanveys at teatime and the Rowens at lunchtime.

  Friendship filled some of that empty space. Bono and his friends belonged to a surrealist street gang called Lypton Village. The artist Guggi and the musician Gavin Friday lived on the same street, and Guggi was a member too. The gang's custom was handing out nicknames. Before he was simply Bono, Hewson went through Steinhegvanhuysenolegbangbangbang, then Huyseman, Houseman, Bon Murray and Bono Vox of O'Connell Street.

  A family secret surfaced decades later. In 2000 he learned that Scott Rankin, whom he had believed to be a cousin, was really his half-brother, the child of an affair between Bob Hewson and his wife's sister Barbara. When school ended, Bob had already laid down a rule. His son could live at home for one year, but if he could not pay his own way, he would have to leave.

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• 3. Notice Board to Wembley

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  On the 25th of September 1976, a notice on a bulletin board at Mount Temple drew four students together. Larry Mullen Jr. had posted it, hoping to find people who wanted to start a rock band. Bono, David Evans, who became known as the Edge, his brother Dik Evans, and Adam Clayton all answered. The early jam sessions were mostly covers. Bono was tired of long guitar solos and hard rock, so he pushed for songs by the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys. The group played other people's songs so badly that they began writing their own.

  They called themselves Feedback for a few months and later The Hype. Dik Evans then left to join another local band, the Virgin Prunes, and the remaining four renamed themselves U2. Bono began as singer, guitarist and songwriter. In a 1982 interview he joked that he had been a guitarist alongside the Edge, except that he could not play. His bandmates eventually suggested he sing instead, and he remembered the day he discovered he could. As the Edge improved, Bono moved to the microphone, though he still plays rhythm guitar and harmonica now and then.

  The 13th of July 1985 put him in front of 72,000 people at Wembley Stadium, with a worldwide television audience of 1.5 billion. During a 12-minute performance of "Bad", Bono climbed down from the stage, picked a woman out of the crowd, and danced with her. The detour stretched the song and ate into the band's allotted time. U2 had to cut "Pride (In the Name of Love)", their biggest hit at that point. The band first counted the day as a missed opportunity. Many journalists disagreed and called it a highlight, and The Guardian credited Live Aid with making stars of U2.

  Reaching for the crowd became a habit. In 2005, at a Vertigo Tour stop in Chicago, he pulled a boy onto the stage during "An Cat Dubh / Into the Heart". He has often let fans join the band to play songs, and he likes to come down to the physical level of the audience.

  Politics followed him onto the stage as well. The Enniskillen bombing on the 8th of November 1987 killed 11 people and injured 63. Bono condemned it in a speech during a live performance of "Sunday Bloody Sunday". The Provisional IRA then threatened to kidnap him, and IRA supporters attacked a vehicle carrying band members. He had been advised to cut the outburst from the film Rattle and Hum, but it stayed in.

  That film also recorded a free concert on the 11th of November 1987 at Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco, called "Save the Yuppies". There Bono spray-painted "Rock N Roll Stops the Traffic" on the Vaillancourt Fountain sculpture. Mayor Dianne Feinstein criticised him, and he faced a misdemeanour charge for defacing public property. He apologised in a written statement to local officials, and the band's promoter Bill Graham agreed to pay for the cleanup.

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• 4. Masks and Mischief

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  On the 30th of December 1989, before a hometown crowd in Dublin, Bono told the audience it was "the end of something for U2". The band had felt musically stuck by the end of the Lovetown Tour. He said they had to go away and "dream it all up again".

  The answer arrived with the 1991 album Achtung Baby, where his lyrics turned more personal and drew on the private lives of the band members. On the 1992-93 Zoo TV Tour, he tried to shake off the group's reputation for being overly serious and self-righteous. He explained: "All through the Eighties we tried to be ourselves and failed when the lights were on. Which is what set us up for Zoo TV. We decided to have some fun being other people, or at least other versions of ourselves."

  His main character was the Fly. It began with an oversized pair of blaxploitation sunglasses from wardrobe manager Fintan Fitzgerald, handed over to lighten the mood in the studio. Bono grew the idea into a leather-clad egomaniac. He described the outfit as Lou Reed's glasses, Elvis Presley's jacket and Jim Morrison's leather trousers, and he dyed his naturally brown hair black. After the earnest stage manner of the 1980s, the Fly strutted. Bono often stayed in character away from the stage, including at public appearances and in hotels.

  Mirror Ball Man came next, in a shining silver lamé suit with matching shoes and cowboy hat. The character parodied greedy American televangelists, showmen and car salesmen, and drew on Phil Ochs and his 1970 Elvis persona. Bono said the character "loved cash and in his mind success was God's blessing". Mirror Ball Man appeared during encores in 1992 and made prank calls from the stage. Often the target was the White House, in a bid to reach President George H. W. Bush. Bono played him through the first three legs of the tour.

  In 1993, MacPhisto took his place. The name came from Mephistopheles of the Faust legend, and the character parodied the devil. Bono wore a gold lamé suit, gold platform shoes, pale makeup, lipstick and devil's horns. He gave MacPhisto an exaggerated upper-class English accent, like a down-on-his-luck character actor. Bono pictured an old English devil, a pop star long past his prime, boring cocktail-hour listeners with tales of the good old, bad old days. The prank calls continued, now aimed at local politicians. As he put it, "if you tell somebody you really like what they're doing, you know it's not a compliment."

  Live television produced a different kind of trouble in 2003. Accepting the Golden Globe for Best Original Song for "The Hands That Built America", Bono used a profanity on air while praising the award. The Parents Television Council condemned him and urged its members to complain to the FCC. The agency judged the word a breach of its indecency standards but declined to fine NBC. The network had no advance warning, and the word was not used in its literal sexual sense. On the 8th of December 2003, a group of congressmen introduced House Resolution 3687, the "Clean Airwaves Act", to list profane words explicitly. It was never enacted, yet the incident has had a lasting effect on how profanity is handled in live broadcasts.

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• 5. Voice, Words and Duets

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  "Gloria" from the album October and "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" from The Joshua Tree both carry religious meaning. Bono writes the lyrics for almost every U2 song, and faith and politics keep surfacing in them. His early tone was rebellious. It hardened into political anger during the War, The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum eras.

  Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day said Bono is "a physical singer, like the leader of a gospel choir, and he gets lost in the melodic moment". Bono is classed as a tenor and says he has a three-octave range. One analysis of his studio recordings put the span between C and G. He often reaches for "whoa-oh-oh" vocalisations and a high, open-throated belt.

  The voice was not always his own. Early in U2's career he picked up an English accent without meaning to, by copying influences such as Siouxsie and the Banshees. He says he still sounds like Siouxsie on the first two albums. He found his own voice, he said, after hearing Joey Ramone sing at a gig in Dublin.

  Roots music reshaped his singing for The Joshua Tree. Spin wrote that he learned to command the full whisper-to-shout range of blues mannerisms. Bono credits loosening up, discovering other voices and holding back more. On "Where the Streets Have No Name" he varied his timbre widely and bent the timing with rubato and controlled vibrato. The author Susan Fast heard "With or Without You" as the first track where he pushed his range noticeably downward.

  The 1990s took him lower still. Fast described breathy, subdued colours on Achtung Baby, where he sometimes sang in two octaves at once. On "Zoo Station" and "The Fly", his vocals were heavily processed. Bono said dropping his register gave him a new vocabulary, since his tenor had limited him to certain words and tones. On Zooropa he underplayed his lung power, according to Jon Pareles, and used an operatic falsetto he calls the "Fat Lady" voice on "Lemon" and "Numb". Rolling Stone's Joe Gross later noted that he leans more on the croon than the belt.

  Outside U2, Bono has co-writing or singing credits on 80 solo and collaborative works. His partners include Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash, Luciano Pavarotti, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, B.B. King and Bruce Springsteen. On Robbie Robertson's 1987 album he played bass on one track and sang on another. In 1999 he and producer Andy Gill finished Michael Hutchence's unfinished song "Slide Away", adding a verse and Bono's vocals. In 2015 he joined D'banj, Waje and Omotola Jalade Ekeinde on "Strong Girl", a women's empowerment song.

  His partnership with the Edge runs beyond the band. They wrote the score for the Royal Shakespeare Company's London stage adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, which opened in 1990. They also wrote the 1995 James Bond theme "GoldenEye", performed by Tina Turner. Later they composed the music and lyrics for the Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and in 2011 they appeared with Reeve Carney on its single "Rise Above 1". With Jay-Z and Rihanna they recorded "Stranded (Haiti Mon Amour)" in 2010 for the Hope for Haiti Now telethon after the earthquake. On the 14th of May 2021 came "We Are the People" with Martin Garrix, the official song of UEFA Euro 2020.

  The pandemic brought another kind of collaboration. On the 17th of March 2020, Bono livestreamed a new song, "Let Your Love Be Known". A week later it reached YouTube as "#SING4LIFE", with will.i.am, Jennifer Hudson and Yoshiki. He has since worked with hip-hop artists, including DMX on "Skyscrapers" in 2021 and Lil Wayne on "The Days" in 2025. For Halsey's 2025 tour, he voiced the Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland-themed videos shown between songs.

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• 6. From Ethiopia to Washington

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  A benefit show for Amnesty International in 1979 planted the first seed. John Cleese of Monty Python and the producer Martin Lewis staged The Secret Policeman's Ball, and Bono says it "became a part of me" and "sowed a seed". Five years later, Bob Geldof recruited him for the Band Aid single "Do They Know It's Christmas?" Bono sang on the 2004 and 2014 versions too. Live Aid, organised by Geldof for the Ethiopian famine, was followed in 2005 by the 20th anniversary Live 8 concerts, where U2 also played.

  From September to October 1985, Bono and his wife Ali Hewson spent a month at a feeding centre in Ajibar, Ethiopia. With other volunteers they built a teaching programme of songs and one-act plays about health and hygiene for children. There he also heard how corruption, trade agreements and debts were blamed for feeding the famine and poverty. The trip is cited as the spark for his later focus on Africa. In 1986 U2 joined Amnesty International's Conspiracy of Hope tour in the United States, alongside Sting and Bryan Adams.

  In 1999 and 2000, Bono worked with the Jubilee 2000 coalition on its Drop the Debt campaign. He met U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, and Republicans including Jesse Helms, John Kasich, Orrin Hatch, J. Dennis Hastert and Dick Armey. His goal was bipartisan support for forgiving the debts of developing countries. During a March 2002 visit to the White House, he lobbied President George W. Bush for financial help for poorer nations. The next year Bush signed legislation authorising the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, credited with saving 17 million lives. Bush told Bono the initiative "never would have made it out of Congress had Bono not been engaged".

  In 2002, Bono and Bobby Shriver established DATA, which stands for Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa. Activists from Drop the Debt joined them, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, George Soros and Edward W. Scott funded it. In 2004 the pair co-founded the One Campaign to end extreme poverty and disease in Africa by building citizen support. It received a $3 million grant from the Gates Foundation. In 2006 they created (Red), which licenses the Product Red brand to companies. Each partner makes a labelled product, and a share of its profits goes to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

  The partners include American Express, Apple, Converse, Motorola, Microsoft, Dell, The Gap, Giorgio Armani, Nike and Starbucks, and Bono helped secure most of them. In October 2007 DATA and One merged in the United States under the name One, with Red as a sister organisation. By December 2018 One had 10 million members, 3 million of them in Africa. By December 2020 Red had raised $650 million for HIV/AIDS grants. In 2023 Bono announced he would leave the One board at the end of the year.

  Honours piled up. In 2005 Time named Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates its Persons of the Year. That year he was also among the first three TED Prize winners, which grants each a wish to change the world. Two of his three wishes concerned the One Campaign. The third was that every hospital, health clinic and school in Ethiopia be connected to the Internet. TED rejected it as a poor way to help Africa and organised a conference in Arusha, Tanzania, held in June 2007. Bono attended.

  The year 2007 brought an honorary knighthood, formally granted on the 29th of March at the Dublin residence of British Ambassador David Reddaway. On the 27th of September, Bono and DATA received the Philadelphia Liberty Medal. He said then: "When you are trapped by poverty, you are not free." He gave the $100,000 prize to DATA. In 2016 Glamour named him its Man of the Year, breaking a 26-year tradition of honouring only women, for a campaign called "Poverty is Sexist". In January 2025 President Joe Biden awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. A White House statement called him a "pioneering activist against AIDS and poverty".

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• 7. Business and Critics

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  In 1992 Bono and the Edge bought Dublin's Clarence Hotel, a two-star property with 70 bedrooms. They refurbished it into a five-star hotel with 49. They sold the leasehold in 2019 and the property itself four years later. In 2005 Bono, Ali Hewson and the designer Rogan Gregory founded the EDUN fashion label. The name is "nude" spelled backwards, suggesting both natural and the Garden of Eden. It aimed to help Africa through fair trade rather than direct aid.

  Elevation Partners, a private-equity firm where Bono served as a board member, tried to buy Eidos Interactive in 2005. It later invested in other entertainment businesses, including a minority stake in Forbes Media, reported to be worth about 194 million euros, or $250 million. The firm also held 1.5 per cent of Facebook, bought for $210 million. In February 2012, reports valued Bono's own stake at about US$1 billion. A 2015 article in Forbes said that figure rested on an incorrect attribution of shares. In 2016 he joined the board of the Rise Fund, a $2 billion impact fund founded by TPG.

  The National Journal named Bono the most politically effective celebrity of all time, and others called him the face of fusion philanthropy. On the 15th of December 2005, Paul Theroux published an op-ed in The New York Times titled "The Rock Star's Burden". He lumped Bono with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and called such stars "mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth". Theroux had lived in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer. He called the idea that Africa can be saved only by outside help "a destructive and misleading conceit". Bono answered in February 2006, calling his critics "cranks carping from the sidelines".

  Bloomberg Markets raised a sharper point in March 2007. Bono had used the 2006 Vertigo tour to promote the ONE Campaign, while U2 collected $389 million in gross ticket receipts, according to Billboard the second-most lucrative tour ever. Revenue from the tour was routed through companies mostly registered in Ireland and structured to minimise taxes. In November 2007, Jobs Selasie of African Aid Action argued that Bono's charities had increased corruption and dependency. He said they failed to work with African entrepreneurs and grassroots groups.

  Also in 2007, U2 moved part of its multimillion-euro song catalogue from Ireland to Amsterdam, six months before Ireland ended a tax exemption on musicians' royalties. Dutch tax law imposes low to non-existent rates on bands. Manager Paul McGuinness said the arrangement was legal and customary. The move prompted criticism in the Irish parliament, and the band replied that about 95 per cent of its business happened outside Ireland. A 2008 report by the charity Christian Aid singled out Bono among several wealthy figures over tax arrangements.

  The 2017 Paradise Papers named Bono as an investor in Nude Estates. The company bought a shopping mall in Lithuania in 2007 and moved its ownership to Nude Estates 1 in Guernsey, in an apparent attempt to avoid tax. Bono welcomed the Lithuanian tax authority's investigation, saying transparency was necessary and that he had campaigned for it himself. Nude Estates paid 53,000 euros in taxes and fines, and Bono severed ties with the company.

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• 8. Home, Canvas and Close Calls

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  Alison Stewart was a year below him at Mount Temple when Bono met her at the age of thirteen. When grief left him adrift and at odds with his father and brother, she began looking after him. They began dating in 1976, split briefly and reunited. By 1979 they were discussing marriage, on condition that his career took hold. They married on the 31st of August 1982 at All Saints Church in her home area of Raheny. The ceremony blended conventional Protestant rituals with those of the Shalom Friendship Christian group that Bono and other U2 members had joined.

  U2 owed money to Island Records, so the couple could not afford a honeymoon. The label's founder, Chris Blackwell, lent them his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica. Back in Ireland they moved into a small mews house in Howth, which they shared with the rest of the band. They have four children: Jordan, born on the 10th of May 1989, Eve, born on the 7th of July 1991, Elijah, born on the 17th of August 1999, and John Abraham, born on the 20th of May 2001. Elijah leads the rock band Inhaler, and Eve is an established actress.

  Bono sketches and paints as a hobby, a habit he took from his father. Bob Hewson used to add colour to black-and-white instant photographs of his wife. The Atlantic's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg said Bono "just walks around with an iPad and sketches everything". In 2003, Bono and his daughters Jordan and Eve painted original pictures for a book adaptation of Peter and the Wolf, released with music by Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer. His paintings were inspired by the 2001 death of his father. They were auctioned at Christie's in New York, with proceeds going to the Irish Hospice Foundation.

  He has also worked on film. Bono was executive producer of Bill Carter's 1995 documentary Miss Sarajevo. Carter had earlier asked U2 to draw attention to the Siege of Sarajevo during their 1993 Zoo TV concerts. In 2000 Bono was executive producer of The Million Dollar Hotel, developed from a story by himself and Nicholas Klein. In 2007 he sang "I Am the Walrus" as Dr. Robert in a cameo in Across the Universe. In 2021 he voiced the lion rock legend Clay Calloway in Sing 2.

  The war in Ukraine pulled his art and music into politics. On the 17th of March 2022, Nancy Pelosi recited a poem by Bono about Saint Patrick and the Russian invasion at a White House event. The public widely derided it. On the 8th of May 2022, at the invitation of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Bono and the Edge performed in a Kyiv metro station that served as a makeshift bomb shelter. In June 2023 Goldberg commissioned him to draw the cover of The Atlantic, a line portrait of Zelenskyy in the colours of the Ukrainian flag. U2 sold shirts, posters and hoodies with the portrait, and all proceeds went to United24 to buy ambulances for Ukraine.

  Sunglasses are almost a trademark. Bono has had glaucoma since the 1990s, which makes him sensitive to flash photography. He told Rolling Stone his eyes redden often, and that the glasses are "part vanity, it's part privacy, and part sensitivity". In January 1996, Jamaican police shot at a plane called Hemisphere Dancer, flown by the musician Jimmy Buffett, believing it was smuggling marijuana. Bono was aboard with Ali, two of their daughters, Chris Blackwell and co-pilot Bill Dindy. The damage was minimal, and the Jamaican government apologised.

  Body trouble came later. In May 2010, while rehearsing for the North American leg of the U2 360° Tour, Bono herniated a disk and badly compressed his sciatic nerve. He had emergency neurosurgery at a clinic in Munich, and the leg was postponed to 2011. On the 16th of November 2014, he crashed while cycling in New York's Central Park, trying to avoid another rider. Five hours of surgery repaired fractures of his shoulder blade, humerus, eye socket and little finger. The surgeon said the elbow bone was repaired with three metal plates and 18 screws. Bono wrote that it was unclear whether he would ever play guitar again.

  The worst scare stayed secret for years. During the 2016 recording sessions for Songs of Experience, Bono had what the Edge called a brush with mortality, and he reworked the album's lyrics afterward. Only in his 2022 memoir did he reveal open-heart surgery for a blister that had formed in his aorta because of a bicuspid aortic valve. David H. Adams performed the eight-hour operation at Mount Sinai Hospital, and Bono made a full recovery.

  That memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, appeared on the 1st of November 2022 and debuted at number two on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list. His narration of the audiobook won Audiobook of the Year at the 2024 Audie Awards. A 14-date tour called Stories of Surrender took him across North America and Europe, where he acted out passages and sang stripped-down U2 songs. Musicians Kate Ellis and Gemma Doherty, plus the producer Jacknife Lee, joined him. An 11-show residency at New York's Beacon Theatre followed in April and May 2023 and grossed $6.8 million. Filmed as Bono: Stories of Surrender, it reached Apple TV+ on the 30th of May 2025 and became the first feature-length film released as Apple Immersive Video for the Apple Vision Pro.

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