“Still my favourite”: The greatest rock lyric ever written, according to Bono
If you’re reading this, you probably love music, but Bono has always been keen to assert that he likes it more than you. Or, at the very least, he’s made it clear that he’s engaged with it on a more profoundly spiritual level.
“Someone has likened prayer to being on a rough sea in a small boat with no oars,“ he writes in his new memoir, Surrender, inexplicably keeping the ‘someone’ anonymous. “All you have is a rope that, somewhere in the distance, is attached to the port. With that rope you can pull yourself closer to God. Songs are my prayers.”
The religiosity that he applies to music is indicative of how seriously he takes it. However, somewhat paradoxically, he is also happy to admit that part of the beauty of pop music is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. “I come from rock ‘n’ roll,“ he said while ironically accepting the Fulbright Prize for International Understanding. “I come from rock ‘n’ roll, and pop lyrics that sound like they are throwaway lines, and they are, but they mean so much.“
In the past, he has put a fine point on that by remarking, “Music can change the world because it can change people.” For instance, Bono, by his own admission, was given a God complex by one simple line he heard in his Dublin youth.
When reflecting on the music that changed him personally, there is one hit that ranks above any others. ”I was thinking about the Beatles ‘I Saw Her Standing There.’ It’s about as great a song lyric as I’ve ever heard. It does not describe itself as poetry. It’s better. It’s adolescent and it’s transcendent. It’s instant and it’s eternal. It’s fun, but not funny, although funny’s OK,” he said in his speech.
To prove that latter sentiment, he cited a funny track that he also rates as one of the finest lyrical songs ever written: Randy Newman’s classic ‘Short People’. Newman’s song is a wry masterpiece that made such a perfect point about the insanity of prejudice that it made him, ironically, the subject of death threats.
After it rose to second in the charts, Newman hilariously spent subsequent concerts singing with as much of his head guarded by the microphone as possible. In essence, pop music is a world unto itself. That’s something the U2 singer appreciates enormously. Some might say he has disappeared up the arse of pop music, in fact.
As Bono continues, ”I like agit prop as well as political satire. Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s going on’, Bob Dylan’s ‘the times they are a changing’,” are just some of the other lyrics he admires. “But ‘I saw her standing there’ is still my favourite,” he adds. It hooked him with its simple guile.
He was so moved by this open-ended line that he can even recall the moment that he first encountered it. “I heard it when I was a kid and it just trapped my imagination. Who was it who inspired the song, I thought to myself? Who was the ‘her’ in the song? Back then it might have been the girl next door,” he recalled. “Earlier times, I might have thought of it as my mother. But now I realise who Paul McCartney was singing to.”
Well, who was it? Bono’s conclusion is typically obfuscated. ”It was freedom. His and ours. You see, rock ‘n’ roll if it’s anything, it’s the sound of liberation,” he says, “political, sexual, spiritual. It’s liberation. It’s the howl, the crash-bang-wallop, you know, the cry of a soul setting itself on fire. I think rock ‘n’ roll is the sound of liberation and liberation is at the core of who I am.”
In truth, while that might sound a touch highfalutin, McCartney himself has opined that The Beatles were always trying to channel the changing of the times in their songs. The catalytic spirit of the ‘60s is deep-seated even in deceptively simple songs like ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, which arrived at the start of their journey back in the March of 1963.
“It was a period of – what else can you call it? – pandemonium,“ McCartney wrote in 1964: Eyes of the Storm.
“Although we had no perspective at the time, we were, like the world, experiencing a sexual awakening,” McCartney continues. “Our parents had fears of sexual diseases and all sorts of things like that, but by the middle of the 60s, we’d realised that we had a freedom that had never been available to their generation.”
And seemingly innocent, humble songs like ‘I Saw Her Standing There‘ were the ”vanguard of something more momentous, a revolution in the culture.” For better or for worse, it certainly changed Bono. But he’s still never revealed who he thinks McCartney saw standing there.
Bono’s favourite lyrical song:
- ‘I Saw Her Standing There‘ – The Beatles (Eternally top of the tree)
- ‘Short People’ – Randy Newman
- ‘What’s Going On‘ – Marvin Gaye
- ‘The Times They Are A-Changin‘‘ – Bob Dylan
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Classic Rock Newsletter
All the latest Classic Rock content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.