The singer Bono had “the greatest voice the human ear has ever experienced”
The heart behind any great U2 song always comes from Bono soaring over everything else in the band.
While his voice can be either a dealbreaker or one of the band’s greatest strengths, you can’t really deny any of the band’s material once he starts singing, almost like he’s screaming from the other side of the speakers and trying to pull the listener into his world. But there are far more people who were willing to push themselves farther than Bono ever could whenever they had a microphone in their hands.
Then again, Bono wasn’t the kind of person to spend the rest of his life chasing after perfection. He wanted to capture a moment every time he sang, and while a lot of the perfectionism came back to the Edge, trying to make the greatest guitar orchestra that anyone had ever heard, there was a certain passion in Bono’s voice that managed to encapsulate every single emotion he ever felt whenever he sang.
Because when you think about Bono’s heroes, all of them left a few emotional scars in the middle of their records as well. It wasn’t easy for John Lennon to tear through his voice on Plastic Ono Band, and The Clash tried their hardest to make sure every single song felt like the end of the world, so the least that Bono could do was follow in their footsteps and make his music feel like it could shift the world on its axis.
And while there were a few times where he managed to actually pull it off, like during the band’s performance at Live Aid, there were also more than a few times where he got to see the professionals up close. No one was going to doubt someone like Bob Dylan or BB King or a second whenever they started singing from their heart, but if he wanted to find singers that touched his heart, it was always going to be coming from back home.
There’s already the long-running gag Bono tries to pull by claiming that every single artist that he ever loved has some Irish blood in them, but things started to shift when he heard what artists like Sinéad O’Connor could do with their voices. This was the sound of pure emotion, but even O’Connor’s croon was nothing compared to what he heard when he first shot a video with the band Clannad for the first time.
All of them were masters of their instruments, but when Maire Ni Bhraonain opened her mouth to sing, Bono practically went to pieces when he heard a human voice do that, saying, “I recorded a collaboration with Clannad, ‘In a Lifetime’. I am the man who can’t say no, but I loved Maire Ni Bharaonain. I think she has one of the greatest voices the human ear has ever experienced. And I had a great time making the video.”
But a lot of what she does is a lot more subtle than the average belter. Whenever people bring up the greatest singers of all time, people like Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston are bound to come up, but what made Clannad work was having this voice in the middle of everything that was far more introspective and had a soft-spoken beauty to it that could also reach into the greatest heights that anyone had ever known.
And when listening to some of U2’s later records, you can hear Bono trying to tap into that same kind of emotional vulnerability whenever he sings. Does he succeed all the time? Absolutely not, but when he does manage to find that comfortable middle ground, he’s not only looking to make the best pop song he can. He wants to celebrate the heritage of his homeland by honouring what set his heart on fire.
