The only U2 songs Bono’s father liked: “He didn’t know where we were going”
Artists tend to prefer letting their art speak for itself. To be fair, one can easily see where they’re coming from. As any creator will tell you, one feels naked enough, letting their work out at any level to go through it and define what inspired which individual part of the song/film/whatever is a vulnerability too far. Especially when they feel it might take away from the audience’s individual interpretation of the song. Then you get Bono from U2.
This is a man who has never been afraid to be direct in his lyricism in the first place, and who recently based his memoirs around explicitly detailing the inspirations behind 40 of his band’s biggest songs. The detail that the man born Paul Hewson goes into in the pages of Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story is, at some points, legitimately shocking. Especially when he goes into his complicated, at times fractious relationship with his father, Bob Hewson.
Like many of his rock ‘n’ roll peers and icons, Bono lost his mother at a young age. A subject he began dealing with in the opening track of their debut album Boy, ‘I Will Follow’ and by his own admission, never really stopped throughout his whole career. This a totally understandable admission from the man who’s probably kept Sunglass Hut in business for decades, but what he’s also been just as frank about is how much he strived to connect with his father through music.
After all, Bono credits his opera singer father with his singing voice. However, Hewson Sr, never paid much attention to his son’s music as it wasn’t to his taste, and wouldn’t sugarcoat that fact for the sake of his son’s feelings.
Put yourself in Bono’s lifted shoes for a second. Maybe I’m coddling one of the most successful people in the history of popular music, but even with a career like Bono’s, that would sting, right? However, a few songs broke through to him, as Bono himself detailed in a typically frank interview with Hot Press. He says, “I do remember he liked ‘The Unforgettable Fire’. Not the album but the song. He thought we were getting quite good around the time of Rattle And Hum – ‘When Love Comes To Town’ was a bit of a favourite. But he didn’t know where we were going in the ‘90s!”
It’s very telling that U2’s 1990s were their imperial phase, with Achtung Baby and the accompanying Zoo TV tour arguably their commercial and critical peak, yet his father’s opinion of it still plays on Bono’s mind. Perhaps it stings a little more as the 1990s were also when they recorded ‘Miss Sarajevo’ for ‘Original Soundtracks 1’, their 1995 curio released under the nomme de plume Passengers. The song was a duet with Luciano Pavarotti that seemed tailor-made to attract the attention of opera fanatics like Bob Hewson, but it wasn’t enough.
After his father passed away from cancer in 2001, Bono would put his relationship with him to tape in a typically honest, powerful song called ‘Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own’, a song that, perhaps powered by its sheer vulnerability, reached the top of the UK singles chart in 2005. A fitting tribute to a complicated man.
