The bandmates also collaborated together on the music for the trouble-plagued Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which ran on Broadway, and a London stage adaptation of A Clockwork Orange.Ĥ6. Bono was close friends with late INXS singer Michael Hutchence, who died in an apparent suicide in 1997. They're similar and they have similar roles in my life. Ali and Edge are definitely the friends I don't worry about. 'I tend to put people into two categories: friends I worry about and friends I don't worry about. 'He's one of my very best friends,' the singer said. Bono and The Edge own the Clarence Hotel in Dublin together. He may end up doing more good out of office than he did in-and he did an awful lot when he was in.'Ĥ4. The kids, we'll all go around to his house. 'We're going to have lunch next Sunday, I think. I see him all the time,' Bono said in 2005. As for former President Bill Clinton, 'I love him. Our clients are the people who are not in the president's ear.' He liked Bush as a person, he said.ģ6. You represent a constituency that has no power, no vote, in the West, but whose lives are hugely affected by our body politic. Asked how, exactly, he broke bread with someone like President Bush, considering the war in Iraq and other policies seemingly antithetical to Bono's mission statement as an activist, Bono said he was simply there as a 'single-issue protagonist. 'I do get depressed on occasion,' he told Assayas, 'a bit black about the uphill nature of this particular struggle.'ģ5. In 2002, Bono admitted that it was hard to stay upbeat all the time when it came to effecting real change. Also in the 1980s, 'Yoko came up to me when I was in my twenties, and she put her hand on me and she said, 'You are John's son.' What an amazing compliment!'ģ4. The first rock and roll song he heard was The Beatles' 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' at age 4, and the first song he ever learned to play on guitar was 'Dear Prudence.' In 1985, he shared the Live Aid stage with Paul McCartney. He considers Boy 'remarkably uplifting, considering the subject matter.'ġ5. (That has since changed, and now he appreciates a good restaurant.)ġ4. He would eat airplane food that his brother brought home from his job working IT for the national airline for lunch and dinner. After Iris died, he lost his taste for any food and stopped enjoying mealtimes. It's still with me.' And to that day, 'I like to be around people,' as opposed to by himself.ġ3. 'I guess fear converts to anger pretty quickly. Bono cites his mother's death (of a brain aneurysm she suffered at her father's funeral) in 1974, when he was 14, as the point where his self-confidence as a lad just 'cracked,' as he told Michka Assayas for the 2005 book Bono. She was in the same class as The Edge, a year behind him.ġ2. Bono also met Alison Stewart at Mount Temple, in 1976. Dik joined Virgin Prunes in 1978, after which the foursome rechristened themselves U2-which is a type of American spy plane.ĩ. They were called Feedback for a few months, and then The Hype. found each other when the first three (as well as Edge's older brother Dik Evans) responded to a notice Mullen posted at Mount Temple Comprehensive School looking for musicians to make a band. 25, 1976, 16-year-old Bono, 15-year-old The Edge (David Evans), Adam Clayton and 14-year-old Larry Mullen Jr. 'Because people who spilled out of the pubs on a Friday night and threw up on the laneway-we thought we were better than them.'Ĩ. They'd get in fights, but 'we didn't drink,' he told Rolling Stone. As a member of the not particularly nefarious street gang Lypton Village ( Monty Python fans who put on performances in the city center meant to provoke), young Paul had several nicknames, including Bono Vox of O'Connell Street ( bonavox roughly meaning 'good voice' in Latin) and, eventually, just Bono.ħ.

U2 members