BONO FIDE?

In a new documentary the U2 singer tries to shed his various personas and find his real self. He talks to RACHAEL DAVIS

- 

“I FEEL a bit of an imposter, if I’m honest,’ Bono, legendary frontman of Irish rock band U2, says with a wry smile from an interview room at the Cannes Film Festival.

“I'm here impersonating an actor, but they've let me away with it.”

Bono - born Paul David Hewson in Dublin, Ireland - is at the prestigious film festival promoting his feature-length documentary Bono: Stories of Surrender, a recording of his one-man theatrical event, which was in-turn inspired by his 2022 autobiography Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story.

The production traces his life from humble beginnings in the Irish capital to achieving international fame with U2, chronicling his relationships with his parents, his experiences of The Troubles and the wider conflict in Ireland and Northern Ireland, his relationship with childhood sweetheart Alison Stewart and, as the title suggests, his ruminations on what it means to surrender.

The 65-year-old vocalist and lyricist explores in intimate, albeit theatrical, detail the intricacies of his upbringing after losing his mother, who died after suffering a ruptured cerebral aneurysm at her father’s f uneral in 1974, and the fraught relationship he had with his father, who he felt didn’t always believe he had what it took to make it as a musician.

It is, he says, the story of “a man still confused about who he is, who might have begun to know who he was, but who certainly has a clearer knowledge of where he came from”.