Bono opened his book tour Wednesday night in what he called a \u201ctransgressive\u201d mood, a little bit guilty for appearing on stage with three musicians who were not his fellow members of U2 and otherwise singing, joking and shouting out his life story to thousands of adoring fans at Manhattan\u2019s Beacon Theatre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He even performed one song in Italian, a flawlessly operatic take of \u201cTorna a Surriento.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis is all a little surreal,\u201d he noted at one point. \u201cBut it seems to be going well.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The 62-year-old singer, songwriter and humanitarian described himself as an eternal boy (born Paul David Hewson) with his fists \u201cin the air,\u201d a \u201cgrandstanding\u201d rock star and a baritone trying to be a tenor. He is now a published and best-selling author, his \u201cSurrender: 40 Songs, One Story\u201d out this week and already in the top 10 on Amazon.com.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Through \u201cSunday Bloody Sunday,\u201d \u201cWhere the Streets Have No Name\u201d and other U2 classics, he traces his biography from his stifling childhood home in Dublin and the grief over the early death of his mother Iris Hewson to the formation of the band that made him a global celebrity and his enduring marriage to Alison Stewart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Former President Bill Clinton, Tom Hanks and U2 guitarist The Edge were among his famous admirers in the audience, which often stood and cheered and sang along. For the 90-minute plus \u201cStories of Surrender\u201d show, billed as \u201can evening of words, music, and some mischief,\u201d Bono wore a plain black blazer, matching pants and added color with his orange-tinted glasses. He opened with an account from his book of his heart surgery in 2016, but otherwise pranced and leapt like a man who had never seen the inside of a hospital and belted out songs written decades ago without any sense he had forgotten what inspired them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ticket prices were rock star levels: thousands of dollars for the best seats and well into the hundreds even for obstructed views. Compared to a U2 show, the setting was relatively intimate \u2014 handwritten illustrations on screens hanging toward the back of the stage and a few tables and chairs that Bono used as props to climb on or to simulate conversations. With warm and comic mimicry, he recalled phone calls with Luciano Pavarotti and his pleas of \u201cBono, Bono, Bono\u201d as the opera star recruited him to perform at a benefit show in Modena, Italy, and once turned up at U2\u2032s studio on short notice \u2014 with a film crew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bono also re-enacted his many tense bar room meetings with his father, who seemed to regard his son\u2019s career as some kind of failed business venture. Brendan Robert Hewson\u2019s rough facade did once collapse unexpectedly \u2014 when he met Princess Diana, an encounter Bono described as like watching centuries of Irish loathing of the royals \u201cgone in eight seconds.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOne princess, and we\u2019re even,\u201d Bono added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He spoke often of loss, of his mother when he was a teenager and of his father in 2001. But he also described his life as a story of presence, whether of his religious faith, his wife and children, or of his bandmates. After what he called the characteristic Irish response to a child\u2019s outsized ambitions \u2014 to pretend they don\u2019t exist \u2014 he called himself \u201cblessed,\u201d and added that \u201cwhat was silence has been filled, mostly, with music.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bono opened his book tour Wednesday night in what he called a \u201ctransgressive\u201d mood, a little bit guilty for appearing on stage with three musicians who were not his fellow members of U2 and otherwise singing, joking and shouting out his life story to thousands of adoring fans at Manhattan\u2019s Beacon Theatre. He even performed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":27083,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_post_source_name":"","_post_source_url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[5310,11941,3195,6573,11935,8433,7599,9214,287,12679,9233,7234,9309,11364,9026,6789,9997,6825,9259,1392,11237,5802,5058,11973,7039,3805,10390,2773,6978,6838,9210,5377,12524,9802,8434,594],"class_list":["post-27082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-amazon","tag-bill","tag-bill-clinton","tag-black","tag-blessed","tag-bono","tag-celebrity","tag-child","tag-children","tag-clinton","tag-collapse","tag-death","tag-dollars","tag-dublin","tag-fans","tag-grief","tag-guilty","tag-hospital","tag-italian","tag-italy","tag-manhattan","tag-marriage","tag-music","tag-one","tag-phone","tag-president","tag-prices","tag-princess-diana","tag-rock","tag-singer","tag-surgery","tag-surrender","tag-ticket","tag-torna","tag-u2","tag-who"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27082\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}