Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Whoever persuaded Bono he could sing?

Even his parents dismissed the idea, but his yowling has sold so many records that he has mistaken himself for a great rock star

Bono at Live 8 in Hyde Park in 2005. Credit: Alamy 
issue 17 December 2022

There are a few pop stars whose work I can’t help liking in spite of myself – their song-writing, that is. I’d be happy never to see the faces or hear the voices of Mick Hucknall or Chris Martin again, but the moment ‘Stars’ or ‘Trouble’ starts, I’m mesmerised – only to wonder crossly the minute the song ends: ‘Why couldn’t they have given it to someone with a decent voice?’ Think about it: dancers have choreographers and actors have scriptwriters, so why should we assume songwriters can sing? Bono’s another. I love some of his songs (‘One’, as performed by Johnny Cash, and ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’, by the Pet Shop Boys), but when faced with the awful actuality of his yowling, I remember what Prince once said about him: ‘You know what I’d do with a voice like that? Become a janitor.’

Surrender comes in at a whopping 563 pages, and I was already beginning to feel quite enervated by the time I’d read the press release informing us that Bono is an ‘artist and activist’ who has written an ‘honest and irreverent, intimate and profound’ book – which we’re lucky he got around to, considering his ‘more than 20 years of activism, dedicated to the fight against Aids and extreme poverty’.

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