U2 frontman Bono’s memoir ‘40 Songs, One Story’ offers a front row seat to his, the band’s history

Having “an eccentric heart” that required eight hours of surgery in 2016. The cassettes that comprised U2’s van playlist the first time they toured the UK. How he likened 1997’s “Pop” to be “the sound of a balloon bursting” even if it did hit No. 1 in twenty-seven countries.

To paraphrase a song title from the band’s 2004 album “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb,” these are but a few of the crumbs from Paul Hewson’s table — a.k.a. U2 lead singer Bono — in “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story.” Every page of his 550-page memoir (which the book’s jacket initially calls a MEmoir, and then a WEmoir) is bursting with information. Beginning with his near-death aortic experience segueing into early memories of growing up in working-class Dublin, it spans to 2022, when Bono made a symbolic appearance in Ukraine along with the band’s guitarist, the Edge.

About that appearance Bono writes, “I feel that these are our kind of people, storytellers who want the Victory Day story to show and tell that their spirit is not broken by this brutal bombardment. Music is what we do, that’s what Edge and I say. That’s how we bear witness.”

Bono isn’t shy about dropping names. Celebrities and supermodels were a big part of U2’s image reinvention in the early 1990s.

“When you invite the Muse to come in,” Bono writes, “she may bring her sisters. Into the rolling improvisation that was the ZOO TV tour swept Christy Turlington, Helena Christensen, and Naomi Campbell. Three women we treasure to this day.”

Bono helped briefly set up Campbell with bandmate Adam Clayton, who was the best man at Bono’s 1982 wedding to longtime love Alison Stewart. While Bono doesn’t mention former Canadian prime minister Paul Martin whom he endorsed at a Liberal convention in 2003, there are political figures aplenty — Angela Merkel, Margaret Thatcher, George W. Bush. There are singer friends including INXS’ Michael Hutchence. Bono relates an emotional exchange the two of them had one night about Kurt Cobain shortly after he died, three years before Hutchence shockingly took his own life. A pontiff even makes an appearance: Pope John Paul II and the time he donned Bono’s “blue-tinted Fly shades.”

On top of this laundry list of personalities, Bono details the history of the band he has been the face of since 1976, albeit not in a totally linear fashion. Forty U2 songs from all but one of their fourteen studio albums are represented as chapter headings, including “Two Hearts Beat As One.” 2022 is also Bono’s fortieth wedding anniversary to Alison “Ali” Hewson (née Stewart), to whom “Surrender” is dedicated. He describes their honeymoon as more of a working vacation for U2’s 1983 album “War” on which that song appears. In describing his relationship with Ali as U2 was struggling to break out he says, “Rather than falling in love, we were climbing up toward it. We still are.”

Bono’s writing is methodical if fragmented at times, revelatory as if he’s always thinking in song lyrics. If you truly want to get lost in his many adjectives and similes, you may want to consider the audiobook version Bono narrates himself.

Lengthy but engrossing, it mimics what a great concert should be, always leaving you wanting more.

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