The 13 Best U2 Stories From Bono’s Memoir, Surrender
Surrender makes clear early on that Bono had that bravado from U2’s first days. One example: the band’s first audition, for a children’s-TV program called Young Line, in 1978. U2 had original songs at the time, but the band had been arguing about what to play — so when the producer asked for an original, Bono passed off “the not-very-but-quite-famous Ramones tune ‘Glad to See You Go’” as a U2 cut. The band made it onto the show, where they played “Street Mission,” an early song of theirs. “No one noticed,” Bono writes. “Another miracle attributable to Joey Ramone.
Bono wanted John Lennon to produce Boy before he died.
Speaking of confidence, how’s this? Bono had been writing a letter to Lennon in 1979, months before his assassination, to ask him to produce the band’s debut album, Boy. “We’d written a song called ‘The Dream Is Over’ sparked by his throwaway explanation of the demise of the Fab Four. Now, as our dream was beginning, the Beatles’ dream was over,” Bono explains. Instead, 1980’s Boy began U2’s early partnership with Steve Lillywhite, who also produced the two following albums, October and War.
The Edge thought God wanted him to quit U2 — but their manager said he didn’t.
U2’s struggles to square their Christian faith with their rock-star life, especially in the early years, have been well documented. But Surrender sheds more light on the moment when their guitarist, the Edge, felt God was calling him to quit the band before the 1981 release of October. Bono decided he wouldn’t stay in the band without the Edge, but what ultimately kept them together was a quick-witted response from their longtime manager, Paul McGuinness (an atheist). Here’s how Bono tells it:
“Do you think God would have you break a legal contract? A contract that I have signed, on your behalf, a legal contract for you to go on tour? How could it be possible for this God of yours to want you to break the law and not fulfill your responsibilities to do this tour?
What sort of a God is this?”
