Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story — Bono’s heartfelt but wordy memoir

“Words matter. I can use too many of them,” Bono writes in one of the 576 pages of his autobiography. The statement is self-deprecatory, but for the reader — dizzied by the U2 frontman’s prolixity, his outpouring of superlatives, metaphors and adjectives — it smacks of a boast. Bono can use too many words, and by goodness, he will.

They are at least his own words. Unlike many rock memoirs, Surrender is not ghosted. It charts the life of the singer with one of the world’s biggest bands in 40 chapters, each named after a U2 song. We watch Bono and his bandmates go from Dublin lads enamoured with punk rock and charismatic Christianity to stadium giants with estimated album sales of over 150mn. We also follow our expansive author as he turns into a major-league celebrity activist, raising billions by lobbying the rich and powerful to alleviate poverty and Aids in Africa.

The book is most engaging in its early stages, chronicling young Paul Hewson’s upbringing in a working-class neighbourhood in Dublin’s Northside. His full nickname, bestowed on him by a childhood friend, was Bono Vox of O’Connell Street. The Latin translation of “good voice” was unintended: the moniker was adapted from the name of a hearing-aid shop. In those days, the Hewson with the good voice was Bob, Bono’s opera-loving father, an amateur tenor.

He poignantly describes himself as having few memories of his mother. ‘The simple explanation is that in our house, when she died, she was never spoken of again’

When Bono became a professional singer, Bob would snipe that his son was “a baritone who thinks he’s a tenor”. In opera, tenors are heroes, while baritones are typecast as buffoons or villains. “One of the great put-downs and pretty accurate,” the younger Hewson admits.

Put-downs were common in their relationship, which was holed below the waterline by the death of Bono’s mother, Iris, when he was 14 in 1974. He poignantly describes himself as having few memories of her: “The simple explanation is that in our house, when she died, she was never spoken of again.”

This is the silence at the heart of Bono’s loquacious book. It sets the stage for an intriguingly unstable emotional dynamic, similar to the fraught father-son relationship that Bruce Springsteen revealed himself to have suffered in his excellent memoir Born to Run. But Bono does not muster the same depth of psychological self-engagement.

He tells us about suffering attacks of rage, yet prefers to skate past them. He writes at length and with affection about his wife Ali, a childhood sweetheart whom he started dating soon after his mother’s death. But the difficulties in what has evidently been a strong and successful marriage provoke some maddeningly imprecise flights of prose. “She was all the women I needed but fortunately/unfortunately not all at the same time . . . I had to accept she could never be known.” And so on.

U2 are his alternative family. Their rise takes place over the hundreds of pages at a strangely rapid clip. One moment they are thrilled to be playing London’s small Marquee Club in 1980, the next they are stealing the gargantuan stage at Wembley during Live Aid in 1985.

Famous names multiply as the band’s profile grows alongside Bono’s humanitarianism. When he asks, “So where is God?”, the reader’s first impulse is to head to the index. Somewhere between “Gates, Bill” and “Gorbachev, Mikhail”, right? But no. He turns out to be elsewhere. “God is with the poor and the vulnerable, and God is with us if we are with them,” writes Bono, a life-long Christian with a yen for third-way solutionism.

Improbably effusive descriptions mount up, from the “wonderful mischief” of Pope John Paul II to the “superwomen” who were 1990s supermodels. Discussing his identity as an “artist slash activist slash investor”, Bono declares that: “You might say I’m flying a hot-air balloon over some very interesting terrain.” But it gets harder to spot the interesting terrain as the hot air intensifies.

Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story by Bono, Cornerstone £25, 576 pages

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney is the FT’s pop music critic

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