‘I wanted to avoid work!’ U2’s Bono says he ‘struggled to concentrate on anything in school except girls and music’ in new memoir – as he boasts he was drawn to write ‘simple’ songs despite ‘not being able to play guitar’
U2 musician Bono is set to release a candid memoir in which he describes being drawn to ‘simple’ songs and became a musician because he ‘wanted to avoid work.’
The activist, 62, from Dublin, has announced his autobiography ‘Surrender’ will be published by Penguin Random House on November 1.
Despite having been in an award-winning band since the 1970s, the memoir is Bono’s first time writing about his life as a musician, activist and family man.
In the book, he reveals how he was inspired to start learning guitar after listening to Glad To See You Go from the Ramones Leave Home as an 18-year-old and thinking it sounded ‘simple.’
He explains how he didn’t feel inclined to take on a job, writing: ‘A job is the thing where you do something you don’t really like for eight hours a day for five or six days a week in return for money to the stuff on the weekend that you want to do all the time.
‘I know I would like to avoid work. I know that if I could do what I love then I would never have to work a day in my life.’
In a video illustrating an extract from Surrender’s ‘Out of Control’ chapter, Bono explains how he started writing U2’s first single on 10th May 1978, his 18th birthday.
He says: ‘I’m jumping around the living room of 10 Cedarwood Road to the sound of Glad To See You Go from the Ramones Leave Home.
‘These songs are so simple and yet they express a complexity that’s way more relevant in my life than Dostoevsky Crime And Punishment, which I’ve just finished.
‘It took me three and a half weeks to read. This album takes only 29 minutes 57 seconds.’
He continues: ‘Songs so simple that even I can play them on guitar and I don’t play guitar.
‘Songs so simple, even I might be able to write one.
‘This would be some kind of personal revolution, the reverberations of which might be felt all the way upstairs to the empty room of my older brother Norman, or more importantly still down the hallway to the kitchen, where the dad is sitting.
‘My dad who wants to talk to me about getting a job. A job?’
However Bono explains there was a ‘problem’ with his decision not to get a job, saying: ‘Even in my pimple teenage obnoxiousness I know that this is unlikely if I’m not great at something. And I am not great at something.’
Bono goes onto say that his friend lost a girlfriend to him because of his abilities as a musician.
He continues: ‘It wasn’t so long ago that I was smart at school but lately I can’t concentrate on anything except girls and music.
‘I’m smart enough to see a correlation.’
Elsewhere, he reveals that he considered being a journalist but was having problems at school that would make it difficult to get the necessary qualifications.
He says: ‘I don’t yet know that rock and roll, Punk Rock in particular will prove my liberation.