According to a story which Harry Browne accepts is surely apocryphal, but which he includes in his book anyway, at a U2 gig in Glasgow the band’s singer silenced the audience and started to clap his hands slowly, whispering as he did so: ‘Every time I clap my hands a child in Africa dies.’ Someone in the audience shouted: ‘Well fuckin’ stop doin’ it then!’ The story is worth repeating because it reflects the way many people, even charitably disposed rock fans, feel about Bono.
They think his name — born Paul David Hewson, he appropriated the stage name from a Dublin hearing-aid shop that advertised devices called ‘Bono Vox’ — is ineffably silly, and join Sinead O’Connor in preferring to call him Bozo. They object to his wraparound shades, leather trousers and designer stubble, and possibly to his diminutive stature and huge wealth (half a billion dollars or so). They deplore his friendships with Tony Blair and George W. Bush. Above all, they loathe his self-righteousness.
It is for such people that Browne has written The Frontman which, he explains, is not ‘conventional biography’ or ‘an effort at psychological profiling’. Nor is it about Bono’s music. It is, rather, an extended, furious, sporadically informative and often badly written rant about the man who has emerged from a crowded field to epitomise the ‘delusions, pretentions and misdirections’ of celebrity philanthropy.
In a speech in Washington in 2006, Bono claimed to have had ‘a father who was Protestant and a mother who was Catholic in a country where the line between the two was, quite literally, often a battle line’. Actually his father was Catholic and his mother Protestant, and any sectarian battle lines were far from the Hewsons’ middle-class suburb.
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