Bono

Bono (born May 10, 1960, Dublin, Ireland) is the lead singer for the popular Irish rock band U2 and a prominent human rights activist.

He was born of a Roman Catholic father and a Protestant mother (who died when he was just age 14). In Dublin in 1977, he and school friends David Evans (later “the Edge”), Larry Mullen, Jr., and Adam Clayton formed a band that would become U2. They shared a commitment not only to ambitious rock music but also to a deeply spiritual Christianity. Indeed, one of the few genuine threats to U2’s extraordinary longevity (a collaboration—with the manager, Paul McGuinness—of more than 30 years) occurred extremely early in the band’s life when three of its members, including Bono, considered joining a Christian fellowship. Throughout U2’s career, religiosity has infused the group’s songwriting and performance.

Led by vocalist Bono, U2 gained popularity on a global scale that few musicians have ever experienced. After releasing a pair of generally well-received albums, the band broke through in 1983 with War and had even greater success with The Unforgettable Fire in 1984. The next year, the band was approached by Jack Healy, head of Amnesty International USA, and was asked to join the “Conspiracy of Hope” tour to bring attention to human rights violations and encourage fans to fight them. Afterward Bono toured war-torn Nicaragua and El Salvador with groups seeking to help the victims of violence and poverty in those countries, and he grew increasingly interested in the plight of people in the less-developed world. His experiences informed the band’s biggest-selling and most influential recording, The Joshua Tree (1987), which ranked 26th when Rolling Stone magazine selected its top 500 albums of all time in 2003. How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004) became U2’s sixth number one album, and by 2006 the group had sold some 150 million albums over its career. With Songs of Experience (2017), its eighth number-one album, U2 became one of the few bands to have a chart-topping album in four consecutive decades. The group received numerous honours, including more than 20 Grammy Awards. In 2022 it was given a Kennedy Center Honor.

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Described by his close friend and U2 guitarist the Edge as the “chairman and founding member of Over-Achievers Anonymous, with an irrepressible lust to be great and a lust for life,” Bono decided, after participating in various benefits for humanitarian causes with other musicians, to deploy his fame and the access it brought to world leaders to commit himself to a second career as a global politician without portfolio. Dividing his time between fronting his remarkably durable band and meeting with presidents, prime ministers, economists, ministers, scientists, and philanthropists, Bono eventually helped found in 2002 Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa (DATA), a policy and advocacy organization that seeks to eradicate poverty, hunger, and the spread of AIDS in Africa through public awareness campaigns and in-country partnerships. That year he appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the legend “Can Bono Save the World?”

Despite his success at raising awareness, Bono was criticized by many in the aid community for his willingness to work with leaders whom many progressives consider to be anathema (particularly Pres. George W. Bush) in order to try to secure additional money for AIDS programs and debt relief for impoverished African countries. Bono’s most high-profile trip occurred in May 2002 when he traveled throughout Africa with U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, an excursion the Washington Post called a potential beginning of a “momentous…alliance between liberals and conservatives to launch a fresh assault on global poverty.” In 2004 Bono cofounded the ONE Campaign to fight extreme poverty and preventable disease worldwide but with a focus on Africa, and in 2008 DATA merged with ONE. In addition, in 2006 he helped create (Red), a project of the ONE Campaign that partners with companies and consumers for donations to fight AIDS in Africa. During the 2010s, however, Bono’s activism mostly took place behind the scenes. In 2022 he released the memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story.