U2 frontman Bono is giving fans a deeply intimate look inside his life in Bono: Stories of Surrender, the upcoming Apple+ documentary that is set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival next month.
Ahead of the documentary’s premiere, the trailer for the film dropped on Wednesday, April 30 — a teaser that included several candid admissions from the 64-year-old “Beautiful Day” artist about his childhood.
Bono (real name: Paul David Hewson), opened up about the devastating loss of his mother when he was 14 years old — and how his father dealt with it at the time.
“Last time I saw my mother alive was at her own father’s funeral,” Bono shared in the documentary. She died three days later. “It sounds almost too Irish, I know. My father’s response to this tragedy was to never speak of her again.”
“I craved my father’s attention,” the legendary rocker continued. “So I sang louder and louder.”
Bono, in his memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, recalled how in the aftermath of his mother’s death, not only did his father not speak about her to neither Bono nor his older brother, “I fear it was worse than that,” he wrote. “That we rarely thought of her again.”
“We were three Irish men, and we avoided the pain that we knew would come from thinking and speaking about her,” he recalled.
Though the stories the 22-time Grammy winner tells in the documentary are personal, they aren’t all painful. At the beginning of the trailer, Bono even quips that the film is about “tall tales from a short rockstar.”
Elsewhere in the teaser, the “In a Little While” singer recalls meeting his wife, Ali Hewson, “the same week I joined U2” in 1976 — when they were just preteens. The couple, who wed in 1982, share four children: daughters Jordan, 35, Eve, 33, and sons Elijah, 25 (who has followed in his father’s footsteps and fronts his own successful band, Inhaler), and John, 23.
“The most extraordinary thing about my life,” Bono said in the two-minute trailer, “is the people I’m in relationships with.”
