Entertainment
Bono admits he dislikes U2’s name and gets ’embarrassed’ listening to old songs
Bono thinks his voice sounds ‘strained’ in early material (Picture: Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images)
Bono hasn’t sugarcoated how he really feels about U2’s name and early music, admitting that he sometimes feels ‘embarrassed’ listening to their tracks.
For decades, U2 has been a household name, releasing iconic songs from Beautiful Day to With Or Without You.
However, lead vocalist Bono – whose real name is Paul Hewson – confessed that despite the years that have gone by, he hasn’t grown fond of the group’s title.
While speaking in a podcast interview with Bono, U2 guitarist The Edge explained that the band was originally called The Hype, but ended up changing it to U2 following a suggestion by their friend and graphic artist Steve Averill.
‘Of the suggestions, it wasn’t that it jumped out to us as the name we were really looking for, but it was the one that we hated the least. And what we loved about it was that it was not obvious from the name what this band would sound like or be about. It felt fresh in that sense,’ he said.
Speaking on the Awards Chatter podcast, The Edge added: ‘It was the one we chose and we didn’t really love it at first,’ before Bono piped up to say: ‘I still don’t. I really don’t.’
The Irish rock band was first formed in 1976 (Picture: Florian Seefried/Getty Images)
Making his point clear, the singer continued: ‘But I was late into some kind of dyslexia, I didn’t realise that the Beatles was a bad pun either.
‘If we’d thought the implications of the letter and the number, in our head, it was like, the spy plane, it was a U-boat, it was futuristic. But then as it turned out to imply this kind of acquiescence, no, I don’t like that name. I still don’t really like the name.’
Looking back on some of U2’s early recordings, Bono said that in his opinion, his voice sounded ‘very strained’, joking that he ‘only became a singer recently’.
‘I’ve been in a car when one of our songs has come on the radio, and I’ve been the colour of – as we say in Dublin – scarlet,’ he stated.
‘I’m just embarrassed. I do think U2 pushes out the boat on embarrassment quite a lot. And maybe that’s the place to be as an artist is right at the edge of your level of pain for embarrassment, your level of embarrassment.’
More: Bono
Bono praised his fellow band members, saying that when listening to their music, the band ‘sound incredible’, but he found his own vocals ‘very strained’.
‘A big discovery for me was listening to the Ramones and hearing the beautiful kind of sound of Joey Ramone and realising I didn’t have to be that rock and roll singer. But I only became a singer recently. Maybe it hasn’t happened yet for some people’s ears, and I understand that,’ he quipped.
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