Few autobiographies are as suited to audio as Surrender, in which U2 frontman Bono reflects on nearly 50 years in music using his band’s songs as his guide. The book opens with the singer – who narrates – undergoing heart surgery to deal with a blister on his aorta that was ready to “put me in the next life faster than I can make an emergency call”.
He looks back on his life, describing the death of his mother from a stroke when he was 14 – he believes it was this that led him to become a performer, seeking the love from audiences that he had lost – and his troubled relationship with his emotionally distant, opera-loving father. Surrender also plots the formation of U2 with a group of school friends and the band’s ascent into a stadium-conquering behemoth. As Bono’s world-saving impulses kick in, he acknowledges the hubris of Band Aid and of leaving his young family for long periods to rescue children on the other side of the world. He also dearly wishes he hadn’t inflicted U2’s music on millions of iTunes users without their consent: “We didn’t just put our bottle of milk at the door but in every fridge in every house in town,” he notes.
In this audio version, the narrative is interspersed with the music that Bono has loved: along with snippets of the Clash and Patti Smith, there are pared-back versions of U2 songs including “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “With Or Without You”. That these songs are stripped of their bombast feels apt in a music memoir characterised by introspection and unexpected humility.
• Surrender is available via Penguin Audio, 20hr 25min
Further listening
Tackle!
Jilly Cooper, Penguin Audio, 11hr 21min
Katherine Parkinson narrates the latest novel by the Riders author, in which Rutshire alpha male Rupert Campbell-Black is the improbable owner of a football team.
Sherlock Holmes: The Complete BBC Collection
Arthur Conan Doyle, BBC Audio, 48hr 33min
A cast including Clive Merrison, Michael Williams, Judi Dench and Harriet Walter, appear in 60 dramatised Holmes stories unearthed from the BBC archives.
