Bono
- Profession: Musician
- Place/Date of Birth: Dublin, Ireland, 10 May 2020
Neil Tennant told the Daily Mirror: "People expect them (benefit concerts) nowadays. The Princess Diana concert is fair enough, but I feel more uneasy about the Al Gore thing.
"I’ve always been against the ideas of rock stars lecturing people as if they know something the rest of us don’t - it looks arrogant.
"It’s not as if they have a private source of information. To state the obvious as if you are the only person that knows it is intellectually weak. Like Bono - he uses his celebrity, but in doing so he increases his celebrity. I’m never totally convinced that the rest of U2 feel comfortable with that."
Bono’s fireplace flap - May 17 2007
It’s a good job that Bono has a few homes to choose from, because his swanky
The U2 front-man mustered his very best diplomacy skills when he was forced to let other occupants of his apartment building know that smoke from their fireplaces was wafting into his two-floor penthouse on the
"Bono was so nice," Leni May, a fellow occupant of the luxury pre-war building told the New York Times.
"He said, ’Listen, whatever I can do to get these things working, but it’s emptying into my apartment and I can’t have smoke like that’," said Leni, adding that Bono told the building’s board members that one of his four children suffers from asthma.
According to the newspaper, the building’s residents, which include Dustin Hoffman and Diane Keaton, have been told not to use their fireplaces while the issue is looked in to.
A spokesperson for U2’s management company, Principle Management, confirmed the grievance, but said that the singer was simply raising a health and safety issue, not a personal complaint against his famous neighbours.
"This is not a Bono issue," said the spokesperson, "It’s a building issue. It’s about health and safety regulations."
Bono attacks world’s rich on Africa - May 16 2007
The world’s biggest industrial countries are failing to keep up with financial promises they made to Africa, rock star Bono has said, calling a new progress report "a cold shower" for the Group of Eight.
G8 members in 2004/06 contributed less than half the amount needed to make good their promises to double
That is according to a report released by Data - Debt, Aids, Trade, Africa - the
"The G8 are sleepwalking into a crisis of credibility. I know the Data report will feel like a cold shower, but I hope it will wake us all up," Bono said in
Bono is urging German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who chairs a G8 summit in
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Born Paul David Hewson in Dublin 1960, Bono has gone on to become one of the biggest names in the international music industry.
The name Bono derives from the days prior to U2 and roughly translates from Latin as ‘good voice’. He was christened as such during his teenage years, initially after a hearing aid shop in Dublin – he sang so loudly that his friends used to say he was singing for the deaf. Despite it’s early origins and perhaps not so flattering connotations the name stuck.
It was in 1976 that Bono took his first step on the music ladder when he responded to an ad to form a rock band. Alongside The Edge, Dick Evans, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr., The Hype was formed – when Dick Evans left the group the remaining four changed the name to U2.
The band went onto release a catalogue of prestigious albums, such as The Joshua Tree and War, which alongside offering mainstream recognition, spoke of social and political themes. Bono’s often outspoken criticisms of the political unrest in Ireland earned him a bit of a reputation - to the point that Provisional IRA paramilitaries threatened to kidnap him following his ‘f*ck the revolution’ speech.
It was at roughly this time that Bono made a public announcement, via Rolling Stone magazine, about his motivations to become actively involved in social and political causes. Alongside his participation with Band Aid and Live Aid projects, he has performed in aid of Amnesty. In more recent years his campaigning has grown to involve active work for the eradication of third world debt and awareness of the plight of both poverty and AIDS in Africa.
His political work has taken him around the world as much as his musical career and in the past decade he has met a number of world leaders, including President George W Bush. He has also be influential in establishing a number of working models that aim to ease to plight of poverty, including DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa), EDUN and Product Red.
His work has not gone unnoticed. In 2003, 2005 and 2006 Bono was a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, he has twice been named as one of the ‘100 most influential people’ of the year by Time magazine – in 2005 he came top of the poll alongside Bill and Melinda Gates. In 2007 he was awarded an honorary Knighthood to the British Empire, whilst Portugal awarded him an Order of Liberty and Chile gave him an International Presidential medal of honour.
Updated May 2007
November 2007