Bono: 'Our best work may be yet to come'
6 Jan 2014 19:09

Dublin frontman vows band can still make hits regardless of how old they are



Bono has insisted that U2 aren’t too old to continue to rock the world – and their best music is still to come.

The Dublin frontman vowed the group have the ability to bring out better tunes than Sunday Bloody Sunday and Pride In The Name Of Love regardless of how old they are.

He said: “Looking as a rock ‘n’ roll band, there’s no-one – no band – who has done their best work who has been around for 30 years.

“So we’re going to see, but that’s not true for film makers, that’s not true of a novelist, that’s not true of a poet. So why should that be true of a rock ‘n’ roll band?

“And I’m humbled that in our little post-punk combo from the northside of Dublin, to think that maybe our best work might be to come even if the odds are against us.”

He will be hoping to prove this when U2 bring out their new album in April, which goes back to their initial roots.

But Bono admitted that he isn’t completely “of sound mind” and uses song writing to fill emptiness within him.

He said: “I think it’s often emptiness, a void, and the attempt to fill the void is art and the artist is the person making up for absence.

“If you were completely of sound mind you would not need 70,000 people a night screaming, ‘I love you’ to feel normal. It’s the god shaped hole, I think, somebody called it once.”

And Bono claimed that how good his family life is often affects how easily he can write tunes.

He told CNN: “Performing for me comes on like a twitch, really. I have no choice. The song writing piece is different. It comes out in two ways.

“Despair and attempt to put things right that have been wrong or joy, just ebullience, you know, it’s just overflowing – my cup overflowed.

“When things are going very well in my life or in our family, the things are good, I write naturally. I just can’t stop writing. And – but also when I’m in a hole, I’m in a corner, I try to write myself out of it.”

And Bono admitted that despite his human rights work he finds political songs can be some of the dullest things going.

He said: “They can often be very, very boring. And we’ve written some good ones. They have to come from the place.

“If you set yourself a task to write a song, I don’t know how ever great the song will be. The great songs kind of write you.

“Often, I might be sitting here with you and I might say this is really on my mind. I’m very concerned about what’s going on in this geography. You would think I would write a song about it.

“It’s not like that. There’s a whole other thing going on in my personal life, there’s a whole other thing going on in my unconscious and it is what is going to come out.”

[www.irishmirror.ie]

SalU2, Nelson.