Bono has spoken for the first time about the shocking family revelation he discovered just a year before his father Bob’s death in the 2001. The leader of the group U2 has a half brother who was born as a result of an extramarital affair that Bob had while he was still married to his mother Iris and they all lived together in their family home in Dublin.
“ I have another brother, whom I love and adore, who I didn’t know I had“, explained the singer on BBC Radio’s ‘Desert Island Discs’ programme.
Learn about the existence of a medium brother and the secret romance that his father kept helped the singer understand much better why he behaved as he did in the face of his mother’s sudden death when he was 14 years. “My father was going through a lot. His head was elsewhere because his heart was elsewhere“, has recognized the leader of U2.
The interpreter of hits like ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ has added that nobody, neither Iris nor her older brother Norman, knew of the existence of another son, whose identity he prefers to protect. Although the timeline of his stepbrother’s birth remains unclear, they were at least able to talk about it before Bob died at the age of 60 years.
“I asked him if he loved my mother, and he said yes. And I said, ‘How can something like this happen? ‘. And she told me that she was trying to fix things, trying to do the right thing. He wasn’t apologizing, he just said that those were the facts. I’ve already made my peace with it“.
The “complicated relationship” between father and son worsened considerably after Iris’s death, but today Bono finally understands that his father was “coping with many things”. That caused any anger he might have felt about the secret he kept from her for decades to be replaced by a feeling of guilt that he was able to put himself in her place, and now he regrets not having offered her more support in the difficult moments that he had to face alone.
“I feel like I wasn’t there for him, really, the way I should be,” he assured. “I apologized to my father in a small chapel in France after he passed away. I went to that little chapel, where there was no one. I lit a candle, got down on my knees and said, ‘Look, I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you. You’ve been through a lot and please forgive me.’ And I felt free“.
Listen to the full interview here
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