U2 fans had wondered how Bono almost had death experience. Usually a garrulous type, Bono refused to elaborate on this intense health scare, saying he would discuss it in due time. That time arrives in the opening pages of “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story” (Knopf, 576 pp.) He also went on to speak about bassist Adam Clayton.
Bono opens up on Adam Clayton
Bono’s love for his bandmates is sprinkled among remembrances in numerous chapters, but his recounting of a 1993 incident during the band’s Zoo TV tour in Sydney is as heart wrenching as it is detailed.
Having “overshot the runway with drink and drugs,” Clayton missed the taping of a TV performance with U2. Band manager Paul McGuinness informed the group that Clayton would survive, but was “not OK” after the bassist was found unconscious in his hotel room. The band performed for the first time without a founding member, but, Bono says, “We got through. We recovered. Adam has been in recovery ever since.”
In the memory he had also revealed that he was born, with “an eccentric heart,” and one that required eight hours of surgery to repair a “blister” on his aorta. Bono also turned his recollections of the 2016 operation – the doctor “wielding his blade with the combined forces of science and butchery,” his desire to have the warmth of his wife, Ali, beside him – into a metaphor for success.
