It seems that U2’s frontman, Bono, isn’t exactly the band’s biggest fan.
In an interview he did The Hollywood Reporter’s “Awards Chatter” podcast, the 61-year-old singer admitted that hearing some of U2’s songs in the radio is enough to make him go “scarlet” red and that he isn’t all that crazy about “U2” as a band name either, no matter how many decades have passed since their debut.
U2, Seattle 14 May 2017
“I’ve been in the car when one of our songs has come on the radio and I’ve been the color of, as we say in Dublin, scarlet,” Bono had said. “I’m just so embarrassed… I look back and go, ‘God!'”
He went on to explain that he thought that U2 “sounded incredible” at the time but felt that his vocals ruined the music somehow because of the way he sounded when singing. “I find the voice very strange and not macho. And my Irish macho was kind of strained by that,” he shared.
“I was singing out of my body because I wasn’t thinking about singing. That’s the thing: We didn’t know a lot about music. We were making it up. When you don’t have music theory at that level, you write your own.”
U2’s lead gutiarist, the Edge, then added that the songs were “written for the stage more than they were written on the radio.”
Regarding the band’s name, Bono lamented that he continues to have reservations about it to this day.
the Edge spoke up about it first, sharing: “It wasn’t that it jumped out to us the most, but it was the one that we hated the least. We loved that it was not obvious from the name how this band would sound like or be about. At that age, we understood that we didn’t want to be lumped in with other artists… We didn’t really love it at first.”
“I still don’t. I really don’t. I was late into some kind of dyslexia,” Bono then said. “I didn’t realize that the Beatles was a bad pun either. In our head it was like the spy plane, U-boat, it was futuristic, but then as it turned out to imply this kind of acquiescence, no I don’t like that name. I still don’t really like the name.”
Well, us fans are just happy that the band is still making amazing music, despite this surprising revelation.
(ALSO READ: U2 Says They Regret Not Performing in the Philippines Earlier)
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