#2330 - Bono

Joe Rogan (0:01)

Joe Rogan Podcast, checking out The Joe Rogan Experience. Showing by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan (0:13)

I fucking loved the film. It was really great.

Bono (0:15)

You saw it?

Joe Rogan (0:15)

I watched it last night.

Bono (0:16)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

It was cool too, because I always feel special when I got to enter in the password because I know that nobody else has seen it yet. I got to enter in the email and the password and I watched it, and I screen mirrored it on the TV. It was great, man.

It was almost like a fever dream. It was wild, the way you set it up, all black and white.

Bono (0:35)

Yeah, you get past the first three minutes. Even my own mates are like, oh, don't do that. It's like, wow. It is like a fever dream, that opening, but that really happened to me.

Joe Rogan (0:47)

It was great, man. It's great. It's also like I love the way you did it. You played the beginning of some songs, and you talked about the origin of the songs. The thing that I have a hard time believing, though, is that you weren't a good singer when you were young.

Bono (1:00)

Well, punk rock, you're a bit of a shouter. That's really what you do. You just get up there and shout. I'm shouting at God. I'm shouting at everyone. I'm shouting at the band. That scene when we're doing I Will Follow, that's really true.

I'm there and we're improvising this song that becomes, I will follow if you walk away, walk away, walk away. I'm just like this woman. We're trying to just do something original.

SPEAKER_4 (1:28)

We're really ripping off.

Bono (1:30)

The irony is we're really ripping off Public Image Limited. This Johnny Rotten became John Lydon again for this band called Public Image Limited back in the late 70s.

I'm singing about, it's a suicide note really. I'm singing about this, and they're saying like, what's it about? And I said, I think it's this guy who's going to follow somebody into the grave. You know, they're going to, it's, I think it's about a, it's a child following their mother, missing them so much that it'll follow them into the grave. And then we realized that our rehearsal room, the little yellow house, is beside the cemetery where my mother is buried. And I have never visited her once or talked about her once. And we're, we've been rehearsing there for months. And it's funny, you know, you can deny somebody in conversation, you can deny somebody to yourself, but in the songs, all that shit comes out.

Joe Rogan (2:31)

Wow. Wow.

Bono (2:33)

But thank you for watching it. That's, that's.

Joe Rogan (2:35)

I loved it. Thank you. It was such an interesting way you put it all together. I've never seen anybody do that like that. Like you did, like, it's like a documentation of your career, but in this like very unique way with like talking about things and explaining these moments and then the music plays. It's all black and white. It was really cool.

Bono (2:58)

Yeah. There's a sort of black and white lens, a kind of clarity. I did this series of shows in the Beacon Theater in New York.

And it was going so well, we thought we should record it. I will tell you, the night before we opened our show in New York, my missus, Ali, said, I don't think you should do this. Just please, please do not do this to yourself in front of a New York crowd. Cancel it now, do what most people do on a book tour, get somebody to interview them and just they'll come anyway, everyone will be happy. And I don't know, I just went for once. I didn't take her sage advice and I did it. And the difference was with an audience, it was funny. And she was like, oh, that's the bit I didn't get in the rehearsals. It's funny.

Joe Rogan (3:56)

Oh, so what was she thinking? It was self-indulgent?

Bono (3:59)

I just thought it was dull, self-indulgent, here you are. I mean, all these things are a version of, here's another great thing about me.

No, I was calling it a me-moir, me-bouc, what I wrote myself. It's the me-moir. And look, there's something narcissistic, but it's your material, you know, that's what you get. It's not just your body, your psychology is the canvas. And, you know, I grew up, John Lennon, the Beatles were everything for me. And, you know, John Lennon made a sort of performance art out of his wedding to Yoko, and he did a bed in for Peace, and he was ready to look ridiculous for Peace. And, you know, I do ridiculous quite well, I'm told. So that was my definition, you know, of art, really.