News Bono’s favourite John Lennon song: “I’ve been writing versions of this all my life”
Like most songwriters of the late 20th century, the mononymous Bono has both admired and envied the songwriting prowess of his 1960s forefathers, especially Bob Dylan and The Beatles’ John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Such artists grabbed a post-war generation by the scruff of its neck and dragged it into a future of countercultural confidence and artistic renaissance.
For his part, as frontman of the Irish rock group U2, Bono became one of the world’s most successful musicians throughout the 1980s with a unique approach to anthemic pop rock music at a time when synth-pop groups were all the rage. Consolidating his legacy over the past four decades, Bono also devotes much of his time to philanthropy and political activism.
U2 released their debut album, Boy, in October 1980, just over a month before Mark Chapman murdered John Lennon in New York City. With this, Lennon never experienced U2’s emphatic rise to prominence. However, it is fair to deduce that the pair might have endeared to one another as kindred spirits of both musical and political zeal.
The Lennon-McCartney partnership had been a companion to Bono from the get-go. In a 2020 feature with Rolling Stone, the U2 frontman picked out some of his all-time favourite songs, including The Beatles’ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’.
“It’s my earliest memory of music. I was three years old and in the back garden of 10 Cedarwood Road,” Bono remembered. “I associate the song with the smell of freshly cut grass as I was lying on my back on the damp green patch after my Da had cut the lawn… Beside me was a lawn mower with green-stained rotors that had to be repaired. My brother Norman could fix it… he could fix anything.”
He added: “It was the spring of 1964… the song on the radio felt like life force… like I was for the first time conscious that I was alive and that being alive was a really, really great idea!”
Elsewhere, Bono revealed his ongoing allegiance to the Fab Four, discussing 1970’s ‘Mother’ as his favourite John Lennon solo composition. After praising McCartney for his maternally influenced Beatles contribution, ‘Let It Be’, he turned his attention to Lennon’s classic Primal Scream therapy-inspired single.
“On the mothers front, John Lennon really went there with ‘Mother’,” Bono wrote, addressing Lennon’s first son, Julian. “That must have hurt a long time before healing. If he’d have made it into his 40’s he’d have followed you around with pride the way you did him.”
“I’ve been writing a version of this song all my life,” Bono added. “So many rock’n’rollers write from a place of abandonment to a place of abandonment… in hip-hop, it’s often the father, but in rock, it’s often enough the mother, even if the mother just passes away too early for adolescence to wear itself out, and so it continues…”
Lennon wrote ‘Mother’ as a means of confronting his long-harboured issues of maternal abandonment. When Lennon was just five, his mother, Julia Lennon, was put under increased pressure by her eldest sister, Mimi Smith, to give up guardianship. Mimi repeatedly expressed to Liverpool Social Services her lack of confidence in Julia as a mother for John due to her “sinful” ways.
In 1945, John was finally forced into the care of his strict aunt Mimi, who would take over guardianship with her husband, George Smith. Lennon had been granted permission to visit his mother, but he became increasingly alienated by the separation. Some 12 years later, Julia was killed by a drunk-driving policeman when John was just 17.
