AT HOME WITH BONO

The U2 frontman opens up about love, grief, feeling like an imposter and a dark time when being a rock star almost cost him his marriage

- MARIELLA FROSTRUP

SUNDAYS with Bono are not for the faint-hearted. It's an open house at his art-filled home in Dalkey, south Dublin. The last time I dropped in, before the pandemic, lunch for eight around his lengthy dining table (which could comfortably fit a UN delegation), overlooking his tousled garden and the grey-green sea of Killiney Bay, morphed into an all-day conversational orgy at his local pub, Finnegan's.

There we built up a salt'n'vinegar crisp mountain - 30 empty packets, counted out by Bono and my husband between pints. At some point our bored kids had to be rescued and dropped back at our hotel by the ever-responsible U2 guitarist Edge and his wife. "Who was that nice man in the beanie?" they asked the next day. We, the dregs, lingered until closing time, solving the world's woes to our inebriated satisfaction.

Two years later I'm back to celebrate the release of Bono's literary debut, his memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story. Normally he can move around his neighbourhood with ease, although this time our meander down the hill to Finnegan's is interrupted by a fan requesting a selfie. Bono, dressed in black jeans and his trademark rose-tinted glasses, is effortlessly charming, smiling for the camera.

In the snug of the pub, he's free from the glare of the world - and perhaps that's the reason he has remained on the "small rock in the North Atlantic" on which he was born, married to a girl he first asked out in 1976.

The 62-year-old star lives in his home town with "the love of his life", Ali Hewson (61), whom he met in the same week that his band got together schoolmates who remain his best friends.