Painting the illustrations for a new version of Peter and the Wolf, U2 singer Bono drew on his own sometimes painful relationship with his father. He talks to Neil McCormick


"Art is an attempt to identify yourself," Bono once said to me. In which case, judging by the self-portraits that form part of the U2 singer's first exhibition of paintings, Bono appears to have identified himself as baked bean.

Bono with one of his 'Wolf' paintings: 'Really driven performers are playing to one person. It might be a lover. But it might be your father'

"I really did look like one until I was 13, and the freckly sphere was punctured by a rather large nose!" he jokes. "I'm not making any great claims for my abilities as an artist. I was just hanging out with my kids one moment, having a laugh with a paintbrush - next thing you know, I'm exhibiting in the Rockefeller Center."

Tomorrow, Christie's in New York auctions a series of paintings by Bono, complete with flowery trimmings by his daughters Jordan, 14, and Eve, 12. They were commissioned as illustrations for a radical reworking of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf by Bono's childhood friend Gavin Friday (recently published by Bloomsbury as a boxed set featuring a book and CD), and all proceeds go to the Irish Hospice Foundation, which helped take care of Bono's father, Bob Hewson, when he died of cancer in 2001.

"I love art too much to call these anything other than marks on paper," he says. Nevertheless, there has certainly been a cathartic aspect to his first public foray into the art world. Peter and the Wolf, he says, is essentially a lesson in teaching music to children, an area in which he felt he was badly let down in his own childhood.

"I got to work out one of those little kinks that I have that drives me, this frustration I feel as a musician, not being able to get the melodies I hear in my head out into the world. My father was a beautiful tenor who loved opera, but he never imagined that music might be handed down, like his bad back and his bad temper, so he never bothered us about learning an instrument."

Bono (born Paul Hewson) is particularly galled by the memory of how his father turned down the opportunity to move his granny's piano into their small house in Ballymun, near Dublin, claiming there was no room.

"As a kid, I would have loved to have learned to play the piano. I think I'm more than angry about the reasons I didn't. Without the band I would explode. Or worse, I'd just numb that area. I think that's what happens to people who have a gift and they can't get it out; they fence it off, put a lot of ice on it, and walk with a limp. So I kind of got to mark that moment; that's really what art is to me. And to use humour. U2 songs are not a bag of laughs, but with these works I got up to some mischief."

That included painting his wife Ali as a rather erotic cartoon cat called Pussy. "He's going to get a clip round the ear," Ali told me when she first saw the picture. "She's secretly purring," insists Bono.

Central to the tale of Peter and the Wolf is the parental relationship. It is about a daring child (cast in these illustrations as young Bono himself) and protective grandparent (modelled on Bono's father). Bono's mother died when he was 14, and he has long recognised that this was a defining moment in his life, pushing him in two directions at once: towards his profound faith in God and towards rock and roll.

But the peculiar thing is that he has admitted he doesn't really remember his mother well. The key parental relationship was with his father. Bono grew up (with his brother Norman) in a house of men, numbed by grief, unable to share their feelings.

"If you are trying to fill that kind of hole, music and being a performer is an obvious route," says Bono. "Insecurity is at the root of most interesting endeavours, I find. If you're totally secure in yourself, and you were told all your life that you were the bee's knees, well, you're probably going to wind up with a respectable job in the city or something. And that's what I want my kids to feel, by the way. I don't like being The Boy Named Sue!"

Bono speaks with great affection about the father with whom he had such a complex, distant, yearning relationship that he once said to me: "Great performers are supposed to play to the back of the hall. But really driven performers, I think you'll find, are playing to one person. It might be a lover. But it might be your father."

Bono was by his bedside when his father died at 4am on August 21, 2001, but that night he was on stage at Earls Court with U2, pouring his heart out to 17,000 strangers. It was one of the most intense and emotional concerts I have ever seen. "If you were of sound mind, you wouldn't need thousands of people a night telling you they loved you just to feel normal," Bono acknowledges. "It's sad, really.

"I had an amazing moment with my old man the first time he came to America," he recalls with an affectionate laugh. "It was in Texas, and at sound-check I organised with the lighting people to put a spotlight on him during the encore. I said, 'This is the man who gave me my voice. This is Bob Hewson!' The light came on, 20,000 Texans hooting at him, and he stood up and he just waved a fist at me!

"After the show, I heard these footsteps behind me, and I looked around and it was my dad. His eyes were watering, and I thought, 'This is it. This is a moment I've waited all my life for. My father was going to tell me he loved me. And he walked up, he put his hand out, a little shaky, a little unsteady - he'd had a few drinks - looked me in the eye and he said, 'Son - you're very professional.' "

Bono has two boys of his own, Eli, 4, and John, 2. "You relive your own childhood with your kids," says Bono. "If your little boy is four years old, you remember being four. It's kind of spooky, because I sing songs to my kids that I don't know the words of, or the melodies, and yet I am singing them. Obviously, I remember this from my own childhood. You're so receptive when you're a child. You pick up quirks and cracks, as well as these melodies and stories. After the old man died, Ali said I was walking differently and adopting some of his mannerisms.

"There's a fantastic story I have to tell you," he says, guffawing with laughter at a memory. "It was backstage at a Pavarotti show. I took my dad there, and the Princess of Wales was there. And [U2 guitarist] Edge came up and asked me, 'Would your father like to meet the Princess of Wales?' Because Edge's family are Welsh, and they were dying to meet her. And I knew the answer, actually, but I asked him anyway. And he said, 'What has the Royal Family ever done for anybody? They were born into all this wealth and power!'

"But, anyway, we were in the dressing room, and she walked in, and she walked straight into my dad. She was beautiful, in a canary-yellow dress; she just looked gorgeous. And she put out her hand to my father, and he put out his, and she said, 'How do you do?' And he went, 'Oh, very pleased to meet you!' And I swear, 600 years of history disappeared! Six hundred years of a bad relationship turned right around.

" 'Very, very nice woman,' he said as she went out. 'Gorgeous girl.' "


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