Latest U2 News & Information

Will a hit be put out on U2 this fall for their crime of teaming up with Salman Rushdie — the noted author condemned to death by Iran’s Ayatollah for his “blasphemous” novel “The Satanic Verses”?

Speaking yesterday at upstate New York’s Bard College on the eve of the release of his new novel “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” Rushdie said the cause-championing Irish rockers have put music to a lyric he’s written into his new book and will include the completed song in the next U2 album, due in September.

According to our spy (Bard-attending daughter Hilary), who sat in on the lecture, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” is a told-in-flashback saga of India’s top female rock star, who’s been killed in an earthquake, her surviving husband (also a musician) and a photographer.

Evidently, not every musician sent an advance of Rushdie’s book was as impressed as U2. “Madonna put her copy in a shredding machine,” Rushdie told the students. “I was hoping to sticker the cover, ‘As shredded by Madonna,’ but we were advised not to.” No sense getting her spiritual followers in an uproar, too.

Rushdie, who still travels on the sly with a phalanx of security guards, made his Bard appearance with only a few hours of advance notice, and still packed the university auditorium. Doubtless other stops on his book-publicizing tour will be just as cautiously undertaken.

© 1999 Philadelphia Daily News. All rights reserved.

Everyone wore black, and many wore long, tapered gunslinger’s jackets as they paid sartorial tribute, as much as anything else, to Johnny Cash in a concert at the Hammerstein Ballroom on Tuesday night.

Until the last minute it was an open question whether Cash himself would perform. In 1997 Shy-Drager syndrome, a neurological disorder related to Parkinson’s disease, was diagnosed, and Cash, 67, has been absent from stages for 19 months.

The advertisements for the concert, which was taped for a TNT “Masters Series” special, did not indicate that he would attend, and no reference was made to his impending appearance during the two-and-a-half-hour proceedings.

Antithetical to the haunted, solitary nature of Cash’s songs, the production was nearly as Hollywood as New York gets. Actor Jon Voight was the host, and introductions were read off a prompter by Kevin Bacon and Tim Robbins. Read the rest of this story »

Concert or record featuring likes of Lauryn Hill, R.E.M
Beastie Boys being considered.

Contributing Editor Brian Hiatt reports:

U2 singer Bono has lined up support from such artists as
Lauryn Hill, R.E.M., the Smashing Pumpkins, the Beastie Boys,
Oasis and opera singer Luciano Pavarotti for a campaign to
persuade the world’s richest nations to cancel the debt of the
world’s poorest.

Bono and the nonprofit organization Jubilee 2000 have yet to
say what exactly he and the other artists might do for the cause,
but they have made it clear the effort will be musical and most
likely done on a large scale.

“Bono and ourselves are discussing how we can be creative,
have fun, make some noise,” said Jamie Drummond, a Jubilee
2000 spokesperson. Read the rest of this story »

U2 star Bono and his wife Ali are expecting their third child.

Ali, the inspiration behind the U2 hit “Sweetest Thing”, is due to give birth this summer (99). The couple already have two children - Jordan, 10, and Memphis Eve, eight.

But while the couple’s family and friends are reported to be thrilled, the news will come as a shock to the organisers of a charity auction four years ago (95) - where Ali bought her husband a voucher for a vasectomy.

She paid $320 for it at the auction in aid of the Dublin AIDS Alliance. It was never disclosed if the singer took up the offer. (@U2 note: Bono later donated the vasectomy to a Dublin man who explained on national radio that he needed the surgery, but couldn’t afford it.)

Bono and Ali have been married for nearly 17 years and have lived in a luxury mansion in Dalkey, Co Dublin since the early 1980s. Ali is a volunteer worker with the Chernobyl Children’s Project and has made several mercy missions from Ireland to Belarus to help chronically sick children.

© 1999 WENN. All rights reserved.

Ed Barrett on the blood, toil, sweat and tears of U2’s lead singer and enemy of the world’s bankers

by Ed Barrett

When Bono attended Tuesday night’s Brit Awards, it was not on behalf of his band of global gypsies U2, whose forthcoming album will doubtless be honoured at next year’s ceremony, but as a representative of the Jubilee 2000 campaign to cancel Third World debt. We, the public, he demanded, should tell them, the politicians, to sort out the bankers. Then he walked into the select section of the public gathered in the London Arena and presented Mohammed Ali (also there to promote the cause) with something called the “Freddie Mercury Award”.

We have become used to such things. Stand-up comedians pontificate on Question Time panels. The Prime Minister announces his views from the daytime TV sofa rather than the parliamentary front bench. Every showbiz ceremony worth its salt has a keynote speech or a launch of another worthy initiative. And when it comes to this kind of public speaking, Bono has been centre stage a full decade longer than Tony Blair. Read the rest of this story »

Bono is on the campaign trail again. This time it is Third World debt. But is it a crusade too far, asks Michael Rose in the Sunday Times.

How do you upstage Robbie Williams, England’s greatest show-off? Answer: you go on stage with Muhammad Ali. At the Brit awards in London on Tuesday night, Bono was one of the few stars with neither a new single nor an album to promote. He came to speak on behalf of the latest pop humanitarian cause, Jubilee 2000, which is campaigning to get Third World debt written off.

At a cost rumoured to be in excess of £20,000, and at Bono’s request, U2’s record label Polygram jetted in Ali. Who needs idols when you can have The Greatest? Once again Bono had proved that pop may be pop but - hey, the grand gesture rocks. Especially when the record company is footing the bill. Read the rest of this story »