Bono Born: Rock Star Turned Global Activist

Bono was born Paul David Hewson in Dublin on May 10, 1960, the son of a Catholic father and a Protestant mother in a city where that distinction still mattered. His mother died of a cerebral aneurysm at her own father's funeral when Paul was fourteen. He channeled his grief, his ambition, and his tendency toward grandiosity into U2, which he formed with three school friends at Mount Temple Comprehensive School in 1976. The band, completed by The Edge (David Howell Evans), Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen Jr. (who had posted the notice on the school bulletin board), spent their early years playing Dublin pubs and developing a sound that combined post-punk urgency with an emotional openness unusual in the genre. Their breakthrough came with War in 1983 and its single "Sunday Bloody Sunday." The Joshua Tree, released in 1987, made U2 the biggest band on earth. The album sold over 25 million copies and produced "With or Without You" and "Where the Streets Have No Name." Bono's vocal performances reached for a scale that invited both devotion and ridicule in equal measure. His activism, which began with Live Aid in 1985, expanded into a parallel career. He co-founded the ONE Campaign to fight extreme poverty and preventable disease in Africa. He lobbied personally with George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Angela Merkel, and dozens of other world leaders. The Jubilee 2000 debt relief campaign he championed resulted in the cancellation of over $100 billion in debt owed by the world's poorest countries. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times. Some people find his public advocacy insufferable. The debt relief campaigns saved millions of lives, measurably, in countries whose names rarely appear in Western media. U2 has sold over 170 million records worldwide. Their 360 Tour in 2009-2011 grossed over $736 million, the highest-grossing concert tour in history at that time. Bono received an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II in 2007 and remains one of the most recognized public figures in the world.