JULIE BURCHILL: Whoever persuaded Bono he could sing?

There are a few pop stars whose work I can’t help liking in spite of myself – their song-writing, that is. I’d be happy never to see the faces or hear the voices of Mick Hucknall or Chris Martin again, but the moment ‘Stars’ or ‘Trouble’ starts, I’m mesmerised – only to wonder crossly the minute the song ends: ‘Why couldn’t they have given it to someone with a decent voice?’ Think about it: dancers have choreographers and actors have scriptwriters, so why should we assume songwriters can sing? Bono’s another. I love some of his songs (‘One’, as performed by Johnny Cash, and ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’, by the Pet Shop Boys), but when faced with the awful actuality of his yowling, I remember what Prince once said about him: ‘You know what I’d do with a voice like that? Become a janitor.’

Surrender comes in at a whopping 563 pages, and I was already beginning to feel quite enervated by the time I’d read the press release informing us that Bono is an ‘artist and activist’ who has written an ‘honest and irreverent, intimate and profound’ book – which we’re lucky he got around to, considering his ‘more than 20 years of activism, dedicated to the fight against Aids and extreme poverty’. But isn’t having your press release calling your book ‘profound’ rather like giving yourself a nickname? Wait for someone else to do it.

Related: Bono is perceived as pompous. Why? “Why do people hate Bono? In a nutshell, the answer probably ultimately revolves around the fact that he is perceived as pompous, a self-ordained savior of rock and the world living the highlife afforded to him by his earnings and status. Why does everyone hate Bono? Consider the fact that the man was once known as Bono Vox. You wouldn’t name your cat that and expect it not to receive humiliation across the neighborhood. While this likely deserves a chuckle, also consider that most of rock n’ roll, no matter under which genre banner it has been paraded under has been just as ridiculous throughout its decades-long existence.”