Bono on the birth of U2, that iTunes album and Live Aid: ‘There’s only one thing I can see when I watch it: the mullet’

“Anything strange or startling?” That’s how my da, Bob, opens our conversations. We’d meet in our “local” pub in Dalkey, Dublin. Finnegan’s is its own country with its own laws and customs. Time is said to change shape on crossing its door. I have experienced that. It’s a constitutional monarchy with Dan Finnegan the head of state, his sons effectively running the government with his eldest, Donal, the prime minister. Donal is 6ft 4in but, depending on the hour and the state of the state, can appear 6ft 7in. I would not want to mess with Donal Finnegan.

Dan Finnegan loved my da. They shared a love of opera and stage musicals, and Dan recognised when another prince was present, one who could actually sing. On the occasion when my father silenced the place by singing The Way We Were followed by The Black Hills of Dakota, Dan looked over at me with something like pity, and I imagined him speaking under his breath, “Think how far you’d have come if only you had your father’s voice.”

Sundays at midday used to be quiet in Finnegan’s. The dark oak and the blue flame over the gas-burning coal fire flickering in the corner. Not a “snug” in the literal sense of a closed-off area in an Irish pub, but it might as well have been. It drew us closer to each other, Bob and I.

“Anything strange or startling?”

The Catholic orders Bushmills Black Bush, a Protestant whiskey from County Antrim in the north of Ireland. We stare at each other. Talk around each other. Occasionally, we talk to each other. Bob is going through some personal stuff that he is here not to talk about. He is also not well. I didn’t know how not well.

I was also having a little scare. They caught something in my throat and wanted to biopsy it. It turned out to be nothing important, but it was a sobering experience. I was crossing the 40th-birthday threshold, the halfway mark of a good life, and, for the first time, noticing my mortality. And those of the people I loved. Like Michael Hutchence. Like my da.

Bob still played the hard man, but the pride was there. Like the smile on his face when he was waving his fist at me from the mixing desk in Houston on the Unforgettable Fire tour in 1985. I had turned the spotlight on him from the stage. “Ladies and gentlemen … appearing for the first time in these United States, more importantly, his first time in the Lone Star State of Texas … will you please welcome my father, Bob …” The sound of the crowd like a 747 taking off over his head. A sound the size of Texas. It was a big moment.

We were left on our own in the dressing room after the show. He reached out his hand to me, looking up with blood orange eyes. Could this be an even bigger moment, I thought to myself. Am I about to receive a compliment from my da?

“You’re very professional,” he said, very professionally.

Over time he’d become comfortable with his son being loved and loathed, which is the price of popularity in Ireland. He had his own friendships. He had the musical society. He had golf. He found it amusing that I’d done so well because it was Norman, my ambitious brother, the entrepreneur, who was always going to do well. And he thought it hilarious that I was throwing cash away as fast as I’d earn it. And that I kept making it.

“When are you going to get a real job?” he asks me with a wink. He still gives me a fiver for Christmas.

re we becoming friends? At least we’re meeting. Talking. I turned the tables one Sunday in 1999.

“Anything strange or startling?” It’s the first time I’ve asked him his own question.

“I have cancer,” he deadpanned.

Huge boulders fall on your head just like that, from some unseen mountain when you’re not looking up. When you’re not looking anywhere. The change in someone else’s life will utterly transform yours, even though your life is not quite the point here. Is it? This is the moment when Bob Hewson describes his own situation as “the departure lounge”. I am not ready to give up on the man I’m just getting to know. I’m not ready to be orphaned. Is anybody? I don’t know if I was much help to Bob Hewson that day, though, self-reliant as he was, I doubt he was looking for help from me.