Bono has revealed the death threats he received from the IRA and how a major gangland figure once plotted to kidnap his daughters during the height of his career.
The U2 star, whose real name is Paul Hewson, makes the revelations in his upcoming memoir ‘Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,’ which is released on Tuesday, November 1.
In his memoir, the U2 frontman recalled former Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams said he “stinks” after it was perceived “U2’s opposition to paramilitaries had cost the IRA valuable funding from the US.”
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However, he was told by special branch officers that his wife was most likely to be their target.
He wrote: “I still take that badly.”
A further threat occurred during the 1990s when Bono wrote in his memoir that a famous gangland leader in Dublin had been planning to kidnap his daughters at the height of his fame.
In the book, he explained that people had cased his home which he shared with his wife Ali and their children Jordan, Eve, Elijah and John - for several months and developed an elaborate plan.
He said he is still shaken by that shocking incident.
That revelation comes after Francis Cahill, daughter of the late gangland criminal Martin ‘The General’ Cahill, sensationally revealed in 2007 that her father stopped the planned kidnap attempt of Bono’s daughter Jordan for a €6m ransom after learning of the plot by another leading criminal associate.
Francis made the claim in a book she wrote about her father called ‘Martin Cahill: My father.’
She maintained that Cahill - whose gang stole gold and diamonds valued more than €2m from O’Connors jewellers in Harold’s Cross in 1983 - refused to take part in the kidnap with a gang who had staked out the rock star’s luxury home in Killiney, Co Dublin, for several months.
“He told them it was a bad idea,” wrote Ms Cahill. “Martin had nothing against Bono’s family. They had never done him any harm and he wasn’t going to get involved.”
‘The General’ also masterminded the theft of some of the world’s most valuable paintings from Russborough House before he was shot dead outside his home in Rathmines in August 1994.
Bono also revealed that while touring America in the 1980s, the group received a sinister threat about what would happen if they sang ‘Pride’.
Speaking at the The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on Sunday, Bono, 62, explained: "The specific threat was that if Bono sings the verse about the assassination of King he will not make it to the end of the song”.
And focussing on other parts of his life in his memoir, Bono reveals how the late former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev paid a visit to his Dublin home in 2002.
There, the former leader met his wife Ali’s goddaughter Anna, who had been born with severe disabilities because of the Chernobyl disaster.
Bono writes that Gorbachev told them that the 1986 nuclear accident was the moment he knew the Soviet Union was finished.
Bono said Gorbachev told him: “I thought to myself if the state cannot control a nuclear power plant of this significance, then the state is no longer functioning as a state. The state is kaput.”
The memoir, due out next month, also explores the band’s rise, the impact on bassist Adam Clayton in particular, and Bono’s embarrassment whenever he watches the 1985 Live Aid concert.
“There is only one thing that I can see,” he writes. “The mullet.”
Live Nation and Penguin Random House announced earlier this month that Bono would visit 14 cities around the world in November including Dublin’s Olympia Theatre on Monday, November 21.
'I miss being on stage and the closeness of U2's audience,' Bono said in a statement.
“In these shows I've got some stories to sing, and some songs to tell... Plus I want to have some fun presenting my memoir, Surrender, is really more of a we-moir if I think of all the people who helped me get from there to here.”
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