Ed Sheeran told Bono he didn’t want to ‘get into politics’ on U2 collab ‘Yours Eternally’
The pair collaborated on the ‘Days of Ash’ song this year, but Sheeran expressed discomfort with the song's political direction, as Bono tells Rolling Stone UK
By Nick Reilly
Bono has revealed how Ed Sheeran was reluctant to get involved in politics when the singer collaborated with U2 on the song ‘Yours Eternally’ earlier this year.
Sheeran has been at the centre of global attention and controversy in recent weeks after his US support act, the rapper Macklemore, was dropped from a huge stadium tour for shouting ‘Free Palestine’ and expressing solidarity with the people of Gaza.
All of Sheeran’s other supports acts, including Irish singer Aaron Rowe and US star Finneas, then announced their departure from the tour in solidarity with Macklemore.
Asked about the situation, Bono told Rolling Stone UK: “I would say with Ed and Macklemore that we shouldn’t personalise this, what’s going on. Brian Eno said today that pop stars are like little fish in a large sea of huge forces and religion and politics. And so I don’t want to dwell on Ed and Macklemore and that incident.”
But elaborating further, Bono revealed how Ed had been reluctant to explore politics when the pair collaborated on ‘Yours Eternally’, taken from the band’s Days of Ash EP. The song also features Ukrainian rocker Taras Topalia and is written from the perspective of a Ukrainian soldier during the ongoing war with Russia.
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“I will say this,” Bono said. ‘When we did ‘Yours Eternally’, he was saying, ‘You’re not going to get me into politics, are you?’”
“And I said, ‘This soldier who inspired us, he loved you Ed and you’ve worked on this song’.”
Sheeran then responded, Bono reveals, by saying, “Yeah, but I just want to keep my thing free,” leading the U2 singer to conclude that “you can’t be pushing people around.”
Drummer Larry Mullen Jr. added: “Brian Eno was saying that artists choose whether they want to be involved, and they are entitled to choose whether they want to be involved or not. And it’s not our job to criticise that, no matter how we feel. He said that it takes time for these things to evolve and people to come to realisations and, not to personalise this, but Bob Geldof was saying a similar thing. I really appreciated hearing that because it is confusing and it is complicated.”
But Mullen Jr. said the band drew the line at billionaire owners stifling their speech, after New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft was among the voices who led to Macklemore’s removal from the tour.
“We are absolutely clear about promoters or billionaire owners and the idea that they could have some influence on what you say or what you do on a stage,” he stressed. “We’ve talked about this, and [if] you applied that logic to U2, we would have been out of business on ‘Sunday, Bloody Sunday’.”
Bono added: “Even before you got to our performance of ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’ in Arizona when we were campaigning for Martin Luther King Day and there was a governor at that time, [Evan] Mecham, who was resisting, and we were told we weren’t welcome there. We’ve been getting into this trouble. It’s what we do and we’re happy to do that, but we’re also happy to recognise if there’s other people don’t want to get into that kind of fight.”
He concluded: “I think what Eno was saying is you have to persuade people by reason. You can’t try to force people into a position.”
Sheeran has returned to the stage since the controversy, admitting to fans he had been “making mistakes, and I’m so so sorry.”
Elsewhere in our chat, Bono also opened up about the death of the late, great Dolly Parton, who features on their new album Carnaval de Luz.