You are listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair.

In his compelling and moving memoir Stories of Surrender, Bono writes about his father Brendan, a man who once silenced his local pub in Dalky Dublin, singing the way we were to day, we're together to talk about the way we were and the way we are.

Like everyone else, I know Bono through you too, his fight for social justice with his one campaign, and read his philanthropy, his strong values, his vision.

I also know him as family.

One of the best days we've had in the River Cafe was with Ali, his wife, his children, and friends, celebrating the birthday he shares with one of my best friends, his daughter, Jordan.

It was a lunch you wanted to go on forever, and in a way it did.

Lunch became sunset, Sunset turned into starry skies, and when we left at midnight, the.

Restaurant was empty.

Fifteen years ago, staying in the home of Bono's best friend, Patty mckillan, I injured my back and for a week the only people I met were Irish.

The warmth, the laughter, the music, the kindness was so overwhelming, even with the pain.

I wanted it to last forever too.

Today, Bono and I are going to talk about family, food, music, memories and more, the way we were, the way we are, and the way we want to be.

Wow.

Well, there we go, and I'm very humble by your writing.

Most people know you for your cooking for the River Cafe, but your community know you for and you may be even more famous in your community for friendship and these love letters that start your podcasts.

Few of us deserve them, but I'm taking them anyway.

Do you know that song the Way we Were?

I most certainly did I know it.

My father used to sing it.

But I prefer the way we are, and I love the way we are together.

This is about you, not about me.

But remember memories like the corner of my mind.

The other one my father used to sing was for the good times.

Why do you just bring all the aunties and uncles of me in tears?

Because I think it's the line, I'll get along, you'll find another.

I'll get along, you find another.

But this old world keeps on turning.

Let's forget something.

Something is it?

I think it might be written by Chris Christofferson.

Yeah, Chris Chosofferson could write them.

So what was the food like when you were growing up?

What did you have?

Do your memories of your kitchen and in your home?

Do you remember your mother cooking?

I can remember the kitchen very well.

Sadly, I don't many memories of my mother cooking or otherwise.

One of the reasons I wrote Surrender was to somehow sort of drag some of those memories out of the river of silence that engulfed our house.

Because after my mother died, my we just didn't speak speak her name.

So it's hard when you do that to recall these things.

And I you know you've heard of kitchen sink dramas, haven't you.

We certainly had kitchen table dramas, three men arguing a lot because the woman of the house was gone.

And I remember my relationship with food changed, I mean really changed my way.

Tell me how it changed.

I just saw this kind of fuel, just something to get done.

There was no I took no pleasure in it.

I remember, do you know do do you know what Cadbury's smashes?

Would you even know that?

We called?

Actually?

Can I read you from my mebouk what I wrote myself?

Yeah?

I'd love that, Okay, after Iris died, ten Seedwood Roads stop being a home.

It's just a house.

Most days, I'd return to it from Mount Temple holding a tin of meat, a tin of beans, and a packet of Cadbury's smash.

Cadbury's Smash was astronaut food, but eating it did not make me feel like David Bowie's Starman or Elton's rocket Man.

In fact, eating it was not a lot like eating at all, but at least it was easy.

You just put boiling water on these little dry pellets and they shape shifted into mashed potato.

I'd add them to the same pot in which I just cooked the tinned beans and the tinned meat, and I ate my dinner out of the pot, sitting in front of the color TV.

Even though this was a particularly black and white thing to do, I don't enjoy cooking or ordering food, which way go back to having to cook my own meals as a teenager.

That then food was just fuel.

We used to buy a cheap fizzy drink called Cadet Orange because it had enough sugar to keep you going, but was so foul you wouldn't want anything else down your throat.

For hours.

We drank it after I'd spent my food money on something more important like Alice Cooper's forty five Hello Hooray for example.

Now, then the good fortune for my father, Bob Norman and I was that ten Seedwood Road was just two miles from the end of Runway Too, where my brother Norman worked for the company Kara in Aerlingus, and he had tucked the company into allowing him to bring home the surplus airline food prepared for air Lingus passengers.

The meals were sometimes still warm when he carried them in in their tin boxes into our kitchen to be heated in the oven for twenty three minutes at one hundred and eighty five degrees.

So yes, this was highly exotic fair gammon steak and pineapple, an Italian dish called lasagne, or one where rice was no longer a milk pudding but a savory experience with peas.

I told Norman, this is the worst dessert I've ever had.

It's not dessert.

And by the way, half the world eats rice every day.

Norman new stuff other people didn't imagine.

Eating rice pudding is your main meal every day?

If my father and I were proud that Norman had removed the need for us to buy groceries or even have to cook.

After six months, the after taste of tin was all we could remember.

Secretly, at night, I took to eating corn flakes with cold milk instead of the airline food.

I thought salvation had arrived in the form of another culinary miracle, this time at Maun Temple.

Comprehensive when the end of the lunch box era was announced and the age of school dinners dawned, Imagine a fanfare of trumpets and cheering at assembly.

That's how excited we all were that I was punching the air only briefly.

The school dinners, a headmaster, Mister Medleycott explained, would not be cooked in the school canteen it wasn't big enough.

Instead, they would be arriving by van in tin boxes from Dublin Airport.

They would be easy, he announced, proudly, at one hundred and eighty five degrees for twenty three minutes in new ovens the school board had paid for.

I'd never been on an airplane, but already my romance with flying was over.

Airplane food for lunch, airplane food for tea was more than any apprentice Rockstock could handle.

In time, the apprentice with his band would take to the skies, and on those early er Lingus flights, I would look out of the small window and try to see Cedarwood Road.

As I finally left this small town and small island and rose above these flat fields, this dull suburbia, my mind filled with memories of the phone box on the street, teenagers with broken hearts and broken bottles, sweet and sour neighbors, and the vibrant branches of the cherry blossom tree between our house at number ten and the rowans at number five, at which point the air hostess would arrive and place one of those little trays right in front of me.

So I had airplane food for lunch, airplane food four tea and supper.

And then I became I joined a band, where of course we judge entire civilizations by the quality of room service, but on the plane the same meal.

And indeed I had never heard of pasta, ed never heard of lasagna, and rice was something that came out of a tin on a very special occasion and was called is pudding.

Later, you know, with Ali, because she worked, I did know dough.

So she worked, and she I would try to cook for her, but I just wasn't able to really and I would try, and she then made a complicated She became a vegetarian, and I'm like, oh god, what do I do?

Nuts and berries?

You know, I'm like, and I do recall coming home on the weekend and she was she was cooking, and I remember getting this beautiful smell of beef.

I thought, oh my god, she's cooking for beef for me and she's vegetarian.

This is how amazing.

And I walked in, I said, what are you cooking?

She said, that's not for us.

That's the dog's dinner.

There's a few bones actually picked out from the butchers.

It's a dog.

And I was like, hold on, smells so good.

And I was like, look, let me and I ate it.

Kids.

I hate the dog's dinner.

I hate the kids.

I'm sure Jordan has told you.

Yeah, my dad he hate the dog's dinner once.

But you know what she did tell me.

She told me that you met Alie's so young, that Ali's mother, her Nan.

She always refers to her Nan, cooked for you.

And also now when Eli comes back from a tour or a gig that she always makes him bread.

So there is a kind of sense of food is love in that family, of kind of her, of her mother, her grandmother and your mother in law.

Cooking then and cooking now is a source of you know, comfort, and taking care of somebody to make bread quite something.

Well.

She Joy is her name.

She's ninety two tomorrow, and she can touch your toes.

There's no pain in her body.

She is sharp and funny, as brilliant as she was when she took me in age sixteen.

Yeah, seventeen, I started to turn up.

I mean, Ali called me the stray dog because I would always turn up at my mate's house at meal times.

Yeah, I heard that, and I would turn up and enjoy it.

Would cook for me, and I felt something from the food.

It's like that water for chocolate book, you know.

I really felt something from her cooking.

And yeah, I felt it from your cooking, and not just in the rest open in your place.

You people speak.

It's a language, and it is for me the essence of being spoiled.

And you are exactly right.

I don't stop much to think about any accomplishments because I'm always thinking about what we haven't accomplished.

But if I do stop, it is with food and wine.

And I tried to give thanks, I tried to say a grace.

I do thank God and induced and it dawns on me.

Wow.

I used to eat corn flakes for my main meal to dodge the airline food.

And now I get to eat in this restaurant or now I have you know?

Somebody like Noney Favero cooked for me.

Who's you know?

I followed her around, We followed her around, and from her I learned to love fish.

I never ate fish, I thought, you know, in Ireland we have a strange relationship with fish.

We're surrounded by it, We're an island.

But fish on Fridays was a sort of penance.

So I think it ruined a fish for a lot of people I loved.

And this might upset you.

I loved well.

I love to smoke cod and and and chips that you got in the in the chipper.

Why would you know?

Why would that bother me?

If it's just fresh fish and it's smoked, and it tastes it's.

Oh so so beautiful.

There's in fact, there's some Italian families they came to Ireland.

They're all from the same place in Italy, I think, and so our version of fast food in Ireland when I was growing up wasn't it was kind of wonderful.

I haven't mentioned my involvement in mister Pussy's Cafe Deluxe, but my brother Norman and my great mate from Cedarwood Road, Gavin Friday, opened up a sort of burlesque cafe in Dublin called called Mister Pussy's Cafe Delox and mister Pussy was a drag act.

Alan m Almsby was his name is wonderful And in mister Pussy's Cafe Deluxe, and that really was its name, they had fish and chips and caveat and because it was an after hours club, we used to have red and white tea on the menu.

It was red and white Why served in teapots because we didn't have that license.

I probablyish't I did, No, I shouldn't say that they might come and find you.

You chose of all my recipes of thirty eight years of recipes, you chose a recipe which I was totally unsurprised about, which was a potato, tomato and green bean salad.

And you know when your friend Patti mckillan comes to the River Cafe and we know he's coming.

We always have extra potatoes.

And I was going to ask you do you always have to have potatoes as well?

What is it with the Irish and potatoes.

Let me just say this to you, Rudy, I got this recipe was selected suggested for me.

Potato green bean tomaso.

No, no way, No.

I think it is for Patty mckillan.

He talks about every day he came home from school and his grandmother made him a baked potato.

And I know about potatoes in Ireland.

Would you like to tell me seriously about about the famine?

No, I do always want to talk about the fab The potatoes is doing great now, so the Irish.

I just want you.

I want to use the podcast.

I want to use the podcast to get a message to all the Irish listeners you have all over the world, just to let them know that the potatoes are fine now they can come home.

All right, potatoes, potatoes are fine.

But I just want to say to all the Irish you're listening here that I rarely, I personally rarely have a meal without potatoes because I love potatoes.

Even I can't say I love more than pasta, but I do love potatoes.

But yes, potatoes would be the pasta of Ireland.

Let's call it that the bassed dish.

But single crop dependency turns out to be not a good idea if you're being managed by the British.

So there, so there you go.

An open kitchen in the River Cafe means we as chefs are able to talk to our guests in the restaurant, and now we're bringing that same ethos to our podcast, a question and answer episode with me and our two executive chefs.

Send a voice note with your question to Questions at Rivercafe dot co dot uk and you might just be our next great guest on Ruthie's Table four.

When you left home, when you left your house, when you left this environment of school?

And did you have any experience of eating other kind of food when you travel?

Oh yeah, ah yeah, See we were given the great gift of a manager who loved food and wine as much as he loved music.

And I remember as kids, you know, because we're twenty, we're driving up and down the motorway in the UK, and do you know what a per diem ise?

Yes, a pre deem.

It sounds like a sort of novene or something, and it is a kind of one.

Record companies used to give you per deems so you could stay in a hotel if you were playing you know, Manchester or Newcastle or Lieds or whatever.

But we wouldn't stay in the hotel.

We'd drive back after the show and save up our per deems so that Paul could take us out for one really good meal on the weekends.

Now it might be in poons of soho could be Chinese.

Yeah, but over the years, yeah, we would go to some great places and we weren't really appreciative.

Early on, we'd sort of slag him off, but you know, he'd be talking about this fella in France.

We'd think of some composer, sort of indie guy we hadn't heard of, called Paul but Goose, and then discover it was a chef and that we'd booked three dates in Leon because our manager wanted to eat in Paul Becuz's restaurant.

So that was our experience, is we learned through this magnificent man about food and why.

When I talked to Paul McCartney about food and wine and he said that he didn't know what it was.

When he and John Lennon went to Paris, they had a bit of money from John's ant.

I think she gave them a tiny bit of money.

So they ate out and they had wine, and he thought wine was just the most disgusting drink because they had the cheapest, cheapest, cheapest wine that they could possibly afford.

And it was only when Brian Epstein took them to Latois, which was this great restaurant, and took them and gave them like your manager, gave them great food and wonderful wine that they thought, Wow, this is what food and wine could be like.

Being able to access food was some about a measure of the work that they had done that allowed them to do that.

I think that's right.

And early on we would you know, this was not very punk rock or post punk activity.

You're supposed to be depressed, and Paul wasn't.

He was anything great that happened for our band.

If we'd have a hit record somewhere, or you know, he would go to find a great restaurant.

And I realized that I then I supposed to turn those experiences into They became magical ones for me because I so loved to listen to him talk.

Occasionally I'd go back into my sort of more matcho sort of North Dublin side, or me and Larry would look at them talking.

Paul McGinnis was very influenced by the manager of horse Lips, who his name is Michael Deane, and he went to Oxford and his brother became I think the High Sheriff of where we call it, a Belfast Catholic, first Catholic to take that position.

And I do remember he and Paul talking about this particular wine and how big it was, and I was with the band, and I just decided I'd speak up for the band.

I said, I'm twenty two or whatever, twenty three and I said, oh, maybe maybe Michael, you might explain exactly like what is a You might tell the band what's a big wine wine?

And Michael Dean he just went on and it will blow your head off.

It was kind of comedic way to put us in our place.

But in truth we were students at the feet of these great professors.

And indeed it's through Paul that I discovered the River Cafe.

When you're performing, do you eat before you go on stage or do you eat after or do you think about I mean, I remember if Posh Spite said that she came to her diet because she had to get up on stage and perform, and she found the kind of food that could make her sing and dance for three hours.

That was a kind of almost like an athlete.

What she would eat before going on stage.

Do you do that when you have a concert?

Do you think about what you're going to eat before or after?

Well it's changed.

I mean I used to ignore all those rules and in our thirties, and you can see some of the results of it, and some of our live shows, which would be very joyous occasions.

But if you saw a big red Irish face, that's because the night before we might have gone out.

I've only twice had alcohol before I went on stage.

Once there's a wedding.

Another one my father put me to bed the night before and I had a mad hangover in Paris.

What year was that?

What year was that?

How old were you?

That was in the late nineties, and it was a wonderful memory of my father, Bob.

But after that, you can't sing if you drink, at least you can't sing.

I can't sing.

Maybe I should just say that.

And tenors, which I was pretending to be at the time.

My father used to say, you're a baritone who thinks he's a tenor, which is a very accurate description of me on all fronts.

But actually, if you sing those big notes, which you two loves the opera and of those big notes, you sort of have to be careful what you eat and what you drink.

And so I would eat very simply before a concert.

Well, you also have had access to power, to people who really can.

Make big decisions.

And did you have a meal with George Bush in the White House or did you have you know, did you ever have lunch with the Pope?

Or do you have when you had access to that kind of world having a meal perhaps with somebody who was not accessible to many of us.

Was that over food?

Well, the thing that started with Live Aid forty years ago was a sort of It was charity, but it started to change in its direction to travel toward justice.

And so the Drop the Debt campaign was really about economic slavery.

We were responding to Desmond, to to to Mandela and all going to work for to try and make a more horizontal relationship with the continents of Africa rather than vertical one, which is the donor and recipient as it's known in the aid industry.

So as part of that, we had to get to know politics, and I used to spend I spent a lot of time in capitals, but particularly in Washington, d C.

Getting to know not just you know the principles as they were called, these senators, congressmen, or cabinet members, secretaries of state, presidents, whatever, but actually they're chiefs of staff.

So I used to go drinking with them, chiefs of staff.

I'd say, let me spend time with the chiefs of staff, because they're really the ones that on Monday morning they're going to be talking to their principle.

And let's see if we can get people together.

What we used to do in DC was Bobby Shreiver's idea was to get people into a restaurant.

It was an Italian restaurant, and we used to get people from across the aisle.

His mother, Euni Shrevir set up the Special Olympics, and his father said of the Peace Corps, Kennedy, but so you'd have some of those kind of high falutin people, but you just have also you know, really dogged ideologues from both parties in America, Democrats and Republics fighting it out at the table.

But breaking bread and drinking wine.

You can't do that anymore.

There's I think a twenty dollars limit a pizzas about what you can get now.

But I remember those arguments.

I remember who is a John Kasik who ran for president on the Republican side.

I remember a stand up argument with him and Larry Summers, who is the then Treasury secretary, and I remember just looking going, wow, this peace making stuff isn't going well for me.

But I learned so much, and I learned about the process, I suppose the sausage making of it all.

And I ended up with more respect for these for these people who were away fing their families a lot, and in other areas of endeavor commerce they'd probably be very successful.

And even though I didn't agree with a lot of their politics, I learned by listening, and I'm trying to listen more, especially in the cracked politics that we have now.

You were talking about meals I had with these kinds of heads of state.

I do remember having to eat humble pie with George Bush because i'd slagged.

That for dessert was that like apple pie or raspberry pie pie.

It's a dish Irish people don't like to eat.

But I had, I had, I'd gone in an I'd had a meeting with them.

I was just very sort of cross because he had said that we were going to get these aid drugs to people on bicycles and motorcycles, whatever it takes, to the furthest reaches, whatever.

And I said, if you can get Guinness to the rural poor, if you can get Coca Cola, we can get these life saving drugs.

And I said, mister President, paint them red, white and blue if you want.

These will be the best advertisements for America ever.

So eventually, after extraordinary campaign with a lot of people involved from different sides of the fens, he'd agreed announced it, and then I'd gone in and said it's not happening.

It's not happening, And eventually it did.

It's twenty six million people actually since then, because back Obama followed through and I went in and I've been banging.

I remember I was banging on the table of the President of the United States, and he got, hey, hey, I am the president.

That's Okay, I'll just remind you of that inspect He was funny too, George Bush.

He had a great, great sense of humor.

Yeah, so I remember that anyway.

I remember he said, sit down, have some lunch, let's talk about do you remember what you ate?

Chicken?

Chicken?

And then did you meet with Barack Obama?

Yeah?

Yeah, everybody, few times, a few times.

But again I would just say and and Obama was an extraordinary man for so many reasons.

But one of the more extraordinary reasons is that even though George Bush had started this pep FAR, which is the President's Emergency Plan for A's Relief, Barack Obama carried it on, in fact, put more of American taxpayers money into it, even in President Bush had and never asked for recognition.

And it was kind of amazing.

But I do remember once maybe this is okay to tell the story because everyone knows now, I remember sitting with Alicia Keys, myself and Barack Obama having lunch, and I brought him a guitar and I ended up I played I don't know, something like something simple on the guitar, and he Breack Obama began to sing, Yeah he loves but he'd never sung in public at that point, and I was slagging them off, saying, oh, so it's not enough to be the president of the United States.

You know you're coming after our jobs.

You're coming after our jobs.

And then a week later he sang and then I don't know if you recall after the school shooting when he sang amazing.

Grace, sang amazing grace.

Can you imagine the leader of the free world singing amazing grace?

Can you sing amazing grace?

It's a song that means to me.

It's a song about a slaver and John John Newton whose ship sank in them in Donny Gaul in Northern Ireland.

So people are don't gonna feel close to this song, but I will sing it if you like.

Uh may e grace hal sweet oo.

Let's say ooh rach.

Like me.

Yeah, w wow loads boo.

Now I am found was blood?

No I see.

One more time.

I can't oh more.

It's so beautiful.

But a song, and isn't I've always known that it was a song of slavery.

But grace is the idea of that.

Grace is a sound.

I just it's it's just a while here for musician grace.

You know, I'm I've got faith, but I'm not very I'm not very good at living up to the creed that I wish I could follow better.

And but grace is the grace is the thing that gets me through it.

I remember when Richard, my husband was downstairs, and I came down and you and Patty again, we're there, weren't you You were sitting there.

Oh yeah, something I'll never forget with him.

Well, I'll never forget your Your husband a towering man as well as I mean a towering figure as well as one who built those towers.

And but he loved you, you know he he Richard.

You say that he loved a lot, he cared and how to deal these high buildings, but his feet were definitely on the ground.

You know.

It's funny, you know, I don't know who said grief is the price we pay for love for love, But I've seen you go through this and even recently, as you know, and I'm with your son and your husband and your your grace is to your friends is unfathomable.

And you fill that hole with all of us who know you.

No, I'd say that hole is filled by it's a reverse.

The hole is filled by my friends and my family, and so I'm.

A lucky, lucky woman.

And I think that you know, we we think that all this is, this conversation has been about, well, it's stories of surrender.

We wanted to talk about the documentary, the song you've written, you've spoken, you've traveled, but you have also done a film which is just out now, and I think if we have people listening, we want them to watch this film.

So would you like to talk about that for a minute, about the film?

You know?

Not really, I I'd rather sing that second verse for for your beautiful Man, and so if I can remember the lyric here, let me just try twalls grace that told my heart to fear.

And grace math fieus really our precious bad grace uhpier the hour our first believe.

And when you went to Ethiopia, when you went to see extreme poverty and hunger, they had nothing, no food, And so I think we could have him in at odd food poverty or as long as you want.

Yeah, after Live Aids, myself and Ali went and not with a camera crew, an he just volunteered and we're to the food station and I was put in charge of this, well not in charge.

I was allowed to work in this orphanage where in the Wallow province and a place called Ajibar, And we were just helping out because we were caught up in what happened at Live Aid.

And Bob Gallof had had this effect on this other little irishman and him a giant, and I just you know, to see, malnutrition is a hard thing to look at.

And Ethiopians are very proud royal people.

They were never colonized, so just you know the dignity of these people, and it of course changed the course of our life, value myself and and all of that.

But having seen what manuitution looks like to then realize that this is not something strong with this labor government who have lowered aid, and it's upset a lot of people, but at least they gave warning that they were coming down.

In the United States, USAID was was just I mean demolished, vandalized by a person who who looked at sort of life losses.

It would appear like job losses, and and there was food locked up and while people starved to death, was food locked up because people hadn't got the keys.

I mean, I'll put it as simply as that.

And there was medicines, critical medicines, aids, medications that never got to people.

Nick Christof's writing in the New York Times is unbelievable on this.

But there will be much more about this because the constituencies that elected Donald Trump a lot of them religious folks, Catholics and evangelicals, and they don't like killing kids.

The almost glee that these organizations these and the sacking of people who are the best of us, really these people civil servants.

So many of the people in our political process that we don't know their names or their faces are actually doing the real work.

There's a really moving piece which actually almost moved me to tears in the New York Times about the fact that Trump, we don't even want to mention his name, our president, my president, is tearing down a lot of the what he calls the bureaucratic buildings that were built in the sixties, and in fact, a lot of that architecture and those big buildings were designed by both Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy to show the American public that there were these huge buildings, huge edifices were for people who were making their world, their society better by going to you know, that there was a government that was actually taking care of them, and they wanted to advertise that.

They wanted to show people that Washington was there to give education, housing, health, and that they did that on purpose.

And now they see that as an example of you know, bureaucracy, which has got to go, firing forty thousand people, as you say, who go to work every day for not very much money to try and make life better.

You know, well the people who bring peace to these conflicts, and even a lot of them fifth of over.

But having observed the Irish peast process, all I remember and this is just the amount of sort of time and energy you know, you had.

You had these huge giants, and Tony Blair deserves credit, and Bill Clinton and and Bertie Hern and all the heads of whoever was working on this.

But it's just the civil servants I who were eating the bad sandwiches and staying up under the fluorescent light, you know, into the small hours of the morning trying to make sense of it.

All people doing trade deals.

Now they're working hard on behalf of their countries.

It's not very rock and roll, but I've developed I've felt this enormous respect for civil servants and just people that we just don't know are keeping the lights on.

You know.

My last, very last question to you.

If food is you know, alleviating hunger.

This food is something we give to people who are hungry.

If food is something we make for our daughter on her birthday and share around the table.

If food has brought you and I together, and Ali and Jordan and your kids over meals in the River Cafe that started in sunshine and end in the moonlight.

It was also comfort if you needed food for comfort, is there a food that you would reach for?

Hmmm?

Maybe this code.

I'm a fish and chips man.

That's who I am.

Shoot me.

Thank you.

I love you, so delighted to be with you.

Thank you, Thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table for in partnership with Montclair.

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