News - Bono & The Edge: A Sort Of Homecoming, With Dave Letterman

Disney+ has announced the music documentary Bono & The Edge: A Sort Of Homecoming, With Dave Letterman will premiere on March 17th to coincide with the new U2 album, Songs Of Surrender...

Press Release

The feature-length music docu-special Bono & The Edge: A Sort of Homecoming, with Dave Letterman, sees Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville captures Dave Letterman on his first visit to Dublin to hang out with Bono and The Edge in their hometown, experience Dublin, and join the two U2 musicians for a concert performance unlike any they’ve done before. The film is part concert movie, part travel adventure plus a whole lot of Bono and The Edge, with Dave’s humour throughout.

As well as the concert performance itself, the docu-special will focus on the extraordinary relationship between Bono and The Edge and how it has developed across 45-plus years of close friendship and one of the most remarkable songwriting partnerships in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, plus document Dublin through Dave’s eyes as he experiences Bono and The Edge’s home city for the first time.

“Recently, I won a radio contest,” said Letterman. “Winner gets to visit Dublin with Bono and The Edge (radio contest part not true, but I feel like a winner). They showed me around, introduced me to their musician friends, and performed some of their greatest songs in a small theater. It’s a great tour. Get in touch with them ― I’m told there are still availabilities. I’m the luckiest man on the planet. (There are no availabilities).”

Letterman, who was on his first-ever visit to Ireland, has a 25-year relationship with U2 but had previously only spent time with the Bono and The Edge in the U.S. As well as being their honoured guest at an intimate concert performance at a local landmark, the former Ambassador Cinema building at the top of O’Connell Street on Dublin’s Northside, Dave embarks on his own exploration of the city. He visits the legendary Forty Foot swimming spot on a freezing cold morning and rides the DART commuter train north from Co. Wicklow. Letterman also inspires a brand new U2 song written by The Edge and Bono and narrowly escapes having to perform at a sing-song at the legendary McDaid’s pub off Grafton Street with an equally legendary bunch of artists and musicians, including Bono, The Edge, Glen Hansard, Markéta Irglová, Imelda May, Loah, Saint Sister, Grian Chatten of Fontaines DC, and Dermot Kennedy, whose voice Bono describes as a “sonic boom.”

“I fell in love with U2 and David Letterman at roughly the same time, somewhere around my sophomore year of high school,” said director Morgan Neville. “That somehow decades later we would all come together in Ireland to make this show was an unlikely dream somehow come to life.”

“I had this incredible dream that I was in the magical city of Dublin with Bono, The Edge and David Letterman,” said producer Justin Wilkes. “And if it wasn’t for the fact that Morgan beautifully captured it all on film, I still wouldn’t believe it actually happened.”

The film was shot on location in New York and Los Angeles and, of course, in Dublin, Ireland.

Also announced this week, a new album titled Songs Of Surrender - a collection of 40 seminal U2 songs from across the band’s catalogue, re-recorded and reimagined for 2023 in sessions spanning the last two years, to be released in full on Friday, March 17th. Songs Of Surrender is curated and produced by The Edge and sees the band revisit some of the most celebrated songs of their 40-plus year career, including With Or Without You, One, Beautiful Day, Sunday Bloody Sunday and Invisible, for a musical reimagining resulting in a completely new recording of each track, to include the arrangements and, in some cases, new lyrics. The first track to be made available from this brand new set of recordings is the anthemic Pride (In The Name Of Love). Listen below...

Image - Disney+