Bono: I may never play guitar again
WENN.com Bono, with his injured arm in a sling, in Dublin, Ireland, on Dec. 24. The singer said he’s not sure if he’ll ever play guitar again due to injuries suffered in a bike crash. Bono’s shredding days may be over.
The U2 singer’s November bike crash in Central Park left him so torn up that he’s not sure he’ll ever pick up a guitar again.
In a lengthy year-end message to fans on the band’s website, Bono made his first comments about the Nov. 16 wreck, saying he “blanked out on impact.”
“[I] have no memory of how I finished up in New York Presbyterian with my humerus bone sticking through my leather jacket. Very punk rock as injuries go,” the 54-year-ancient rocker wrote.
“The consequences of this freak accident are significant enough that I will have to concentrate hard to be ready for the U2 tour in fitness terms… as a result I have cancelled every public appearance and decided this missive is all the communication I can manage for the first half of 2015, beyond muttering and singing to myself of course,” he added.
The Irish rocker broke his left shoulder in three places, shattered his left high arm, and broke a bone in the orbit of his left eye in the brutal wreck, which doctors said occurred when he swerved to avoid another rider.
Charles Sykes/AP Bono with U2 during a concert at the New Meadowlands Stadium in July 2011. Surgeons at New York-Presbyterian looked-for five hours, three metal plates and 18 screws to knit the mangled frontman back together.
In his New Year’s note, collected as a year-end “A to Z” list, Bono kept a light tone about his injuries, musing that he now had the distinction of being the only member of rock ‘n roll royalty to have a titanium elbow.
Somewhere else, though, he struck a more gloomy note.
“Recovery has been more hard than I plotting… As I write this, it is not clear that I will ever play guitar again,” he said, adding that his bandmates “have reminded me that neither they nor Western civilization are depending on this.”
“I in person would very much miss fingering the frets of my green Irish falcon or my (RED) Gretsch. Just for the pleasure, aside from prose tunes,” he said.
Composing the year-end access, he said, was an attempt to learn from his mistakes – “the first of which is the discovery that I am not an armored vehicle.”
Yet the largest casualty of the freak bike crash wasn’t the singer’s busted face or arm.
“The real injury this year was to my Irish pride as it was learned that under my tracksuit I was wearing yellow and black Lycra cycling shorts,” he said.
“Yes, LYCRA. This is not very rock ‘n’ roll.”
