During the course of a recent episode of BBC’s Desert Island Discs podcast, Bono recalled how he learnt he had a secret half-brother.

Bono said he was stunned to learn in the year 2000 that his father Bob had had a child with a woman who he now sees as “part of the family.”

“I do have another brother whom I love and adore that I didn’t know I didn’t have — or maybe I did,” the U2 frontman told host Lauren Laverne. “My father was obviously going through a lot [when Bono’s mother died], but partly his head was elsewhere ’cause his heart was elsewhere. So I think that was part of the problem I was probably pickin’ up as a kid.”

He continued, “It’s a very close family, and I could tell that my father had a deep friendship with this gorgeous woman who was part of the family. And then they had a child, and this was all kept a secret.”

Bono explained further that his mother never found out before her sudden death when he was just 14, but that he did get the opportunity to confront his father about the affair years later.

“I asked him, did he love my mother? And he said yes,” Bono said . “And I said, you know, ‘How could this happen?’ And he said, ‘It can.’ And that he was trying to put it right, trying to do the right thing. He wasn’t apologizing, he was just stating, ‘These are the facts.'”

During the podcast, Bono also chose the eight records he would bring with him to a desert island.

Source: RTT Music News