Bono and Edge on Howard Stern

U2’s most talkative pair, Bono and Edge, made their first appearance on the Howard Stern Show. It was quite the road of life covered over the course of the interview.

A few highlights follow:

On their one and only physical fight:

It was a small gig at a nightclub that turned into a big deal after they found out the Talking Heads would be in the audience. But when their drummer Larry Mullen Jr. stopped playing in the middle of their performance in order to fix something wrong with his kit, Bono lost his cool.
“He says I threw the drum kit at him but actually I threw them away from him,” Bono said of his onstage reaction. “I just lifted up the drums to expose the fact that he was hiding there. He was actually, I think, doing something very sensible like fixing his pedal.”
“I seem to remember you were playing the drums with your microphone as a sort of form of encouragement,” the Edge said with a laugh.
All the two would say in terms of what occurred that night was that the Edge had to step in and get physical with Bono after Larry fled from the stage. It’s unclear who exactly won the fight, but Bono gave Howard this piece of advice:
“I can tell you never pick a fight with a man whose hand-to-eye coordination is his living,” Bono joked about taking on his mate the Edge.

They perform “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”:

Bono on listening to himself sing:

Even harder for Bono, though, is revisiting some of his earlier performances and recordings. He told Howard he went years without listening to U2’s best-selling album “The Joshua Tree.”
“I find it excruciating to listen to those songs,” he explained. “I don’t like the sound of my voice on a lot of the stuff.”
According to Bono, many of his vocals on the album sound “squeezed.” “The music’s magnificent and the tunes are great and some of the lyrics are okay, but the voice, it’s like, God, spare me the voice,” he said of his own singing.

Performing “You’re The Best Thing About Me”:

The entire interview can be found here.