Bono speaks on World Aids Day

Bono tells Paul Vallely of The Independent why people in rich nations can make a difference to the Aids disaster.

“Do the maths,” says Bono. “It costs about $5 a week to pay for the two pills a day it takes to keep someone with HIV alive.”

And, talking about the work the band has been doing on their new album Bono reveals, yes, here it comes, ‘The Edge is on fire’:

“World music this is not,” he says, though U2 fans will “feel the difference”. Polyrhythmic is the word he chooses with a self-deprecating laugh. “U2 in dancefloor shock. Normally when you play a U2 tune, it clears the dancefloor. And that may not be true of this. There’s some trance influences. But there’s some very hardcore guitar coming out of The Edge. Real molten metal. It’s not like anything we’ve ever done before, and we don’t think it sounds like anything anyone else has done either.”

U2log.com predicts the album will come out sounding just like U2, just the way we like it.

Read more and find out about Bono’s number one in Ghana

RED strikes back at ‘costly’ claims

Paul Vallely at The Independent refutes claims made by advertising trade magazine Ad Age that Bono’s RED campaign spends more money on advertising than it raises for Africa.

“The money RED has raised means that some 160,000 Africans will be put on life-saving anti-retrovirals in the coming months, orphans are being fed and kept in school in Swaziland and a national HIV treatment and prevention programme has begun in Rwanda. Some 99 per cent of funds raised go directly to life-saving schemes.”

On the RED website, CEO Bobby Shriver also reacts to the article in Ad Age:

“Your article says that $18 million and soon to be $25 million (when we have completed our most recent accounting) is a “meager” amount. It’s five times the amount given to the Global Fund by the private sector in four years.”