Bono’s ‘Bonkers’ Elvis Poem

Listeners were treated to such lines as: “Elvis, with god on his knees/ Elvis, on three TVs/ Elvis, here come the killer bees, head full of honey, potato chips and cheese”, as the U2 frontman ran through the 14-minute epic he’s believed to have written in 1994.

The Beeb said it was “delivered plainly, but intensely, by Bono”, claiming that “some lines are purposefully quintessential Elvis clichés while others make listeners view Elvis in a new light”.

“It took a while to work out how to produce it in a very effective but bonkers way”, said Des Shaw, a director of Ten Alps, Bob Geldof’s production company, who first heard it when interviewing Bono for another programme.

“He was talking about how much he loved Elvis and he said he had written a poem about him. I said I’d love to hear it and he ran upstairs and grabbed it and just read it for us”, Shaw told The Times.

“I suppose, really, it’s his thoughts on Elvis. He’s a huge fan and he knows an awful, awful lot about his music. We’ve been tossing ideas around for two years, keeping on going back to it and trying to work out how we’d use it”, he explained.

The poem was published in the band’s fan magazine, Propaganda, in 1995 but has never been publicly aired in full. The BBC reading came with a warning about its language, as one rhyming triplet reads: “Elvis the bumper stickers/ Elvis the white knickers/ Elvis the white n***** ate at Burger King and just kept getting bigger”.

Also likely to cause offence was another section that said: “Elvis the ecstatic/ Elvis the plastic/ Elvis the elastic with a spastic dance that could explain the energy of America”.

“While I’m sure Bono didn’t intend to insult disabled people, the word [spastic] is often used as an offensive reference to someone with cerebral palsy”, Alice Maynard, chairman of disability charity Scope, told The Times.

“Because of this, the word can be very insulting to a disabled person and its use in some contexts is inappropriate and, at worst, discriminatory”.

The epic poem was mixed over the top of various Elvis tracks, as well as popular culture recordings from the past 50 years.

In some recent performances Bono has taken to the stage wearing eyeliner, telling journalists that he thought he looked like Elvis’s stillborn twin brother, Jesse. “Which, maybe, is in poor taste,” he added.

Click here for the entire Times article.