U2 megastar Bono has revealed one of his cousins is actually his half-brother.
The frontman told earlier this year how the relative was the result of an affair in the 60s between dad Bob and a “gorgeous woman”.
Now Bono – real name Paul Hewson – has admitted the woman was his Auntie Barbara and that their child is a stock market analyst called Scott Rankin.
READ MORE: U2 singer Bono’s famous family – following in dad’s footsteps to Netflix star daughter
He said: “We felt like brothers long before we knew we were.”
Iris Hewson, the singer’s mum, died in 1974 when Bono was 14 and she never knew about the affair.
Auntie Barbara was married to Jack Rankin, Iris’s brother, who died in 2020.
Bono, 62, learned about the infidelity in 2000, a year before Bob died of cancer.
(Image: AFP/Getty Images)
Bono, 62, learned about the infidelity in 2000, a year before his father died of cancer.
He said: “I must have known that something was up, and I must have held my father responsible for kind of making my mother unhappy in the way kids just pick up things.”
Bono first spoke about the affair when he appeared on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in June.
He told presenter Lauren Laverne: “My father was going through a lot. His head was elsewhere because his heart was elsewhere.
“It’s a very close family and I could tell 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 secret.”
(Image: X90004)
Mr Rankin worked at Davy Group, Ireland’s largest stockbroker, for more than 15 years, before becoming a civil servant with Ireland’s department of finance.
The affair was reportedly kept secret from most of the family with many only finding out just before Desert Island Discs was broadcast.
It comes after Bono has said that he takes full responsibility for the 2014 marketing disaster that saw U2’s latest album automatically downloaded onto the devices of 500 million iTunes users.
In September 2014, copies of U2’s album Songs of Innocence were given away for free to millions of iTunes account holders across the world, causing significant backlash.
(Image: AFP via Getty Images)
Frontman Bono apologised at the time, saying: “I had this beautiful idea and we kind of got carried away with ourselves.”
In an extract from his forthcoming memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story by Bono published in The Guardian, Bono wrote about the band’s long-standing relationship with Apple.
It stems from the group meeting Steve Jobs in 2004, when the Apple co-founder refused to pay them in Apple stock for their music to be used in an iPod advert.
For the latest breaking news and stories from across the globe from the Daily Star, sign up for our newsletter by clicking here
READ NEXT:
Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
