U2 frontman Bono was recovering well yesterday from emergency surgery to combat injuries sustained while he was preparing for his latest US Tour, writes Sal Volatile, Entertainment Correspondent.
U2 promoter Arthur Goebbels confirmed that all 16 US concerts - set to begin on 3 June at No Hope, Idaho and finish on 19 July at Indignity, New Hampshire - have been cancelled.
Bono has been released from the Victor Frankenstein Hospital at Ingolstadt, Germany, the country where the singer and would-be world-saviour is understood to have been rehearsing a new spectacular Ego-Display that was set to stun US audiences.
Promoter Goebbels issued a statement yesterday saying: "Bono suffered a very complex injury during rehearsals. His ego - already swollen after intense megalomaniac activities during the past 12 months - became further inflamed, and began to impact upon and to suffocate his talent. This meant that Bono began to lose touch with the Earth. His whole body became engorged with excessive egotism, and he took off like a hot-air balloon.
"Soon he was floating at such a height that witnesses thought he was a blimp advertising the upcoming tour. We had to alert the German authorities before F-4 Phantoms were deployed from the Jagdgeschwader 71 air defence wing to shoot him down."
Surgeon Ludwig Van Bilgen Upfahrt, the doctor who performed the delicate operation - which also involved the removal of the star's exciting sunglasses and the freeing up of his repertoire of globalpolitical platitudes which had gone into spasm - told us:
"We have treated Mr Wilfred Littlehampton (Bono's real name) with the care which we show to all our cases of megalomania and ego-explosion. He must now undergo an extensive recovery involving solitudes, isolation, humility and self-deprecation. This will reduce the bloated ego to normal proportions again."
Dr Van Bilgen Upfahrt had some bad news. "Unfortunately, we are unable to do anything about the shrunken talent. It seems that this is something Mr Littlehampton has always possessed and with which he must learn to live in harmony now."
Dr Van Bilgen Upfahrt has a worldwide reputation, based upon his work with such egoists and global-domination fantasists as Alexander The Great, Napoleon, Noel Edmonds, Adolf Hitler, Simon Cowell, Joanna Lumley, David Icke and Nick Clegg.
It is thought that Dr Van Bilgen Upfahrt has prescribed either a year in Canada or a season in British pantomime as the back end of an Irish pantomime donkey as the perfect anti-ego programme for the ailing performer.
There is no news yet on which one of these programmes - if any - Bono will adopt in his quest for ego normality.
Page 35 - Adam Clayton & Larry Mullen to be replaced by CGI images on next U2 tour.
