Bono reveals his cousin is also his half-brother: ‘I must have known something was up’

Bono has revealed that his cousin is also his half-brother, after his father had an affair with his mother’s sister.

The U2 frontman’s father Bob Hewson apparently told Bono, real name Paul Hewson, the news back in 2000, before dying of cancer in 2001.

Hewson and Bono’s aunt Barbara allegedly had an affair and had a son, Scott Rankin, although Bono’s late mother Iris never found out about it.

Although they grew up thinking they were cousins, Bono says that Rankin had always felt like a brother to him.

"The truth is with Scott, we felt like brothers long before we knew we were. I love Scott and his mother, Barbara,” he told the Irish Times.

“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.”

The U2 frontman also spoke of his grief after the loss of his mother at age 14: “These things that shape us are huge gifts in the end.”

“At least they were to me because the wound that was opened up by my mother’s passing so quickly... became this hole, this void, that I filled with music,” he added.

“Though the family seemed to disappear in that moment, I started finding other families: Ali’s [his wife] family, the band, alternative families. In that sense, I am an easy read. You can see what happened,” the singer and activist said.

Bono and his wife Ali have been married for 40 years and have four children together.

In an extract from his memoir released over the weekend, Bono 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.

Bono apologised at the time, saying: “I had this beautiful idea and we kind of got carried away with ourselves.”