U2 front man Bono has admitted that he still dislikes his band's name, is "embarrassed" by most of their songs and is no fan of his own singing voice and goes "scarlet" when he hears U2 songs on the radio.
In a frank interview with the Awards Chatter podcast, the singer (61) revealed that he had only learnt how to sing "recently" and that while his band are "incredible", his vocals are now "strained" and make him "cringe a little bit".
U2's new track Your Song Saved My Life, which features on Sing 2, is shortlisted for the best original song Oscar.
"I’ve been in the car when one of our songs has come on the radio and I’ve been the colour of, as we say in Dublin, scarlet. I’m just so embarrassed."
He added that he doesn't like U2’s name, which was first suggested by Steve Averill of Dublin band The Radiators in the late 1970s. Averill went on to design many of the band’s album covers.
"I really don’t. But I was late into some kind of dyslexia," Bono said. "I didn’t realise that The Beatles was a bad pun either.
"In our head it was like the spy plane, U-boat, it was futuristic - as it turned out to imply this kind of acquiescence, no I don’t like that name. I still don’t really like the name.
"Paul McGuinness, our first manager, did say, 'Look, it’s a great name, it’s going to look good on a T-shirt, a letter and a number’."
Speaking about his voice, he said that U2's 2004 single Vertigo is "probably is the one I’m proudest of". "It’s the way it connects with the crowd.".
He also revealed that back in 1980s, the late singer Robert Palmer told U2’s bassist Adam Clayton: "‘God, would you ever tell your singer to just take down the keys a little bit, he’d do himself a favour and he’d do us all a favour who have to listen to him.’
"But I was thinking out of my body. I wasn’t thinking about singing. I didn’t really think about changing keys. Did we ever change a key?
"I do think U2 pushes out the boat on embarrassment quite a lot and maybe that’s the place to be as an artist, you know right at the edge of your level of embarrassment."
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