"You wouldn't have any inkling that Lemon was about Bono's mother unless you were told...
It happened completely by chance. Someone had approached one of Bono's family at the airport and told him about the existence of this ancient footage in which Bob and Iris Hewson featured...It was eerie watching it. The image of his mother, on-screen, haunted Bono. 'She was wearing lemon. That's where the title came from.'
From that starting point, the song became something else entirely: a meditation about film itself and the pleasure of looking. 'The cinema is where we get to be nosy,' Bono reflects. 'Where we go to look into people's lives, without them minding. People like to stare at other people up close. But because of my position, I don't get to stare at people so much, so film is important for me, in that it allows me to do that.'
Excerpt from:
U2 Into the Heart: The Stories Behind Every Song
By Niall Stokes
It's a great book, but sometimes it is a little dissapointing to read that the stories and meanings behind your favourite songs are not what you had imagined.
