Bono's gone bonkers!

Hi Jennifer and Friends: Next week Bono is going to recite a 14 minute poem about Elvis Presley on the BBC here in London on May 14 at 11:00 pm.

The BBC is better known as the a primary repository for serious news and comment, but Radio 4 is to enter uncharted territory next week when it broadcasts a bizarre 14-minute poem about Elvis Presley written by Bono, the U2 frontman. The Irish singer has long been a professed superfan of the king of rock’n’roll, and is thought to have written the rhyme, American David, in 1994.

Listeners will be treated to lines such as: “Elvis, with god on his knees/ Elvis, on three TVs/ Elvis, here come the killer bees, head full of honey, potato chips and cheese.” The BBC has billed it as “delivered plainly, but intensely, by Bono. Some lines are purposefully quintessential Elvis clichés while others make listeners view Elvis in a new light.”

The recording is thought to have been made two years ago by Ten Alps, Bob Geldof’s production company, as part of a Radio 2 programme exploring the history of Sun Records, which released Presley’s first records. U2 are huge fans of Presley, and recorded their 1988 album Rattle and Hum at Sun Studios, Memphis, with Bono using a microphone once used by Elvis. Larry Mullen, the band’s drummer, called his first child Aaron Elvis, an inversion of Presley’s first names. In recent performances Bono has taken to the stage wearing eyeliner, telling journalists that he thought he looked like Elvis’s stillborn twin brother, Jesse. “Which, maybe, is in poor taste,” he added.

Clare, London, England