Bruce Springsteen and Bono together in New York in June

Bruce Springsteen will receive the Harry Belafonte Voices for Social Justice Award at the Tribeca Festival in New York in June, and will be accompanied by Bono. The recognition, named after the great singer who passed away in 2023, is awarded from 2021 to artists and personalities who use their public visibility to promote equality, dignity and human rights. Jane Rosenthal, co-founder of the Tribeca Festival, said: “There are few figures who embody the spirit of Tribeca’s Harry Belafonte Award more fully than Bruce Springsteen.”

The ceremony will be held on June 13 at the OKX Theater of the BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center: the peculiarity is that it will be marked by a “duet” with Bono, not musical but in the form of a public conversation. Tributes from Patti Smith and Robert De Niro are also seen.
If you are near New York at that time, tickets are on sale for €50-65: the event is the culmination of a long series of public appearances and certificates of mutual esteem which has never led to studio collaborations but to numerous joint performances. Springsteen also replaced Bono in U2 in 2015 at a public event in Times Square when the singer was injured.

When Rockol interviewed Bono last spring, the singer talked about how the Boss has been “a source of inspiration since 1981, when I saw him at the Hammersmith Palais in London and he was with Pete Townshend of the Who. I met him, I couldn’t believe it: my brother had given me his albums when I was a teenager.”

He’s always been a role model, not in the rock and roll sense, but in the opera sense: “Jungleland,” to me, is opera, not rock. He is Italian-Irish, and opera is never far away from those origins. Family stories are an opera, not in the sense of a soap opera, but of a real one. The fact that he had the courage to talk about his father in the early 80s gave me the courage to sing about my father in the Zeros and now in this period. This, and many other things: the way he behaves, above all.