Bono Said When U2 Worked With Ed Sheeran on ‘Yours Eternally,’ Singer Asked, ‘You’re Not Going To Get Me Into Politics, Are You?’

U2 is legendary for speaking their minds, advocating for change and unabashedly speaking out to support causes they believe in. That’s their bag, though, according to singer Bono. Asked by Rolling Stone UK to weigh in on the controversy surrounding Ed Sheeran’s Loop tour and the dropping of rapper Macklemore over his chants of “Free Palestine” during two opening slots on the North American leg, Bono said the official statement from Sheeran about that incident tracked with his stance while recording “Yours Eternally” with U2 for this year’s surprise Days of Ash EP.

“I would say with Ed and Macklemore that we shouldn’t personalize this, what’s going on,” Bono said of the fallout from Macklemore’s statements, which resulted in the rest of the tour’s opening acts, as well as Sheeran’s onstage backing band, leaving the tour. “[Producer]Brian Eno said today that pop stars are like little fish in a large sea of huge forces and religion and politics … And so I don’t want to dwell on Ed and Macklemore and that incident.”

After calls for Macklemore’s removal reached a fever pitch, Sheeran issued a statement in which he said that while he was “appalled by the conflict between Israel and Palestine” and suffering and pain on both sides, after speaking to venues hosting the shows in an attempt to “build a bridge,” Macklemore being removed was the promoter’s decision, not his.

Saying his shows are about bringing people together in “unity, joy, escapism [and] love,” Sheeran added, “I am not complicit. I have my personal views on this devastating conflict. Just because I choose not to speak publicly, it doesn’t mean I don’t have them, and it doesn’t mean I don’t care.”

That choice to let his music do the talking is keeping with Bono’s experience working with Sheeran as well on “Yours Eternally,” which featured Ukrainian soldier-turned-musician Tara Topolia on the song written from the perspective of a letter written from an active-duty soldier on the front lines of war.

Bono said Sheeran asked him, “‘You’re not going to get me into politics, are you?'” Bono told the mag he replied, “‘This soldier who inspired us, he loved you Ed, and you’ve worked on this song’,” to which he said Sheeran responded, “‘Yeah, but I just want to keep my thing free.'”

The U2 singer and human rights campaigner noted that “you can’t be pushing people around,” with drummer Larren Mullen Jr. adding that, “artists [can] choose whether they want to be involved, and they are entitled to choose whether they want to be involved or not … And it’s not our job to criticize that, no matter how we feel.”

Dubbing the situation to weigh in or not as “complicated,” Bono stressed that while the band believe everyone is entitled to their own opinion, he has no patience for billionaires flexing their muscle to tamp down speech they disagree with. The latter was a seeming allusion to New England Patriots owner billionaire Robert Kraft, who helped lead the push to have Macklemore removed from the Sheeran tour.

“We are absolutely clear about promoters or billionaire owners and the idea that they could have some influence on what you say or what you do on a stage,” Mullen Jr. said. “We’ve talked about this, and [if] you applied that logic to U2, we would have been out of business on ‘Sunday, Bloody Sunday,'” he added about opening track from the band’s 1983 album War that took on the thorny issue of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in one of the band’s most plainly political songs.