‘He taught me to create my own destiny’

Elijah Hewson, Bono’s son, and his band Inhaler tell Will Hodgkinson about their work ethic and what it is like to be a Gen Z rock band.

Elijah Hewson of Inhaler, an Irish alternative rock band who recently released a superbly confident debut album called It Won’t Always Be Like This, has a Rolling Stones poster on his bedroom wall. Next to it is one of David Bowie’s Heroes. Hewson, who is talking to me on Zoom, is wearing a Beatles T-shirt. It doesn’t seem typical that a 21-year-old should be tying his colours to the mast of all this classic rock, so I ask Hewson if he got the poster at a Stones concert.

‘‘Oh no, I bought it off Amazon,’’ he says. An image comes to mind of Hewson’s father, Paul, aka Bono of U2, stumbling out of his Dublin pile to sign for the Amazon delivery while his teenage son slumbers upstairs.

Hewson is on our call with Inhaler’s drummer, Ryan McMahon. ‘‘At school we were certainly the outliers,’’ he says of being into rock music as a Gen Z teen. They met, alongside Inhaler’s bassist, Robert Keating, at St Andrew’s College, a private school in Dublin, before bumping into their guitarist, Josh Jenkinson, at a party. ‘‘Rock was how we found each other. We were into Motorhead, Metallica, Nirvana. . . It was not normal to be into those bands when you were 13 in 2012.’’

Inhaler wouldn’t be receiving as much attention if Hewson’s dad wasn’t in the biggest Irish band of all. By the same token, Inhaler would have also been written off outright if their debut wasn’t so good: tight, purposeful, exciting. After the band members left school to spend a year doing as many gigs as possible – and if that didn’t work out, bowing to parental pressure and going to college – things started happening in 2019 when they played the Electric Picnic, Ireland’s Glastonbury, before making it on to the BBC’s Sound of 2020 list. Being a rock band who lived from concert to concert, however, the pandemic stopped Inhaler in their tracks.

Stuck at home with parents, without much to do, the four friends worked hard at writing songs. The result is It Won’t Always Be Like This, which as an impassioned alternative rock album with a widescreen sense of ambition falls somewhere between the Pixies and, yes, U2. Nobody could listen to a record as crafted as this and dismiss it as the product of the son of a rock star and his mates riding on a famous dad’s coat tails.

‘‘Before the Electric Picnic we were playing in pubs before audiences made up of our family and friends, although most of our friends couldn’t get in because they were underage,’’ Hewson says. ‘‘Finally, our parents were encouraged enough to say: ‘Give it a go.’ Thank God we didn’t go back to college.’’

As to the benefits of being in a band when your father is Bono, Hewson says: ‘‘I don’t know any different. But I can say that he’s been incredibly supportive, and if I play him a song he’ll tell me straight up if he likes it or not. I’m proud to be his son and we don’t want to hide from that. It’s a bit like if you are bullied at school. The last thing you should do is cry about it.’’

There is a downside, of course. ‘‘It means that people will always have biases about us, but that made us strive harder to make a really strong album. Besides, we have such a young fanbase now that they may not even know who U2 are.’’

‘‘And you probably wouldn’t be talking to us right now if the album was bad,’’ McMahon says. That is true. It was after hearing the album that I wanted to interview the band, not when I heard of their singer’s illustrious pedigree. Inhaler – the name comes from Hewson’s adolescent asthma – spent years as a school band, doing covers and being shambolic in the way teenage boys tend to be. It was only when it came to recording the album that things got serious.

‘‘We were a raucous, ropey garage band, and to be honest we couldn’t really play our instruments,’’ Hewson admits. ‘‘It was our

producer who told us that we weren’t good enough, and that if we were going to write all these musically demanding songs we had to be able to actually play them. That’s when it started coming together and it led to the album having this defiant, joyful sound.’’

You would assume that It Won’t Always Be Like This is about coming to terms with the pandemic. Some of the songs certainly do address the situation. ‘‘Like Paris in 45/ the whole world’s waiting to come alive,’’ Hewson sings on When It Breaks, which was written last summer. However, the title track was written five years ago.

‘‘It Won’t Always Be Like This is about waiting for your life to start, dreaming of your future and egging yourself on,’’ Hewson says. ‘‘For us it will always be about being 16 . . .thinking, ‘I’m never going to get these braces off my teeth, I’m never going to be rid of these spots,’’’ McMahon elaborates. ‘‘It meant something very different to us back then than what it has come to mean to people now.’’

Inhaler realised how much their young lives would be affected by world events at the beginning of March 2020. They were on tour in Europe when they heard that the huge industry event South by Southwest had been cancelled. ‘‘Before then, we were thinking that this coronavirus thing will be like swine flu,’’ McMahon says. ‘‘Then we started thinking, ‘What if everything really does get cancelled?’ We came back from that tour and we were meant to have a week off before going to America, but in that week everything went into lockdown. And, being a bit naive, we said, ‘Oh great, now we’ll have three weeks off.’’’

Instead they ended up back at their respective mums and dads’ houses for a year and a half, not knowing if the band would survive or play gigs again. ‘‘You couldn’t leave your front door, you couldn’t see your friends, and when you’re young that’s really challenging. It was a very dramatic shift in our lifestyles, so lockdown forced us to mature. We’re in a band, we get on stage, we play raucous guitar music. If you go straight from school to doing that, you don’t have to grow up. It was a conflicting time for us all, and those emotions made their way on to the album.’’

The first time the four got to see each other again was June last year, when they went to London to work on the album. They found themselves trying to finish songs about their young lives just as statues were being pulled down, Black Lives Matter was taking off, and wildfires were raging in California. ‘‘It felt like a pivot moment,’’

Hewson says. ‘‘We were missing festivals and gigs and trying to imagine what things would look like when everything came back. When It Breaks is about that. That’s us getting a little bit political.’’ All this comes at a time when being in a rock band has fallen out of fashion. ‘‘Someone asked us in an interview, ‘Do you write your own songs?’’’ McMahon says. ‘‘She was taken aback when we said we did.’’

Hewson does seem like a pretty good advertisement for the parenting skills of Bono and his wife, Ali. He’s polite and selfeffacing, and Inhaler are too good a band to have got where they are without work. It is easy to forget that Hewson grew up in a rarefied world. When I ask if he learnt anything from supporting Noel Gallagher, he replies: ‘‘Actually, we didn’t get to talk to him that night. But he is a family friend.’’ You have to wonder if his father, famous for giving young bands the ‘‘Bono talk’’ on the perils of success, has offered advice on the rock life.

‘‘My father taught me that you create your own destiny, and the amount of effort you put in is as much as you get out,’’ he replies. ‘‘We’ve been working flat out for the past few years and now it’s paying off. We couldn’t afford to be a band that said, ‘Yeah, man, we’re just into the music.’ We had to be on top of everything.’’

Hewson and McMahon both say they can’t wait to get back on stage. ‘‘We want our egos back,’’ Hewson says.

It Won’t Always Be Like This by Inhaler is out now