Does U2 like Yoo-Hoo?

I see that Bono, the frontman for the band U2, was on a podcast saying that he "still" doesn't like U2's band name and he turns off the radio when he hears himself sing.

I always knew I had something in common with that Irishman!

He was on the Awards Chatter podcast talking about his career and his music.

"I still don’t [like it]," he said of the band's name. "I really don’t. But I was late into some kind of dyslexia. I didn’t realise that The Beatles was a bad pun either. In our head it was like the spy plane, U-boat, it was futuristic — as it turned out to imply this kind of acquiescence, no I don’t like that name. I still don’t really like the name.

OK, the Beatle name was a pun, a tribute to rock founding father Buddy Holly and his band The Crickets. I don't call that a bad pun at all. 

But U2? Yes, that was a spy plane, and thereby hangs a tale, if you have a minute.

On May 1,1960, the Eisenhower era of somnolent living was coming to an end. That fall, John F. Kennedy would be elected, ushering in an administration he called "The New Frontier." 

But as the clock ran out on "Ike," there was one last international incident to deal with.  On May 1, former Air Force pilot Francis Gary Powers, who had retired from the military to fly a CIA spy plane over the Soviet Union, was captured by the Russians, who took exception to being spied on.

Powers with his U2

In Washington, Eisenhower and his military brass harrumphed away the very notion of spying! America would never do that! Powers was flying a weather observation plane, and somehow got lost! 

Yeah, that's the ticket.  

And America didn't worry about someone calling us out on this, because they counted on Powers to kill himself if captured in the act of spying. He had been issued a coin containing a poison needle, and the military figured he had offed himself.

But he didn't. Russia had both the pilot and the plane almost fully intact, in their possession. It was a major embarrassment for Eisenhower to admit that the US had been spying with the U2 plane. 

Powers spent almost two years in a Russian prison before being traded, along with American college student Frederic Pryor, for a Russian spy and a third-round draft pick in the next CIA rookie draft. He lived 15 years in relative ignominy, generally regarded as insufficiently valiant for not using the self-destruct charge that the plane carried, which would have destroyed, and kept out of Russian hands, the camera, photographic film, and other related classified parts. And there were those who criticized him for not killing himself.

He came home, and divorced his wife, who had been known to be with other men during his incarceration and have numerous affairs. She broke her leg dancing with one gentleman, and failed to go with the CIA-issued cover story that she broke it waterskiing. Powers's sad life came to a heroic end, however, in 1977, when he was flying a helicopter for a Los Angeles TV that ran out of power. During descent, Powers steered the chopper away from a group of children playing. This evasive maneuver disrupted the helicopter's autorotative system.

So, if you are in contact with Bono, please clue him in to the derivation of his band's name. He probably won't care.