Elijah Bob Patricius Guggi Q Hewson (born 17 August 1999) is an Irish rock musician. Born to U2 frontman Bono and activist Ali Hewson in Dublin, he grew up in Killiney and featured on the cover of U2's Songs of Experience in 2017. He formed Inhaler in late 2012 with bassist Robert Keating and drummer Ryan McMahon, from St Andrew's College, Dublin, with fourth member and guitarist Josh Jenkinson joining later, and released the albums It Won't Always Be Like This (2021), Cuts and Bruises (2023) and Open Wide (2025) as part of the band. His unusual name, for which his father was mocked in the press, is a result of Bono's Christianity and incorporates the names of Guggi and Quincy Jones.
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Life and career
Elijah Bob Patricius Guggi Q Hewson was born in Dublin on 17 August 1999 to Bono, the lead singer of U2, and Ali Hewson, an activist. He has two older sisters, Jordan Joy Hewson and Memphis Eve Sunny Day Iris Hewson, and a younger brother, John Abraham Hewson. Elijah was raised as a Christian and lived at Temple Hill in Killiney, which his parents had moved into in the late 1980s. He attended Dalkey School Project and St Andrew's College, Dublin.
At age 13, he took up the guitar after playing the video game Guitar Hero, three years after discovering that his father was famous. In late 2012, while at St Andrew's College, he met Robert Keating and Ryan McMahon and formed a band with them and a vocalist under the name "The Collapsible Chairs". The band had bonded over a love of Arctic Monkeys and Nirvana, while Hewson became its lead singer when he was fourteen or fifteen after its original singer left after his vocals were found to be substandard. They later earned the sobriquet "The Inhalers" after the medical device of the same name due to Hewson's asthma and adopted the moniker Inhaler in February 2015. Around this time, Josh Jenkinson joined the band after Hewson played him "I Wanna Be Adored" by The Stone Roses at a party. In December 2017, a photograph taken by Anton Corbijn of Elijah holding hands with Sian Evans, the daughter of U2's the Edge, appeared on the cover of Songs of Experience, U2's fourteenth album.