ied,   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.