The one band both Henry Rollins and The Edge agree is the best: “The greatest rock and roll band of all time”
There are few things that can manage to get Henry Rollins to lash out in anger quite like U2.
Garfield doesn’t even hate Mondays the same way that the punk rock icon despises the Irish rock legends, and he has made it known more than a few times why they have stood for everything that rock and roll didn’t need to be. But if there’s one thing that Rollins also knew, it was that music has the ability to unite people from all walks of life if it has the right intentions behind it.
And it’s not like Rollins was an absolute purist when it came to all things punk rock. There are plenty of records in his collection that are full of the heaviest riffs that the punk community ever spit out, but he was also willing to defend all stripes of music, whether that was listening to John Coltrane deliver some of the greatest records in jazz, The Who paving the way for grandiose music in rock and roll, or Black Sabbath playing the heaviest that mankind has ever seen.
But the reason why Rollins would have been so open to this kind of music was probably due to people like The Clash. It wasn’t clear beforehand whether punk rock was going to be a flash in the pan or not, but after Sex Pistols lit the entire world on fire, Joe Strummer was the one to remind everyone that this was a serious form of expression. Anyone had the ability to make something new, and with records like London Calling and Sandinista, they went all over the map stylistically and didn’t give a rat’s ass about what the “true punk acts” thought of them.
That kind of adventurousness is what lit Rollins’s mind on fire when he first heard their debut album, saying, “It is one of the bestest records I have ever heard. I played this record and I realised that authority is to be questioned. I can thank Joe Strummer for giving me that attitude. Soon after hearing it, in Washington DC, I saw the Clash play. It blew my mind and changed my life. [That record] was a gamechanger and it is a pitch perfect rock album.”
So naturally, how would that fit in with the same kind of soft approach that U2 had. Clearly the same band that made tunes like ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ had that fire in their belly at some point, but when listening to The Clash for the first time, The Edge also had no problem considering them one of the greatest bands to walk the Earth.
When inducting them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the guitar wizard didn’t even attempt to hide his fandom for a second, saying, “I’m sure the last thing Mick, Joe, Topper or Terry or Joe, bless him, would want me to do is to sell you some emotional blarney about how fantastic they all were but sorry about that lads, because that’s exactly what I’m gonna do. And not because they need to hear it but because I don’t think you really know how great they really were. I love this band and to me, without doubt, they remain, next to the Stones, the greatest rock and roll band of all time.”
It’s impossible to imagine a band that transcendent resulting in artists with that much ire towards each other, but that’s the beauty of all Clash records. They had the ability to go in multiple directions, and while Rollins took that authoritative questioning to heart whenever he began work with Black Flag, it’s easy to look at the more eclectic styles of their music and see where U2 got the guts to reach for the stars on Joshua Tree, reinvent themselves on Achtung Baby, and even embarrass themselves on Pop.
Because if there’s one underlying factor that united every Clash fan, it was always about being fearless in the face of danger. No one could have imagined that a band like that could have stood the test of time, but the reason why they lasted as long as they did was because they believed that their music could go well beyond the three-chord trick everyone was being sold on.
