The “incredible” singer The Edge was always thrilled to work with
The Edge didn’t want to spend the rest of his life making songs that were the same pieces of U2-style rock and roll.
He was always the heart behind many of the band’s greatest tunes, and some of the best moments of their career came from him taking a chance and making a song that didn’t exactly line up with what the rest of rock music was doing. That was half the fun of working in a band as he did, but he felt that he couldn’t have done it without his fellow musical adventurers coming before him.
Because when you think about it, there’s no real reason for anyone to think that one of the biggest guitar heroes of all time would be someone who hardly played lead guitar. The Edge was someone who was used to colouring the sound in a very particular way every single time he performed, and when you listen to every one of his guitar parts, a lot of his best moments are about not playing anything conventional.
All he needed was to play a few notes drenched in delay, and he had exactly what he was looking for for a particular song, but his heroes were aiming to look even bigger. The mavericks of the music industry don’t ask for permission every single time they make a record. They just go ahead and make whatever they want to make, and Lou Reed was the perfect example of someone who refused to take no for an answer when it came to his music.
Then again, a lot of the members of U2 got attached to Reed’s music secondhand. Each of them were huge fan of people like David Bowie, so when ‘The Starman’ began working with Reed on his solo work, that forced every one of his fans to do their homework and start listening to what The Velvet Underground had to offer. They were blown away, but none of them thought that they would come to know Reed on a deeper level.
First of all, Reed didn’t seem like the kind of person who would have worked with U2 on principle. He was on the cutting edge of everything that he ever did, and bringing in one of the biggest bands in the world to work with him wasn’t normally his idea of a good time. But according to The Edge, each of them walked away thinking that they had found a musical friend when working with him on The Conspiracy of Hope tour.
And even years after the fact, The Edge never forgot what those days hanging out with Reed meant to him as a musician, saying, “We were huge fans of Lou Reed when the Transformer album came out. We’re still huge fans. We miss him. It was such a thrill to get to know him, as we did, on the Amnesty International Conspiracy of Hope Tour in 1988. What an incredible intellect and incredible talent and all-around fascinating person.”
It’s hard to really pick out any lyrics in Bono’s songbook as being Reed-coated or anything, but everything about Achtung Baby seemed to be taking cues from what Reed did. He lived to disrupt everyone’s expectations, and U2 were doing the same thing by dismantling everything they had built on The Joshua Tree and pivoting in the opposite direction the minute that they came out with tunes like ‘Until the End of the World’.
That takes a lot of bravery for any band to pull off, and while The Edge made the whole thing look easy from behind the fretboard, Reed personified everything that rock and roll was supposed to be. It was designed to rebel against authority, and everything that he did almost seemed like he was daring every single member of the media to take the musical plunge with him on every record.
