The musician that made The Edge want to play guitar: “I wanted it to sound like that”
There has always been a certain aura about U2 that has made them both cool and uncool at the same time. On the one hand, there probably aren’t many frontmen who have gotten more grief than Bono for his pompous efforts, but then again, his claims about music changing the world do actually sound possible when you hear some of their greatest hits. Bono might be the voicebox, but The Edge was the sonic wizard, and many of those great guitar tracks probably wouldn’t have existed without Rory Gallagher.
In terms of musical similarities, though, The Edge was always his own guitar entity most of the time. Even with his style being copied by almost everyone who discovers a delay pedal when they’re starting out, the U2 six-string whizz is one of the few musicians who’s able to look at his instrument the same way a mad scientist looks at chemicals, always looking to get some unique tone out of whatever song he’s working on.
In fact, a lot of U2’s early influences involved music that was about getting raw sounds as opposed to flying up and down the fretboard. The guitarist may have admitted to being a fan of prog rock acts during his formative years, but the punk revolution and post-punk boom meant that acts like Magazine and Television were just as important for getting strange noises out of the guitar.
Whereas The Edge went down that road more often than not, Gallagher was the one who taught everyone that the sound and tone are all in the fingers. Sure, he was playing the same kind of bluesy licks that everyone under the sun was playing, but good luck trying to keep up with him half the time, usually going for the kind of vicious attack that no one since Eric Clapton had touched on.
Even though The Edge crafted his own path, he remembered that Gallagher was the first time that he actually got interested in the guitar, telling Fender, “The first guitarist I actually got interested in was an Irish guitar player called Rory Gallagher. He played a real beaten-up early 1960s Strat. I just remember thinking that if I pick up a guitar, I wanted it to sound like that.”
If Gallagher created the sound of chaos, then The Edge created an entirely new world whenever he got behind the fretboard. While not necessarily the flashiest guitarist in the world, the tone behind a lot of U2’s music was intended to sound abrasive, like those piercing few notes in the breakdown of ‘New Year’s Day’ or the crackle of guitar chimes on ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’.
That’s not to say that The Edge couldn’t get a little bit flashy when the time called for it. The dramatic slides on a song like ‘Bullet the Blue Sky’ sound like someone slowly being drawn down to Hell, and the Achtung Baby sessions featured him practically assaulting the instrument on the track ‘Love is Blindness’. If nothing else, Gallagher instilled one core lesson in the Irishman that everyone should know: as long as you play with passion, it will sound amazing.
