The one guitarist The Edge said he could never play like: “I could not even begin to do anything like that”
Not every guitarist can live up to what their heroes are doing. The golden rule for any musician is to be themselves whenever they hit ‘RECORD’, but even for all of the great music that The Edge has made, U2 was never going to have the average guitar hero among their ranks.
But it’s not like The Edge didn’t try to make something flashy every now and again. Before he had joined the group, he was already listening to the biggest names in progressive rock, and while that might have driven Bono up the wall given his punk background, that didn’t stop the guitarist from trying his best to sound like Steve Howe from Yes or Steve Hackett from Genesis in his spare time. If you were born in Edge’s generation, the archetype for a guitar hero was always a blues player.
From Eric Clapton onward, every kid wanted to make their guitar scream whenever they picked it up. No one was going to turn into Jimi Hendrix overnight by any stretch, but if they practised those scales that everyone from Clapton to Brian Jones to David Gilmour played, there was a good chance that they could be considered rock and roll gods. For Edge, though, all he had was a bunch of effects and a boatload of imagination.
That’s not to say that he couldn’t play impressive stuff, either. Make no mistake, he does have a fair bit of chops and can leave a listener stunned when he delivers a solo like ‘Love is Blindness’, but the majority of his playing revolves around that magnificent delay setting that he builds. The droning strings on ‘I Will Follow’ were a great introduction to their sound, but when listening to ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’, it still feels like stepping into the future when those cascading notes come rushing in.
Then again, the blues never went away by the time U2 started making their first albums. People like Stevie Ray Vaughan would soon become the biggest names in rock and roll, and even though The Edge was never placed in that conversation, Gary Moore was the line where he realised that he could never reach that level of playing.
For a band that was meant to go against the grain, The Edge didn’t necessarily see his lack of skills as a bad thing, either, saying, “It would be no contest to put me against a fast player like Gary Moore or any of those guys; I could not even begin to do anything like that. At a very early stage of my playing, I just decided that for me, that was totally irrelevant. It may have thrilled listeners, but as far as I was concerned, that was something that had been done before, and there was no need to repeat it. So instead, I put my energy into songwriting.”
And looking at both of them back to back, it’s clear that they’re speaking totally different languages half the time. Moore was always great at making the guitar sound like it was crying whenever he performed, but there’s a whole wealth of emotions that Edge could get out of his guitar. It could sound tortured when it wanted, it could be brash and confident on some of their uptempo rockers, and even heartfelt in the few lead lines he put on ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’.
The blues virtuosos had their place in rock and roll history, but The Edge was far from concerned with the music of the past. U2 wanted to help push music forward, and while he may have had a healthy respect for many guitar heroes that came before him, The Edge was looking to invent his own sound where everyone would know who he was within the first few seconds of any song.
