The 1977 show that made The Edge want to play guitar: “It is possible”
Like most of us, The Edge grew up believing that he would be destined to a life of relative obscurity forever. As a very young teenager, being celebrated for making music that made people sing, dance, and feel didn’t seem like something remotely accessible to the young Essex-born lad.
Despite this natural, naive self-doubt, The Edge was always able to watch others prosper while he plucked and strummed away on his beaten-up guitar at home. The television afforded a new means of escape for all in the 1970s, but it also could be cruel sometimes, depicting a life you wanted that seemed never-endingly out of reach.
Thankfully, one specific television show provided the first point of contact between the hopeful young musician and his punk contemporaries: “Punk rock happened kind of just when I was turning 15,” He reminisced in conversation with Rick Rubin. “The first punk song I heard was probably [by] The Jam on Top Of The Pops. This was a moment because… the sheer energy of it,” he recalled.
We all understand the importance of the truism ‘seeing is believing’; that day, The Edge saw a vision of himself from the future, played back in the small box screen: “The fact that these guys were probably only about three or four years older than us really felt suddenly not only was it possible to write your own songs but actually get some notice, so that was a big encouragement to us at that time because it was music we could play.”
Sure enough, three years after the fateful performance from The Jam, U2 released their debut album, Boy, a title which summed up the kind of youthful energy and agitated adolescence skittering across the project. It was clear that The Jam had spurred them into action; this newfound momentum was key to songs like ‘Out of Control’, on which Bono sang, “One day I’ll die, the choice will not be mine, will it be too late? You can’t fight fate.”
“We Love The Ramones for the same reason,” he said. “They were probably the first cover of something that was from the punk tradition [that] we did. That was probably all we could play at that point.”
With Rubin in agreement, it’s hard not to see how The Ramones kind of stripped-down, melodic, fast but easy to follow style pioneered punk rock, and introduced U2 to the world of back-to-basics bashing out.
The revelations that Top of the Pops afforded The Edge are so monumental in his career because it speaks to the foundations of his guitar playing, which was largely self-taught. These days, the artist opens up his instrument to newer, more experimental sounds (like the blues, or African-American inspiration, The Edge shared with Rubin thoughtfully), but beneath it all will always be this thumping, traditional melodic urgency.
Lately, the punk ethos picked up by The Jam has translated through more than just The Edge’s guitar playing; U2 surprise-released two EPs in early 2026, Days of Ash and Easter Lily, preluding an album that, in Bono’s words, is as “noisy, messy, and unreasonably colourful” as fans might dream of. The two EPs are politically charged and melodically focused. We might just have Top of the Pops to thank for that, too.
