The defining voice of guitar, according to The Edge
Anyone who has ever picked up a guitar past the year 1990 can probably tell you where they were when they first heard The Edge perform for the first time.
U2 didn’t set out to be one of the most unstoppable forces in rock and roll, but even outside of all of the different onstage speeches that Bono has given over his career, you can’t deny the massive textures that The Edge created whenever they went into the studio. He was a sonic inventor in a lot of ways, but his sense of technique was also a love letter to the kind of guitarists that he started out idolising back in the day.
Then again, The Edge himself would probably tell you that he isn’t that technical a guitar player. If you take all of the effects off of a song like ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’, it’s not like he’s playing the most complicated licks in the world, but that’s because he doesn’t need to. He earned his spot in rock history by being a good listener, and every U2 record shows him hearing what the rest of the band are doing and reacting accordingly.
Sometimes it doesn’t even involve him playing any proper notes at all, but when listening to the harmonics in a tune like ‘Drowning Man’, he’s practically creating a certain tone with his guitar that can’t really be matched by anyone else. It was about setting a scene half the time he was playing, but that also meant taking cues from the other guitarists who set scenes whenever they played guitar.
Andy Summers had already begun creating smooth textures in every single Police song years before The Edge began working with the likes of Brian Eno, but when listening to Rattle and Hum, a lot of his influences went far deeper than the likes of Television and Magazine. He was a student of the blues heroes from back in the day, but even if he didn’t think about coming close to someone like Gary Moore or Rory Gallagher, what BB King was doing threw him for a loop a lot more.
The band may have been calling their shot as rock and roll legends a little bit early for many people’s tastes, but The Edge didn’t want to collaborate with King in the hopes of being an equal. He wanted to learn everything he could about how he could make the guitar sing, but when you listen to everything from Live at the Regal, you start to realise just how singular he was whenever he picked up a guitar.
The Edge certainly had his guitar hero moments, but he felt that the entire guitar scene was shaped by the way that King plays, saying, “B.B. was a specialist and had a pure and unmistakable guitar style. You would know within a note or two that it was B.B. playing, and that’s in a music that is so studied and plagiarized. To be one of the defining voices of an entire genre of music is no mean feat. I’m very happy he didn’t waste any time branching out into other styles.”
All this despite the fact that he was far from the fastest player in the world. A lot of what King played was a lot simpler than most people would expect from a guitar god, but if you listen to the tone and sense of timing that he puts into everything, you would swear that he was squeezing every single note out of the guitar to get as much emotion out of it as he possibly could.
So while The Edge has his fair share of toys to work with every single time U2 takes the stage, King will always be a reminder of what a guitar god is capable of with only a few notes at their disposal. Eric Clapton may have been a guitar god playing a million notes at once, but it takes a special guitarist to use only one note and have the entire crowd cheering before they even play the rest of their solo.
