“That sorts me out”: The Edge on the two albums essential to rock music
Not much is needed to make some of the greatest rock and roll songs of all time. Although hardly anyone can put their finger on it, there’s normally that certain spark that takes someone from being merely a great performer and turning them into one of the voices of their generation whenever they play, whether that’s how the musicians are working off each other or the one line that could shatter everyone’s minds in an instant. U2 may have had moments of both transcendence and embarrassment throughout their career, but The Edge knew that he could always look to two records when he felt lost.
Because when anyone has been in the business for too long, there comes a moment when things start to get a little bit strained. Even though the Irish legends have held up a reputation as a band of brothers half the time, there have been times when they were dangerously close to breaking up, usually happening on the cusp of them releasing some of their greatest material like Achtung Baby.
Then again, isn’t that how all great art works? There have been thousands of artists who take the basic construct of a pop song and try to pass it off as one of the best things that anyone has ever made, but if punk rock had taught us anything, it was that there had to be some blood, sweat and tears left on that stage or else people would be asking for their money back at the end of the night.
But punk rock was never limited to a single genre, either. From the days before the genre even existed, Patti Smith was taking things in a different direction by writing beautiful poetic passages paired with reckless rock and roll. Although she was never a punk in the true sense of the word, every punk artist who came after her mimicked her approach to rock and roll with as few frills as possible.
There comes a due date for every genre, though, and even when punk ended up bottoming out in the late 1970s, artists like Television were starting to delve into post-punk, usually taking the attitude of punk and pairing it with songs that didn’t fit in the typical pop construction and writing guitar freakouts across their records.
Even though U2 went miles beyond their punk roots, The Edge kept returning to both Smith and Television to remind himself of what he should be striving for every time he makes a record, saying, “Whenever I start to get a little nervous about what’s essential, I just put on Patti Smith’s Horses or Television’s Marquee Moon, and that kind of sorts me out.” And while U2 don’t sound like those bands in any respect, that spirit is very much alive in Edge’s guitar tone.
Outside of the adventurous side of his effects, The Edge has always been a fairly punk rock player, and the fury that he plays with on tunes like ‘I Will Follow’ may as be the inverse version of what Smith had been doing on a tune like ‘Gloria’. And when it comes to guitar effects, U2 is the concept Television had touched upon broken wide open, especially during the Achtung Baby period when his tone changed on almost every song.
But if there’s one thing to take away from both records, it’s that the effects and raw sound are only half the battle when making a record. It all comes from the heart inside the artist playing it, and on Horses and Marquee Moon, you can hear the spirit of what made genres like rock and roll thrive in the 1970s.
