‘The Fly’: The best riff U2 ever wrote
God bless ’em, but U2 aren’t a band known for their riffs. To be clear, The Edge is a generational guitarist, and if you consider Kevin Shields to be a guitar legend, then you basically have to agree.
However, in the great pantheon of riffs, you’d have to scroll down through many, many players before you get to his work in U2. It’s kind of unfair, as he does have a few gems to his name.
‘Vertigo’, ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’, ‘Pride’, even ‘Get On Your Boots’ have a great riff attached to a thoroughly cringe-worthy song. However, the man born Dave Evans doesn’t quite get the recognition he deserves as a creator of great runs. This most likely comes from his heavy use of effects pedals, where most great riffs are found in that sweet spot between simplicity and raw technical skill. However, I also think it comes from how The Edge is a thoroughly unselfish guitarist.
Which is to be celebrated, really. This is a man who, despite playing the instrument most associated with rock star egos, is absolutely committed to playing the song and nothing more. This often means hours spent in his tower of effect pedals striving to find the noise in his head, then, when the song gets released, the man gets clowned on for playing relatively simple guitar parts.
These same people probably wax lyrical about punk bands for playing simple, effective music, but logic doesn’t often matter very much to these people after all. However, of all the songs in the extensive back catalogue of U2, there is one that I would happily put against any banger riff you care to mention. One that’s so energising and outrightly awesome that if you played it to most casual rock fans without context, I bet few of them would ever be able to tell that it came from U2 of all bands.
What makes ‘The Fly’ the best riff U2 ever wrote?
You can often tell a great hook when, the first time you hear it, you swear blind you’ve heard it before. ‘The Fly’ is the guitar riff version of that. A swaggering, priapic cruise-missile of a riff so simple yet effective that one can barely believe no one thought of it before. One can tell that the band felt the same way because this riff, and the song built around it, was chosen to be the first single promoting the band’s 1991 masterpiece Achtung Baby.
Let’s unpack that for a second, because the sheer pressure on this song to succeed was immense. The band had already been the biggest in the world before Rattle and Hum put an unignorable dent in their reputation. They went away to dream it all up again, thus their next step had to be amazing. Then the word started spreading that U2, of ‘With or Without You’ and ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’, with the singer who thought he was Jesus Christ himself, were going techno. The knives were being sharpened with glee.
Thus, the first single from the band’s new direction had to be utter dynamite. By focusing on The Edge, his stellar guitar work and by extension, his creative vision, it was. In an interview with Jo Whiley for BBC Radio 2, Bono backed this up by saying, “‘The Fly’, the sound of the guitar is the sound of The Edge’s brain. If you hear that ‘ner ner ner nernernerner’, if you lean close as I am now, you can hear that’s the sound of The Edge’s brain.”
‘The Fly’ is still one of the best songs in the band’s back catalogue because it sums up Achtung Baby perfectly. A techno riff, fed through a guitar and supercharged with stadium rock energy, combine that with arguably the best solo that The Edge ever recorded, too, and you’ve got a genuine guitar classic. One that should serve as an eternal reminder that no matter how many sketches Bill Bailey writes, The Edge deserves immense respect for his guitar greatness.
