The greatest rock and roll band ever, according to Bono
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how pretentious Bono can look whenever he gets onstage.
He remains one of the greatest frontmen that rock and roll has ever seen and can make entire audiences move with only his voice, but when he talks about the greater problems with the world and being able to bring people together, you start to realise that he might be taking his job a little bit too seriously. Rock and roll certainly has the power to change the world, but the U2 frontman was self-aware enough to realise when some bands could get the lead out a lot better than his band could.
Because when you think about it, there aren’t many U2 songs that are strictly meant to be pure rock and roll tunes. They grew up as part of the punk tradition, but even when they started jamming with people like BB King, they were making music that was a stew of different influences. There would be echoes of punk here and there, a few avant-garde moments in their approaches to production, and the slightest touch of prog to the way that The Edge played his guitar parts, but it was never truly rock and roll.
Which is strange considering how much rock DNA the band has in their songs. They worshipped everyone from The Who to The Clash when they began making their first records, but even The Edge had to admit that the closest the band ever came to having a true rock and roll song was probably ‘Vertigo’. That was years after the likes of The Joshua Tree, but it’s not like they had ever lost the love of that style of music.
They could make songs that sounded angry, but to play real rock, there had to be an element of danger to it. Songs like ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ and ‘New Year’s Day’ certainly sound angry to a certain degree, but people forget about that last word of the genre. It’s called rock and ROLL for a reason, and Bono felt that the sense of swagger that someone has mattered as much as the quality of the songs half the time.
The Beatles may have looked like a bunch of lads having fun when they started performing on the Ed Sullivan Show, but when it came to the root of the genre, The Rolling Stones couldn’t really be touched. While the band has been going for longer than most fans have been alive, seeing footage from them back in the day is still a snapshot of what the genre was always supposed to be, from Mick Jagger strutting his way across the stage to Keith Richards’s wry smile as he churned out every single lick.
That was enough to get a rise out of any teenage kid, and when asked about the greatest rock and roll band, Bono had no problem giving that title to The Stones, saying, “I think greater is a better accolade. They might watch their step. Their body of work: I can only stare at in awe. And Mick’s a great journalist. He’s a great lyricist. He describes his world very well, with humour, with intelligence, and the odd Polaroid.”
But even with those fantastic riffs that Richards pumped out, the band will always be remembered for how their music made people feel back in the day. There was a lot of piss and vinegar to the way that they performed tunes like ‘Satisfaction’ or ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’, but there was also a lot of heart behind everything they did when you look at the ballads like ‘Wild Horses’ or ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’.
So while Bono can only hope to reach the kind of accolades that The Stones reached, being the greatest rock band isn’t about copying them. The Stones only did what came naturally, and the best that everyone else could hope to do was try and look as effortlessly cool as they did when being themselves.
