“Used to be great”: The musician John Lydon said invented U2
Bands don’t arrive into the world fully formed on their first record. While it might be possible for some of them to knock it out of the park on their debut releases, it usually takes years of finetuning before they find a sound they can call their own and turn into some of the most universal anthems in their respective genre. Although U2 may have had their sound down to a science when working on The Joshua Tree, John Lydon felt that they would have been nowhere without this musician.
Then again, Lydon was never all that cagey about what he thought of the type of pinup rockstar that Bono personified. Yes, he had made a lot out of his image as the originator of punk fashion, but part of the appeal of Lydon was being brutally honest about everybody, whether that meant calling people out for not being punk enough or thinking that certain artists were putting on the most shallow excuse for music he had ever heard.
Even for a band as omnipresent as U2, though, they never forgot where they came from, either. There were traces of genres like new wave and prog-rock in their sound, but Bono hung onto his status as a punk rocker for as long as he could, even managing to make the song ‘The Miracle of Joey Ramone’ sound earnest after years of making the most pretentious decisions in music industry history.
When looking at their first records, though, a lot of what they did was indebted to post-punk, and that was something Lydon was already inventing in PiL. He had his fun making subversive rock and roll for the masses, but listening to him work off of Keith Levene in the group, they were on the cusp of making something far more interesting, relying on the atmospheric sounds of the guitar rather than catering to any particular chord progression.
Although Lydon still tried to be subversive where he could, a lot of what Levene was doing was indebted to the kind of music that he swore never to indulge in. Despite being known as a punk, Levene always paid tribute to people like Steve Howe of Yes for reinventing how people thought about guitar, and while the textures on Metal Box are nowhere near that level of sophistication, they are still innovative for their time.
While Lydon eventually lost contact with Levene over the years, he admitted that bands like U2 would have never been if not for what they did, saying, “I’ve got no idea what happened to dear old Keith. What a waste of talent. He used to be a great guitarist. But he made the mistake of over-grandiosing his own position in PiL, and then he complicated his life with various substances. And he ended up doing fuck all. Which is a shame because there’d be no U2 without Keith’s guitar style.”
And it’s not like any member of U2 is denying it. Even if they don’t cite the group as a prominent influence, the way that The Edge used guitar effects and also cited Howe as one of his biggest inspirations made him and Levene kindred spirits, even if Lydon wasn’t going to sing a song like ‘With Or Without You’.
Still, it’s hard not to look at U2 as a celebration of all those types of influences. After all, their music was a spiritual love letter to those who made them pick up guitars, and that meant drawing a little bit from the experimental side of punk.
