The one performance The Edge called “a life-changing experience”
Every artist usually has the one gig that changes everything in their minds. No matter how many times they may have been able to see artists performing live on stage in the past, seeing one of their favourite acts playing their hearts out to legions of fans usually creates the spark that makes that fan go home, strap on a guitar, and write songs of their own. While The Edge had been born and bred out of the world of guitar heroes, it was a group of punk rock legends that were responsible for turning his world inside out.
Throughout the first stages of the guitarist’s musical development, he was always looking to play the most complicated arrangements he could. As Bono would later recall, the very beginnings of U2 ran into trouble when the group had to deliberately stifle the sounds of progressive rock creeping into the mix, with The Edge being fascinated by bands like Yes and Genesis.
As the 1970s turned a corner, though, the rock world was hit with a tidal wave when punk took over. Instead of the massive rock and roll exercises coming out of the mainstream, artists like Sex Pistols and the Ramones were bringing rock back to square one, taking the fundamental sounds of pop and rock and injecting them with some bad attitude every time they played.
While many bands from around this time were concerned with songs about destruction and upsetting the established order, The Clash were the first band to have a clear agenda whenever they played. Compared to the cheap pop songs that were coming out of other bands, Joe Strummer wanted every one of the band’s songs to mean something, whether it was the pure political bombast of ‘London Calling’ to arguments about music politics on ‘Complete Control’.
When seeing the band live onstage for the first time, The Edge would recall something changing in his DNA, telling Rolling Stone, “For U2 and other people of our generation, seeing them perform was a life-changing experience…It was a complete throw-down for us. It was like: Why are you in music? What the hell is music all about, anyway?”.
Coming from bands that were known to play with finesse every time they picked up their instruments, The Edge was knocked out by the lack of polish in the group’s records, saying, “They were raw in every sense, and they were not ashamed that they were about much more than playing with precision and making sure their guitars were in tune. This wasn’t just entertainment. This was a life-or-death thing”.
Outside of their love for raw punk rock, though, The Clash would eventually toy with every element of their sound that would suit them, whether adopting reggae or putting layers of dub tracks into massive undertakings like Sandinista. That kind of experimentation would also become paramount in how U2 saw themselves just a few years later.
Across albums like October and War, The Edge was playing with the same approach to creativity, taking the traditional guitar sounds and messing them up to make them fit in the context of the right song. Like Strummer and Mick Jones had done before him, The Edge understood the importance of every note from his instrument. No matter how many times he might hammer away at a song, The Edge understands the power of playing every note like it’s the last one he will ever play.
