The singer Bono crowned as the original punk rocker: “Most interesting”
It seems like another lifetime ago when someone like Bono could have been considered even remotely punk.
U2 are still one of the finest rock bands of their generation, but when you look at their roots in the post-punk world, it’s hard to think of the same band that cut their teeth playing Ramones covers suddenly making records like Songs of Surrender years down the line. They have come a long way from the days of making ‘I Will Follow’, but Bono never lost sight of the true musical geniuses who broke down the barriers for punk rock when they first started.
Because no matter how far their star continues to rise, U2 will always be indebted to music used as a form of rebellion. The Edge always considered The Clash to be one of the greatest rock and roll bands of all time, and when you listen to some of the Irish band’s own protest songs, a tune like ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ or ‘New Year’s Day’ would have never been possible without ‘London Calling’ coming first.
But punk rock means a lot more than a bunch of kids with safety pins through their noses playing onstage. That was the fashionable side of what punk rock was supposed to be, and while the band did love the idea of making the best music that they could inside that framework, the main premise of punk rock always revolved around being unique to the person next to you at every single turn.
No one was concerning themselves with following trends in the early days, and the idea of going against the grain goes all the way back to the glory days of rock and roll. No one really approved of what Elvis Presley and Little Richard were doing when they first became famous, and when looking at the greatest names of the next generation, there aren’t any singular musicians that broke down those barriers as much as David Bowie did in the 1970s.
He was what bravery was supposed to look like, and even though his songs were a lot more tuneful, there was a lot of punk rock energy behind everything that he did. Being a fan of The Velvet Underground certainly helped his case, but when looking at some of the biggest parts of his career, he was always concerned with moving on to the next thing and bucking the trends the same way the Sex Pistols did when they became famous.
So while the rock and roll alien crashlanded on Earth a little bit early, Bono considered him to be the first major source of punk rock in his life, saying, “Bowie was much more responsible for the aesthetic of punk rock than he’s been given credit for, like, in fact, most interesting things in the Seventies and Eighties. I put his pictures up in my bedroom. We played ‘Suffragette City’ in that first wedding-band phase.”
And when you listen to some of Bowie’s songs from his glam period, there is a fair bit of punk DNA laced throughout those tunes. The guitars sound absolutely nasty on everything from ‘Cracked Actor’ to ‘Suffragette City’, and when you hear the nervy energy of ‘Hang on To Yourself’ being sung by a man in pancake makeup and a hot red mohawk hairdo, he was already the epitome of what a punk rocker should be before anyone decided to rebel against prog rock.
There was so much more ground that Bowie had to cover, but his role in pioneering punk rock is something that Bono wouldn’t take for granted. He was out there to wow every single crowd he played to, and that involved making the kinds of tunes that no one would have ever imagined were possible before him.
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