The Edge: “I was so embarrassed to be playing ‘Bye Bye Baby’ that I had erased it from my mind”
When U2 first formed, The Edge was used to taking the uncomfortable route as a guitar player.
Not everything that he played was going to be the same flashy run that you heard out of every other virtuoso, but his experimentation with delay and harmonics created the kind of atmosphere on their tunes that no one else could have done if they were in his shoes. Even with his chops, he was a sonic inventor more than a fretboard master, but that didn’t mean every one of the band’s earliest gigs had to have the greatest performances of all time.
Then again, since when has any band been fully formed from the moment that they picked up their instruments? The Beatles had to tough it out for years before they finally settled in with Ringo Starr behind the kit, and while Led Zeppelin may have had lightning in a bottle right out of the gate, it would have never worked had Jimmy Page not done years of session work and played with The Yardbirds to figure out what he wanted to sound like.
So if those legends needed some time to work things out, a couple of Irish friends from school were going to need some sorting out as well. Not everything that they played was terrible right off the bat, but when looking at where they all were coming from, they weren’t exactly joined at the hip with every single genre they played, either. The Edge had a soft spot for prog bands like Yes, Bono famously hated prog and thrived on punk, and Larry Mullen Jr was into Eagles and didn’t want to be in a punk band by any stretch.
That seems like the worst members to be in a band, but the thing that connected them all together was their drive. They wanted to make music that no one had ever heard before, and when they eventually got their act together and started making original tunes, you could sense the urgency in Bono’s voice when he came screaming in on a song like ‘I Will Follow’ or ‘Gloria’. But as any band knows, you don’t get started by playing originals first.
Any band has to cut their teeth playing the pub circuit doing a bunch of covers, and while it took the band no time to start making their original tunes, what they were being asked to play wasn’t exactly their favourite songs of all time. Getting away with playing Ramones tunes wasn’t going to fly, but when they started performing songs like ‘Show Me the Way’ by Peter Frampton and ‘Bye Bye Baby’ by Bay City Rollers, Edge was mortified.
The covers weren’t bad by any stretch, but the guitarist felt he never wanted to be seen with those songs ever again, saying, “I was so embarrassed to be playing ‘Bye Bye Baby’ that I had successfully erased it from my mind until now. But the truth is I think they were the only songs that we could play all the way through. As much as I would have loved to play Rory Gallagher or something with a bit more credibility, it was just not going to happen, it was not possible. Those two songs were simple enough that we could actually get by.”
If the band were to have been a success with those songs, though, we would have been looking at a much different band. The Beatles may have had to fight tooth and nail not to have a song like ‘How Do You Do It’ come out, but even if the Irish rockers played the perfect version of Frampton’s classic ballad, having them go in that direction instead of getting ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ or anything from The Joshua Tree would have been the real tragedy.
Still, everyone has to start somewhere, and while The Edge might treat those songs like embarrassing baby pictures when he looks back on it, it’s not something to be especially ashamed of. If anything, this was a privilege for anyone looking to see the first steps of a band that was slowly becoming a rock and roll giant.
