U2 guitarist The Edge might not be everyone's idea of a conventional 'guitar hero', but the 65-year-old musician has influenced generations of guitar players with his unique approach to the instrument, and his admirable determination not to rest on his laurels as a musician.
"We genuinely think that we might just write the best song we’ve ever written next week," he told the New York Times recently. "That's why I'm still in this band."
Reflecting on his personal approach to his instrument, The Edge added, "I've always made it a point to try and find a way to make the guitar sound different and to to play the guitar in a different way.
"I think that was born of the fact that we emerged as a band in that moment after punk rock. Punk rock kind of pulled everything down, and started from ground zero again... We took advantage of that opportunity to to start something new. The cycle is Order, Disorder, Reorder, and we arrived just at the beginning of that reorder phase."
In a 1992 interview with US magazine Musician, the guitarist (real name Dave Evans) spoke about his approach to the guitar, and about the importance of finding one's own distinctive voice as a musician. In conversation with trusted US journalist Bill Flanagan, the guitarist revealed the thought process that led to him developing his own style.
"I suppose it really starts with picking up the electric guitar, age 15, and playing cover versions. Knowing a few Rory Gallagher licks or whatever," The Edge began. "Then suddenly you're in this band and there's all this fantastic music coming at you that challenges everything that you believed about what the electric guitar was for. Suddenly the question is, 'What are you saying with it?' Not 'Can you play this lick?' or 'What's your speed like?' It's, 'What are you saying with your instrument? What is being communicated in this song?'
"Suddenly guitars were not things to be waved in front of the audience but now were something you used to reach out to the crowd," he continued. "If you were in the fourth row of the Jam concert at the Top Hat Ballroom in Dunleary in 1980, when Paul Weller hit that Rickenbacker 12-string it meant something and it said something that everyone in that building knew. There were other bands, other guitar players. They all sounded different, but they all had that thing in common which was that there was something behind what they did which was communicating.
"I had to totally re-examine the way I played," he reflected. "It was such a challenging thing to hold up your style against this and say, Well, what are you saying? What is this song about? What does that note mean? Why that note? So much of this bad white blues barroom stuff that was around at the time was just guitar players running up and down the fretboard. It was just a kind of big wank. There was nothing to it, it was gymnastics. I started trying to find out what this thing around my neck could do in the context of this band... I was not going for purity, I was going for the opposite. I was trying to fuck up the sound as much as possible, go for something that was definitely messed with, tampered with, had a character that was not just the regular guitar sound.
"Then I started to see a style coming through. I started to see how notes actually do mean something. They have power. I think of notes as being expensive. You don't just throw them around. I find the ones that do the best job and that's what I use."
U2's new album Carnaval de Luz, the follow-up to 2023's Songs Of Surrender will be released on November 15, and is available to pre-order now.
The Edge describes Carnaval de Luz as “a messy, provocative, sacred collection of songs”, while frontman Bono promises listeners will enjoy “loud guitars, deep bass, some ecstatic rhythms."
