Like a tumor atop the plane, we turn back the clock to the birth of U2 and begin our excavation in earnest.

"I suppose it really starts with picking up the electric guitar, age fifteen, and playing a lot of cover versions," Edge says. "Knowing a few Rory Gallagher licks or whatever. 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. 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 twelve-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 reexamine the way I played. 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 freeboard. 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. Songs were coming through and 'Well, that sort of works' and integrating the echo box, which was a means of further coloring the sound, controlling the tone of the guitar. 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, definitely tampered with, had a character that was not just the regular guitar sound.

"Then I suppose 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. I suppose I'm a minimalist instinctively. I don't like to be inefficient if I can get away with it. Like on the end of 'With or Without You.' My instinct was to

 

[45]

Go with something very simple. Everyone else said, 'Nah, you can't do that.' I won the argument and I still think it's sort of brave, because the end of 'With or Without You' could have been so much bigger, so much more of a climax, but there's this power to it which I think is even more potent because it's held back.

"I suppose ultimately I'm interested in music. I'm a musician. I'm not a gunslinger. That's the difference between what I do and what a lot of guitar heroes do."

Ten or twelve years into this, I remind Edge, he can look out at a lot of guitarists he's influenced.

"Yeah." He shrugs. "Unfortunately when something is distilled down to a simple style, those who copy the style basically are copying some­thing very flat. You take what I do, bring it down to a little, short formula and try and apply it in another context, another guitar player, another song—it's going to sound terrible. I think that's probably what's happened to Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page. So many of their strong ideas have been taken up by other guitar players in other bands and the result is some pretty awful music. Heavy metal for one."

The first U2 albums were dominated by Edge's heavy use of an echo effect on his guitar. It fattened the band's sound, covering up the fact that neither the guitarist nor bassist in this band were playing very much. It also gave the early U2 songs a feeling of reverberating size and —not least—laid a coat of common personality over the material. U2 had a sound.

Edge says it started with Bono: "We had a song we were working on called 'A Day Without Me' and Bono kept saying, 'I hear this echo thing, like the chord repeating.' So I said, I'd better get an echo unit for this single. I got one down to rehearsal and played around with it with limited success. I didn't really like it; I thought it muddied up the sound. Then I bought my own unit, a Memory Man Deluxe made by Electro-Harmonix. I mean, Electro-Harmonix made the cheapest and trashiest guitar things, but they always had great personality. This Memory Man had this certain sound and I really loved it. I just played with it for weeks and weeks, integrating it into some of the songs we'd already written. Out of using it, a whole other set of songs started to come out."

[46]

Was there any moment when Bono said, "Oh, no, I've created a monster! Turn that echo off!"?

"When the War album was coming together we all—but particularly Bono—felt that we should try to get away from that echoey thing," Edge says. "It was a very conscious attempt at doing something more abrasive, less ethereal, more hard-edged. Less of that distant thing. I realized that the echo could become too much of a gimmick. There are a couple of tricks you can do with a guitar and echo that sound impressive, but I could see they were blind alleys. I've always left it and gone back to it. I don't like to use effects in an obvious way. You get sick of the same textures. Variety becomes important."

Between the first album, which established U2 as a hot underground band, and War, which began moving them into the mainstream, MTV, and headlining arenas, came the troubled second album, October. Re­corded quickly, with Bono improvising words after his lyric notebooks were stolen, the album reflected the moment when U2 almost split up over Bono, Edge, and Larry's embrace of charismatic Christianity, much to the chagrin of Adam and McGumness.

"I think October suffered as an album because of the lack of time we had to prepare it, but it actually is a pretty good record," Edge says. "There's some real spontaneity, some real freshness, because we didn't have time to have it any other way. I like 'Stranger in a Strange Land,' 'Tomorrow.' 'October' was a song that could have gone places but we didn't have time to do any more with it, so we said, 'Well, let's just put it out as it is.'

"October is a very European record because just prior to writing those songs and recording the album we spent all our time touring around Europe. We'd never been to Germany, Holland, Belgium, France. We would drive through these bleak German landscapes in winter. Those tones and colors definitely came through in the songs that we wrote.

"It was a real eye-opener. Boy was written and recorded in the context of Dublin. Four guys get together, decide to be a band, write some songs because they get inspired by this huge new sort of music happen­ing across the water. There's all these albums filtering back: the Jam, Patti Smith's Horses was a very big album for us, Television, Richard Hell and the Voidoids. It was an incredibly exciting time. But here we are in Dublin, trying to make sense of the stuff we're hearing from out there, trying to make sense of our own life in the context of Dublin.

 [47]

Then we end up in the middle of Europe in a Transit van, driving down the corridor between East and West Germany, going to Berlin. It just gave us a totally different perspective. In a weird way it was a more Irish perspective, because suddenly our Irishness became more tangible to us, much more obvious, maybe even more important.

"October was a struggle from beginning to end. It was an incredibly hard record to make for us because we had major problems with time. And I had been through this thing of not knowing if I should be in the band or not. It was really difficult to pull all the things together and still maintain the focus to actually finish a record in the time that we had. You could hear the desperation and confusion in some of the lyrics. 'Gloria' is really a lyric about not being able to express what's going on, not being able to put it down, not knowing where we are. Having thrown ourselves into this thing we were trying to make some sense of it. 'Why are we in this?' It was a very difficult time."

"You and Larry and Bono were having doubts about whether it was okay for you as Christians to devote your lives to a rock band."

"It was reconciling two things that seemed for us at that moment to be mutually exclusive," Edge says. "We never did resolve the contradic­tions. That's the truth. And probably never will. There's even more contradictions now."

Even at the time of October U2 resisted going public with their Christianity. I remember writing an article about U2 at the very mo­ment when the future of the band was in doubt—a struggle everyone around them was trying hard to conceal from the outside world. I knew about U2's faith, but when I got McGuinness on the phone and asked him to go on the record about it he backpedaled like a man about to bicycle over a cliff.

I was still very nervous about the Christian label," Edge says. "I have no trouble with Christ, but I have trouble with a lot of Christians. That was the problem. We wanted to give ourselves the chance to be viewed without that thing hanging over us. I don't think we're worried about it now. Also, at that stage we were going through our most out-there phase, spiritually. It was incredibly intense. We were just so involved with it. It was a time in our lives where we really concentrated on it more than on almost anything. Except Adam, who just wasn't inter­ested."

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