Imitation is said to be the highest form of flattery, but from a guitar perspective that has never sat right with The Edge. In fact, he’s never been that impressed by those who look to copy his sound and style.
In a 1996 interview with Guitar World, the U2 icon reflected on the guitar scene at the time, and discussed the fact many were settling with imitating a style as opposed to developing their own.
“It is so hard to really pull something out of yourself,” he conceded. “If you think about guitar players down through the years who have that fire, who have that ability to play and really, really connect with you, there aren’t that many.
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“The odds are really stacked against you doing it, so most people settle for the imitation – that’s reliable at least, and kind of impressive, if not life-changing.”
He turns to Jimi Hendrix for an example. Trailblazers will always have their imitators, but he questions what value that actually brings.
“Jimi Hendrix’s work was life-changing, astonishing,” The Edge observed. “But all the people down through the years who’ve played his style have been, at best, impressive. Is it craft and not art?
“I tend to cringe a bit when I hear people who’ve obviously taken my style. I think it’s a joke that’s often played on me in that it’s the simplest of my ideas that ends up taking off – it’s my one-note solos that work! And the problem is you cannot argue with something if it really works.”
Naturally, many players will always wear their influences, perhaps a little too proudly, on their sleeves. Wolfgang Van Halen, for instance, once suggested his dad ruined ‘80s guitar because of the legion of copyists his magic conjured.
The Edge was getting tired of imitation, which is perhaps why, in 1997, U2 made a stylistic U-turn and embraced electronica on Pop, peeling away from the blues rock pool.
In the same GW interview, The Edge spoke out against the stupid mentality of the “white blues rock thing”, and shrugged off players who commit to 15-minute guitar solos.
But musical brilliance doesn’t always mean virtuosic prowess. As he found out while tracking one of the band’s biggest records, sometimes the simplest ideas work for a reason.
“I remember on Achtung Baby [1991], I wanted to “fix” the solo in The Fly, and I just wasn’t allowed. ‘No! You cannot touch that! You cannot argue!’” he reports. “As much as my pride would have loved me to go back and do something more elaborate, I knew that this thing did work.”
It proved a valuable lesson for the guitarist. Blazing virtuosity and fanciful fretboard dances aren’t always the answer, even if most players have that urge to do so. Sometimes, it’s better to leave an itch unscratched.
