(Credits: Far Out / Joe Ahorro)
Sun 12 April 2026 15:30, UK
Everyone in U2 has been wary about their own mortality every time they make a record.
Bono and the gang are the first people to talk about the heavy topics whenever it comes to their faith, and a lot of the cornerstones of religion are preparing someone for what is going to happen when they reach the other side. And while The Edge’s guitar parts are what bring the band their sense of soul and colour their sound perfectly, he felt that the final songs to celebrate him needed to be a bit more gritty.
Because when you think about it, U2 are still a punk band that’s trapped underneath a massive corporate mask. They are always trying to push themselves out of their comfort zone and try something that no one has ever thought of before, and while that worked perfectly when making an album like Achtung Baby, it’s not like everyone was fawning over their decision to go full ‘Big Brother’ and put their album out to everyone who had ever owned an iPhone.
But if you remove the massive sense of hubris that Bono has, The Edge was still interested in the core values of what made rock and roll great. ‘Vertigo’ may have been one of the first great rock and roll songs they made that didn’t make you think all that hard, but when looking through some of the best pieces of his record collection, the guitarist had a lot more respect for people who thought outside the box, like The Velvet Underground.
Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison weren’t really thinking about sounding pretty every single time they made a record, but out of all the great songs in their catalogue, The Edge wanted ‘Beginning To See the Light’ played at his funeral, saying, “One of our proudest moments was doing a gig with them, and it turned out to be one of their last because Sterling Morrison passed away not long after. One of the great things about being in a big band is that you get the chance to ask someone you love to come out with you. It was a bit weird – you shut up and listen.”
Then again, a lot of the beauty behind The Velvets was how much heart they had behind a lot of their music. It was going to take a while for the average pop fan to fall in love with a song like ‘Sister Ray’, but compared to every other record in their catalogue, their second self-titled record was smart enough to put something that was a little more abrasive like this next to the pure beauty of ‘Pale Blue Eyes’.
And it’s not like you couldn’t hear the lineage that Reed and company had on the bands that U2 were first inspired by. They were practically the first punks before people even knew what the genre was, and if they hadn’t been there to kick down the door, that wouldn’t have led to The Clash, which in turn wouldn’t have changed Edge’s life when he first heard them perform in Dublin for the first time.
Not a lot of U2 material is overtly inspired by Reed’s work by any stretch, but a lot of it is baked into the foundation whether most people realise it or not. Bono understood Reed’s idea of always pushing himself forward, and while a lot of U2’s tunes could sound the same after a while, his lyrical style was a strange mix of David Bowie’s sense of eclecticism and the raw honesty that Reed had whenever he talked about his feelings.
So while The Edge is hoping to pass away any time soon, he felt that having a song that was about seeing the other side for the first time was the best kind of track he could hope for. There’s already a liturgical quality to far too many of U2’s records, so to send one of them off with a song that has a lot of grit behind it would be a nice change of pace.
