The Edge talks Bono, Vegas and Songs of Surrender
Updated / Wednesday, 15 Mar 2023 20:36
U2 guitarist The Edge has described his lifelong friend and band leader Bono as "like everyone. A mixture of good and some aspects not the best."
Speaking to Ryan Tubridy on RTÉ Radio 1 on Wednesday morning, he said, "That's what makes him so amazing. The intent is always positive and from the get-go in our band, we always decided to look out for each other and the friendship and success we’ve had is largely down to a culture of mutual support."
He added, "That kind of loyalty is rare enough. There is a quote that would represent the opposite of us. It’s from Gore Vidal and he said `it’s not enough that you enjoy success, what’s important is that your friends also fail.’
"We are all about each other succeeding and we are there for each other."
The Edge was speaking ahead of the release of U2's latest album, Songs of Surrender, and the Bono and The Edge: A Sort of Homecoming, With Dave Letterman special on Disney+, which are both out this Friday.
Songs of Surrender sees the veteran band revisit and re-record forty of their songs, ranging from their earliest work in 1979 to more recent tracks and the guitarist said it was a chance to breath new life into some classic U2 moments.
"There is something about songs to me that are gifts," he said. "They arrive and there’s something mysterious and magical. If you talk to any songwriter, they’ll explain it in the same way.
"This thing exists that didn’t exist before and they have this power, if they’re good enough, to become part of people’s lives, not just the people who wrote them and in this case, me and Bono have had this longstanding belief that with some of our early recordings we were just way wound up, we were intense young men trying to prove ourselves and get our music across and the music reflected that."
Describing the new album as a "bit of an experiment during lockdown, he added, "Listening back, we thought wow, we could probably do this in a different way that would make the songs shine, not just as new recordings but as pure songs that would not eclipse the previous recordings because they’re classic. We’re not taking those away but just to give a different slant and a different dimension to them."
He said that the band have always reworked certain songs when they play them live.
"We’ve seen in work on a couple of classics when we play them live, like Every Breaking Wave or Staring At The Sun, which ended up becoming iconic in their stripped-down version so the theory was could we do that to a song like Bad or Pride?
"I tried to see where it might lead us and that was the great discovery when Bono starting singing them, that, yes, a great song is indestructible.
"You can play it in different ways and play it in a different style, it’s still the same song in essence but you might understand it in a different way and that’s what Songs Of Surrender is about. People might fall in love with these songs all over again. That’s what they mean to us."
"Walk On we rewrote with a nod to Ukraine because that’s what’s happening now in our life that we feel needs a spotlight or Stories For Boys we wrote when we were boys and singing it now without reviewing the lyric would have felt quite odd and we rewrote it about the boys we were back then and what kind of characters we were when we were just starting out."
Asked if re-recording their old songs had given the band a sense of their own mortality or whether it was a happy and wistful experience, he said, "It’s both, I think and that’s the beautiful thing about music.
"You can hold contrasting ideas in your head at the same time so with Stories For Boys there is an awe about the power or youth but also a pathos about looking back.
"City of Blinding Lights, which is usually a full-bore celebratory rock song, but the new version has a lot of self-doubt and a more vulnerable emotion to it and that makes it really interesting."
The band are set to begin a residency at new venue The Sphere in Vegas later this year and they will be the first U2 shows without drummer Larry Mullen since 1978 when he broke his foot in a motorbike accident.
Speaking about Vegas, The Edge said, "First of all, the attraction is the venue. I don’t think we’d be playing in Vegas if it was a regular residency. This is a state of the art venue the likes of which doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. In terms of design, it’s light years ahead in terms of design and technology.
"It’s 18,000 to 20,000 people so it’s fairly substantial in size and why it’s appealing to us is that it’s a combination of sound and pictures that is a canvas for us that we are dying to get our hands on.
"The sound quality will be phenomenal because it’s purpose built for audio and the size of this canvas is huge, it’s a 120,000 square feet LED screen inside and there’s also another screen on the outside of the building which we will get to play with from time to time so it gives us the chance do to the kind of show that’s never been done.
"That’s the thing that always gets U2 excited, that we’re breaking new ground, that we’re finding a new way to present our music to our fans that marries great audio with the live experience and add another layer of experience to the songs."
