U2's The Edge: Our 1985 "Unforgettable Fire" Interview

JasO

During 1985's Unforgettable Fire tour, The Edge called me to talk about U2's origins, as well as his guitars, techniques, tunings, gear, and how to turn musical limitations into advantages.

There is interesting material here for guitar players. For instance, when I asked him about recording The Unforgettable Fire, Edge responded, “On this album I was using quite a lot of damped strings, using gaffer tape or stuff, a lot of bottleneck, different pickups. I have an acoustic guitar that has already got an in-built seducer-style [transducer] pickup, but I put a normal regular acoustic guitar pickup on it, and that’s had some interesting sounds.”

Asked about unusual tunings, The Edge mentioned his lap steel, which is tuned to three octaves, and this unusual one for a standard 6-string electric guitar: “This tuning I use for the Tele is a very odd one. It’s another one I made up. It’s – you’re gonna laugh – F, A, D, D, G, D. It’s a kind of odd tuning, but it makes a nice chord. The story is, as I was putting down some guitars on that song ‘Unforgettable Fire,’ I was having a little bit of difficulty coming out with something that I was pleased with, so I just decided as a sort of radical change of approach to just tune the guitar to the notes that seemed right, or seemed interesting. And so that was the tuning that came. It was pure chance, but it does sound a very beautiful chord in relation to the song.” He played this with an E-Bow, adding that “the only problem with E-Bow is it tends to make everything sound the same, so it’s really down to how you treat your sound after the guitar, whether or not you get a nice, pleasant effect, or whether you get that same sort of whining sound that everyone gets.”

Other highlights are when he talks about how he and the rest of U2 turned their musical limitations into a sound all their own, as well as how to break out of playing clichés. If you’re interested in seeing more, I’ve transcribed and posted the entire conversation here: U2’s The Edge: The "Unforgettable Fire" Interview

stickyfiddle

Fantastic - a great read

ElectricXII

Great. Thanks for posting this.

digitalkettle

Excellent read...I'm very nostalgic about that era of U2

CaseOfAce

Anyone see the Charlie Burchill / Simple Minds interview in this month's Guitarist magazine.

He says he got to play thru the Edge's AC30, black strat and effects rig he was using at that time.

Burchill says when he played thru it, it sounded ,,,, exactly like the Edge - and he realised tone is indeed in the gear....!

He also said it was the best sounding rig he'd ever heard.

russpm

Brilliant, thank you so much for posting.

marktheharp

Brilliant read, love that album , the videos and the imagery of Anton  Corbjn