(Credits: Far Out / Spotify)
Inspiration is the one thing that any artist can hope to spread throughout their career. It probably doesn’t hurt to see the sales figures of their records start climbing every single time they make a new record, but the only mark of a great artist is whether or not they can take their music a little bit further and compel someone to follow in their footsteps long after they’ve played their final musical notes. And while Bono has both inspired and infuriated many people in the rock sphere, he never forgot the people who brought him to where he is today.
Because if there’s one thing that U2 are, it’s students of rock and roll. There are a handful of moments where the songs either don’t work or they make a grave error when looking at their career aspirations, but never once can they say they haven’t done anything with love, even if it meant shoving their music down people’s throats when striking a deal with Apple for Songs of Innocence.
When they first started thinking outside the box in the 1980s, though, it seemed like the rock world had another band that could take on the world. All the pieces for a classic band were there on albums like War, but they needed the right set of people to help them get further along, and for anyone even mildly interested in the cutting edge at the time, it all went back to Brian Eno.
While most punk fans like U2 wouldn’t be caught dead with a synthesiser on one of their records, Eno was the one who wanted to push himself in different directions that weren’t simple pop keyboard lines. He had been making strange detours ever since working with Roxy Music, but when he started working with artists like David Bowie, there were moments where his touch behind the production board almost didn’t sound like any instruments heard in Western culture.
Low already set the template for genres like post-rock, but a song like ‘Heroes’ took guitars to new places they hadn’t been. Most guitarists would attack the strings whenever they played like a percussion instrument, but Eno found a way to make the first primitive eBow out of Robert Fripp’s guitar, making one static drone that kept the tension rising perfectly throughout the tune to offset Bowie’s vocal performance.
“As writer, performer, producer there is no one alive that has had more influence on more music genres than you in the last 50 years… that’s just it.”
Bono
While Eno would work magic for U2 on The Joshua Tree later, Bono always held ‘Heroes’ in high regard as the finest piece he heard from him, saying, “I can so feel your presence on this song… what a presence it is… so many of us have climbed aboard your thinking and your strategies for making music, art and risotto. As writer, performer, producer there is no one alive that has had more influence on more music genres than you in the last 50 years… that’s just it.”
And it’s easy to see that kind of magic working when The Joshua Tree came out. Everyone had been used to The Edge making strange uses of his delay pedals, but when ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ comes on, it’s like being thrown into a time tunnel for those first few minutes before Bono comes screaming in, as if he was giving a glimpse of what the future of rock could sound like.
No one can justifiably claim to rewrite rock and roll history, and while Eno might not even earn that title in many respects, he certainly made everyone look at the genre in a new way. Nothing had to be the traditional guitar/bass/and drums setup anymore, and the rest of the world took that as a challenge to make their own classics.
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