They may have some of the most recognisable rock songs of all time, but U2 guitarist The Edge is still working on a song that’s now 40 years old.
The Bono-fronted band have a handful of all-time great tracks in their archive, not least their Johnny Cash collaboration, Ellis Island. But a song The Edge has been working on for decades has struck him as “uncomfortable” for some time, and when speaking to BBC Radio 2 for the band’s Tracks of My Years appearance, he confirmed the song was still something he was wrapping his head around. Despite I Will Follow being released as part of the band’s debut album, Boy, The Edge is still trying to figure out the guitar parts, much to the glee of Bono and the band.
Asked about his relationship with the band’s back catalogue, The Edge said he had “an uncomfortable one” and that there are songs he and Bonno were still finishing in their heads. He explained: “I’m still working on the guitar sound for I Will Follow. You know, it’s like, I’m almost there, you know, still in development. How long is it now? It’s probably, you know, 40 years, but I’m getting very close, very close.”
Later in the interview with Vernon Kay, The Edge added: “That can be the case in some of your two songs, they’ll always be morphed in some way like Electrical Storm, we never quite got that arrangement to work live, loved the song but Adam you were going to say?”
Bassist Adam Clayton also weighed in on the band’s backlog, saying that some songs can’t quite make the transition from studio to stage. He explained: “I feel like we’re starting to discover that they mean different things at different stages in your own life. So they mean different things to you. So I’ve heard people say, ‘oh, I can’t stand that song. I don’t want to perform that song ever live.’ I don’t feel that about our material or our songs. I think the audience sort of owns them 85%, and maybe we own 25% of them at this stage. But our DNA is still in there.”
Though The Edge may still be working out the guitar parts for I Will Follow, the band has hardly performed it in recent years. It was a setlist staple for much of their career, with over 1,000 performances of the song from 1980 onwards. It’s unclear whether the song will return to their setlist for The Greatest Show on Earth, with the group having last performed the show on tour in 2019.
A full setlist for the last time the band performed I Will Follow, at the D.Y. Patil Stadium in Mumbai, can be found below.
- Sunday Bloody Sunday
- I Will Follow
- New Year’s Day
- Bad
- Pride (In the Name of Love)
- Where the Streets Have No Name
- I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For
- With or Without You
- Bullet the Blue Sky
- Running to Stand Still
- Red Hill Mining Town
- In God’s Country
- Trip Through Your Wires
- One Tree Hill
- Exit
- Mothers of the Disappeared
- Desire (with Noel Gallagher)
- Elevation
- Vertigo
- Even Better Than the Real Thing
- Every Breaking Wave
- Beautiful Day
- Ultraviolet (Light My Way)
- Ahimsa (A.R. Rahman cover with A.R. Rahman)
- One (with Noel Gallagher and A.R. Rahman)
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