The voice The Edge called as big as the Grand Canyon: “An incredible man”

Some musicians seem to have been handed a slightly unfair allocation of talent. They can sing, play guitar, write songs, command a stage and somehow still find time to be effortlessly funny – someone like Dave Grohl springs to mind, and that’s before we even start talking about the ol’ drums.

Then there’s The Edge, who has spent much of his career proving that you don’t need to dominate a song to make it enormous. With U2, his guitar became less of a lead instrument and more a kind of weather system, with delay, repetition and negative space arranged with the precision of an architect.

Opinions on The Edge’s approach have always been divided between those who see him as an innovative sonic architect and those who find his style limited, but whatever side of that argument you fall on, it’s difficult to deny the skill involved in understanding exactly how little you need to play to make something feel vast. He carved out space for Bono’s voice, Adam Clayton’s pulse and Larry Mullen Jr’s martial snap, creating an atmosphere that could make even a relatively simple guitar part feel enormous.

What’s less talked about is that he seems to be rather good with words, too. When asked to describe Johnny Cash’s voice, he didn’t reach for the usual cliché, instead opting to liken Cash’s voice to ‘the Grand Canyon’. He did admit at the time that he had stolen the phrase from someone else, but then again, what is music if not one long line of stolen influences The Grand Canyon is enormous, yes, but its scale isn’t the only thing that makes it overwhelming – it’s the sense of time too. Its layers of rock expose millions of years of history, carved into the landscape and left there for anyone to see, and Cash’s voice had those layers, too.