Born on August 8: To the world, U2 guitarist David Howell Evans is known as The Edge

He was born in London to Welsh parents in 1961, but like his U2 bandmates, The Edge became Irish at heart.

The birth of the most popular quartet ever formed in Dublin was a natural fit for the times. Four teenagers living in the same neighborhood. In this case, The Edge responded to an ad posted by drummer Larry Mullen Jr. on the doorstep of the very Catholic Mount Temple Comprehensive School. It was here that the four boys of U2 grew up. At the age of 12, Paul "Bono" Henson also met his wife Alison Stewart. It was here that the band found graphic designer Steve Averill, who would later design their record covers. A big family!

The Edge mostly plays a few fairly standard guitars: a Fender Stratocaster, a Gibson Explorer, and a Les Paul of the same brand. But he doesn't neglect acoustic guitars. The distinctive sounds he's been honing for years come from the reverberations, modulations, filters, and digital delays he uses extensively. To the solos so dear to his peers, he prefers sonic explorations and melodic rhythms, which are beautifully realized on the 1987 album "The Joshua Tree" and tracks like "With Or Without You," "Mothers Of The Disappeared," and the haunting four-note intro to "Where The Streets Have No Name."

While he has occasionally performed alongside Johnny Cash, Ron Wood, Tina Turner, and B.B. King, The Edge has never been drawn to solo adventures. Even though he wrote the music for the American animated series "The Batman" in the mid-2000s.

He also participated in the "UV Achtung Baby" residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas in 2023 and 2024. He will be remembered for his performance of "Sunday Bloody Sunday" with Bono in March 2022 in the corridors of the Kyiv (Ukraine) metro, as Russian bombs continued to rain down on the country, wantonly tortured by Putin. And even more surprisingly, The Edge, discreet on the subject but a self-proclaimed practitioner, played a few notes under Michelangelo's frescoes in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel in September 2015 during a cancer symposium.

(MH with Stéphane Soupart - Photo : © Etienne Tordoir)

Photo: The Edge with U2 for the presentation of the album "The Joshua Tree" at Zaventem airport (Belgium) on July 8, 1987