David Howell Evans was born at the Barking Maternity Hospital, in the county of Essex in England, on 8 August 1961. He is the second child of Welsh parents Garvin and Gwenda Evans, both of whom originated from Llanelli, a coastal town in South Wales. Garvin was an engineer who worked for the local electricity board, and subsequently worked for the electronics company Plessey. The Edge has an elder brother Richard (often called Dik) and a younger sister called Gillian. The Evanses initially lived in Chadwell Heath, Essex. Around 1962, Garvin was offered a promotion and a transfer at his job, and the family subsequently moved to County Dublin, Ireland for him to take it.

While the Evans brothers were at Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin in 1976, they went along to a meeting in response to an advert posted by another pupil, Larry Mullen Jr., on the school’s noticeboard seeking musicians to form a new band with him. Among the several other pupils who also responded to the note were Paul “Bono” Hewson and Adam Clayton. The band went through a number of reformations before becoming known as U2 in March 1978 (Richard Evans having left before this to join another band, leaving his younger brother as the lead guitarist).

U2 began its public performance life in small venues in Dublin in 1977, occasionally playing at other venues elsewhere in Ireland. In December 1979, they performed their first concerts outside Ireland, in London, and in 1980 began extensive touring across the British Isles, developing a following. Their debut album Boy was released in 1980.

In 1981, leading up to the October Tour, Evans came very close to leaving U2 for religious reasons, but he decided to stay. During this period he became involved with a group called Shalom Tigers, in which bandmates Bono and Larry Mullen Jr. were also involved. Shortly after deciding to remain with the band, he wrote a piece of music that later became “Sunday Bloody Sunday”.

He received his initial formal education at St. Andrew’s National School, in Malahide. As a child, he also received piano and guitar lessons, and practised music with Dik. The Edge received his first guitar at the age of seven when his mother bought him a Spanish guitar. He did not know how to properly tune it or hold it and referred to it as “little more than a toy”, but he was fascinated by how cool it was. At the age of nine, the “first proper guitar” came to the Evans household when the Edge’s mother purchased an old acoustic guitar at a jumble sale for a pound. He and Dik both experimented with this instrument, replacing the rusty wire strings with nylon ones and learning to properly play it. The Edge said in 1982 of this early experimentation, “me and my elder brother Dik both played it, plonking away, all very rudimentary stuff, open chords and all that.”

Evans married his secondary school girlfriend Aislinn O’Sullivan on 12 July 1983. They have three daughters: Hollie (born in 1984), Arran (in 1985) and ‘Blue Angel’ (in 1989). The couple separated in 1990, but were unable to get legally divorced because of Irish laws regarding marriage annulment at the time; divorce was legalised in 1995, and the couple legally divided in 1996.

In 1993, he began dating Morleigh Steinberg, an American professional dancer who was employed by the band as a choreographer and on-stage belly dancer during the Zoo TV Tour. They have a daughter, Sian (born 1997), and a son, Levi (born 25 October 1999). The couple were married in 2002.

The Edge, Bob Ezrin and Henry Juszkiewicz co-founded Music Rising in 2005, a charity that helped provide replacement instruments for those that were lost in Hurricane Katrina. The instruments were originally only replaced for professional musicians but they soon realised the community churches and schools needed instruments as well. The charity’s slogan is “Rebuilding the Gulf Region note by note” and has so far helped over a hundred musicians who were affected by Hurricane Katrina. The Edge also serves on the board of the Angiogenesis Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organisation dedicated to improving global health by advancing angiogenesis-based medicine, diets, and lifestyle.

In 2007, the Edge was awarded an honorary doctorate of music from Berklee College of Music. In 2010, Gibson ranked him the 23rd-best guitarist of all time, saying that he “created a sound that is distinctly his own – no small feat when you consider he’s had to do it in the course of three decades while working shoulder-to-shoulder with one of the biggest personalities in rock, Bono”. The following year, Rolling Stone placed the Edge at number 38 on its list of “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”; Daniel Lanois called him an “innovative mind”, a “scientist, and a poet by night”, and said he is “dedicated to note-taking” to “document every detail of his sound”. In 2012, Spin ranked him 13th on their list of the 100 greatest guitarists, saying that he “masked and flaunted his willful ignorance of how guitars are meant to be played with forgiving delay pedals, forging a sonic trademark so distinctive that his band’s name became an adjective”. In 2015, Rolling Stone ranked Bono and the Edge at number 35 on its list of the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time. At the 2017 Bonnaroo Music Festival, the Edge was honoured with the Les Paul Spirit Award by the Les Paul Foundation for being someone who “exemplifies the spirit of the late, great Les Paul through innovation, engineering, technology and/or music”.

In 2008, the Edge participated in the Davis Guggenheim-directed documentary film It Might Get Loud. The film examines the history of the electric guitar, focusing on the careers and styles of the Edge, Jimmy Page, and Jack White. The film premiered on 5 September 2008 at the Toronto International Film Festival

He also created the theme song for season one and two of The Batman. He and fellow U2 member Bono wrote the theme of the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye. The Edge, along with Bono, composed a musical adaptation of Spider-Man. On 25 May 2011, a single titled “Rise Above 1” by Reeve Carney featuring Bono and the Edge was released digitally. The music video was released on 28 July 2011.

On 29 April 2016, the Edge performed in the Sistine Chapel as part of a conference for the Angiogenesis Foundation, making him the first rock artist to stage a concert at the site.

The Edge plays electric guitar, acoustic guitar, keyboards, piano, bass guitar (on “40” and “Race Against Time”) and lap steel guitar. Detailed gear diagrams of the Edge’s U2 guitar rig for the 1981 October Tour, the 1983 War Tour, and the 2009 U2 360° Tour are well-documented. In 2016, Fender unveiled a signature model of guitar and amplifier designed in collaboration with the Edge: the Edge Signature Stratocaster and the Fender Edge Deluxe, respectively.