U2
SOME KIND OF MONSTER It’s not often that you get to use the words ‘the eponymous stage’, but U2 have made it quite clear in the naming of their latest tour that this one really is all about the venue, writes Lizzie Mitchell
U2’s tour is called the 360º Tour because it takes place under ‘the Claw’, a vast four-legged spider that has walked out of a Transformers movie to hover sci-fi-monster-like above the band, and a hefty section of audience surrounding the stage on all sides. Three hundered and sixty degrees in fact. The idea, according to architect Mark Fisher, was ‘to make a set that was as intimate as you can make it in a stadium. So everybody in the stadium feels like they are real close to the band and the band feel like they’re real close to everybody in the stadium.’ As well as the circular stage at the centre, there’s a concentric walkway swooping through the crowds further out, which the band members can access via bridges. A cylindrical video screen suspended from the body of the spider projects the onstage action into the outlying audience, and a sound system in each leg ensures that the four little fellas in the middle can make themselves heard when they need to.
The four-legged design was inspired by the Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport. Fisher is the architect, but perhaps the real mastermind is Willie Williams, a designer who has been working on U2 tours since 1982 and has reportedly been toying with the idea of a 360-degree stadium for several years. And as with all really good gizmos, the Claw has already left at least one story of outrage in its wake. Residents of Ireland’s Croke Park blockaded the roads in protest against the 94 trucks scheduled to enter and leave the venue, one every three and a half minutes right through the night. In a resounding victory for the Croke Park Residents’ Alliance, the trucks were unable to pass and the Claw missed its ferry to Sweden. So it’s all set for a concert staging revolution. Just so long as the giant spider doesn’t wake up, in which case the crowds will be screaming to a very different tune . . . ■ Get a virtual tour of the stage at 360.u2.com
I’m always intrigued by U2’s ambitious tour production – from Zoo TV to PopMart and now U2 360°. Though I’ve had the pleasure of seeing this band live several times, I’m constantly wondering: what can they do to top this? And will they end when they realise they can’t create interesting music, rather than become the Rolling Stones and tour until they’re old enough to be in senior citizens homes?
U2 play Hampden Park, Glasgow, Tue 18 Aug. See page 4 for our U2 competition.
RICHARD JOBSON Filmmaker, broadcaster and former Skids singer The first time I saw U2 they played the Hammersmith in London to 10 people, but you knew
something special was going on straight away. They played like a 1000 people were there. Bono had all the charisma he was to later show to bigger audiences. The next time I saw them they were playing Yankee Stadium in New York on the Zoo TV Tour, doing a live satellite link-up with Lou Reed in front of 50,000 people. It was just one of those tingle-factor moments. The world was theirs; they were just the biggest band on the planet. Yet they still had the ability to make it very intimate.
U2 and Green Day covered the Skids song
‘The Saints are Coming’ out of the blue in 2006. It was extraordinary to see the two biggest rock bands on the planet doing a song I wrote in my bedroom in Dunfermline when I was 16. And for an amazing reason – every penny that record made for me and U2 and Green Day went to a charity for kids. U2 live is still an experience and I think we need it. It’s great to see a band as massive as U2 still delivering the goods.
COLIN SOMERVILLE Music journalist and broadcaster I first saw U2 at Clouds in Tollcross, Edinburgh in 1981. They were very young and big on
enthusiasm and energy, but unsurprisingly short 10 THE LIST 13–20 Aug 2009
on charisma. Back in those days Adam Clayton was the bad boy bucking the others’ holier than thou reputation with tales of wine, women and song percolating in the press. I had a Chinese meal with them after interviewing Bono in the back of their promoter Tony Michaelides’ Ford Granada and he was very unassuming. Adam seemed much more, how shall we say, gregarious? By the time they played Murrayfield on the
PopMart tour 16 years later, everything had evolved. That was the pinnacle of stadium rock, a show of monstrous proportions built for the big arenas and filling them sonically and visually. Others had tried but U2 genuinely knocked it off. But then, I recall seeing them play the Paris Bercy around the same time and feeling that they had done all that could be done with shows on that scale, and while it might not all be downhill from there on in, it would never scale the same heights.
JONATHAN WAYNE Founder of U2 fansite U2Station.com U2 is Bono’s showmanship, charisma and unrelenting ego. He’s a rare frontman who can sit alongside the president of the United States and other world leaders, meet with the richest men in the world, orate on Africa, trade jokes with the Pope and go out on massive world tours while creating rock albums along with three guys he’s known since he was in high school.