The confetti serves as an opening act for the 12,000 individual spheres of the LED backdrop: daisy-chained pixel units that have unreeled from above while the chaff storm distracted us. More crucial, though, the Vegas confetti storm is a bridge, a liminal device for the audience we're over that threshold now, into the show. Someone's worked these reflective differences out to get just this effect under exactly these lights. The red rectangle is textured, the golden disc smooth, mirrored. I pick some up, feeling like a rube at Roswell. This glorious falling cloud is designer radar chaff, die-cut metallic PVC film. The confetti cannon takes me by surprise as U2 opens the concert with "City of Blinding Lights": glitzy, glittering, emotive kitsch. The ghostly red Scalectrix of the Ellipse whips past us. "William Gibson is in the house," Bono observes through the Vertigo sound system. I hadn't thought of the design of rock tour sets as architecture before, but the idea of big, ambitious nomadic design erecting itself nightly within big, ugly concrete sports temples excited me mightily. I can't remember ever having entered one, except for a rock concert.Īrchitect Mark Fisher, who led the design of the ZooTV set, introduced me to the intricacies of how a rock concert, a node of mobile architecture, can inhabit a sports arena - much as a hermit crab inhabits a seashell, it seemed to me. For this reason, arenas have remained culturally mysterious to me. I was born without a team-sports gene, I think, as I watch a technician pass Edge a Stratocaster in some shade of lacquer last seen on a Buick in Havana. The remarkable continuity of U2's management culture allows for a genuine evolution, and the band members insist on it, so the odds of seeing something new are high indeed. Now I'm back, drawn by accounts of a lighter, more limber show.
I've been able to follow this, up close and backstage, on four other tours, beginning with ZooTV in 1992.
We're here because U2 is the early 21st century's biggest - and arguably most technologically innovative - touring group, the one that continues to define and redefine the spectacle that is arena rock.įor more than a decade, they've been driving both the technology and the form of the megatour while providing huge audiences with a powerful yet intricately managed sense of intimacy. My wife and I stand in Seattle's KeyArena, noses level with the lower swoop of what U2 calls the Ellipse, the elevated stage loop the band traverses in performance. Its eyes are clusters of surveillance cameras. Heaving up, Transformer-like, it comes alive, its shoulders the housings of giant speaker arrays, trailing epaulets of LED lighting. Scraping across oil-stained concrete, it bunches up anthropomorphically. The flat, interlocking plates of the stage are laid out like a game of solitaire. Every last piece of cargo has been set out, part of an angular, bilaterally symmetrical Rorschach blot - a hard-edged Mothra, inducing a faint deja vu. Unpacked the lights and the behemoth speakers and the Wi-Fi cart for the backstage offices and spread it here, on the outskirts of some city from a '50s horror film where distance plays tricks on the eye.
Pan across derelict concrete runway at dawn, somewhere in the American Southwest: Someone's unpacked the whole convoy of semis that haul the equipment for U2's Vertigo//2005 tour.
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