U2 travels with ‘The Claw’ to give all its fans a view out of this world
U2 travels with ‘The Claw’ to give all its fans a view out of this world
By Sean Daly, Times Pop Music Critic
In Print: Friday, October 9, 2009
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U2’s stage nears completion Thursday in Raymond James Stadium in Tampa. Nicknamed “the Claw,” the stage offers a 360-degree view of the Irish rockers. “]![[CHRIS ZUPPA | Times] U2’s stage nears completion Thursday in Raymond James Stadium in Tampa. Nicknamed “the Claw,” the stage offers a 360-degree view of the Irish rockers.](http://u2ol.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/b4s_concert1009a_88661c.jpg "b4s_concert1009a_88661c")
A worker tries to beat the heat while constructing the U2 concert stage. It takes 31/2 days to build the stage and 11/2 to tear it down.”]![[CHRIS ZUPPA | Times] A worker tries to beat the heat while constructing the U2 concert stage. It takes 31/2 days to build the stage and 11/2 to tear it down.](http://u2ol.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/b4s_concert1009b_88660d.jpg "b4s_concert1009b_88660d")
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Imagine a four-legged beastie from the nightmares of Tim Burton: a malevolent arachnid, an advancing reptile. Now breed that sucker with a metallic hulk from the Outer Limits, something Steven Spielberg would use to wage war on the world.
Now, for the finishing touch, stick U2, perhaps the only band brazen enough to conquer this leviathan, in the middle of it all.
Are you ready to rock?
Or run screaming?
When the Dublin Four invade Raymond James Stadium tonight — as the only Florida stop on the tour — they will do so via “the biggest rock ‘n’ roll production to ever tour the world,” says U2 360 tour director Craig Evans.
On Thursday, the 49-year-old Evans offered a sneak peek of U2’s setup, which reportedly costs the band around $755,000 a day during the course of the 44-show tour. (That includes off-days, too!) The idea for the stage — dubbed “the Claw” by designer Willie Williams and architect Mark Davis and the “spaceship” by the band — came from frontman Bono, as most of U2’s gaudiest ideas tend to do.
He “wanted to play in the 360-degree configuration,” said Evans, “so every seat would have an intimate view of the stage.”
“Intimate.” That seems like an odd word to use to describe That Thing, which takes 31/2 days to build — and 11/2 to tear down. The tour employs more than 350 staffers, traveling on 114 trucks; another 1,500 local workers will be on hand to make sure it’s all pulled off with panache.
The Claw — I prefer that vaguely threatening name better — stretches from Raymond James’ 50-yard line to its south end zone. It spreads sideline to sideline. Inside the Claw is a 54-ton high-def circular video screen that will “share our 3D vision,” Evans said. There is also a 160-meter runway for Bono to gambol and proselytize upon.
If you’re looking for deep philosophical meaning behind the structure, well, don’t. This is U2’s first stadium tour since ‘97; it wanted to give fans bang for their buck, in the nosebleeds or elsewhere. The design, explains Evans, “is not so much esoteric as functional.”
The basic structure is 90 feet tall, but my favorite touch is the center pylon, which is topped — at 165 feet — by a disco ball. Rest assured, that will not go unused.
For all the numbers Evans tossed out, the most impressive, and most daunting, was this one: 70,000. That, he said, is the record for attendance at Raymond James Stadium, set during this year’s Super Bowl. He expects U2 to draw even more. Live Nation, the promoter of the tour, won’t announce a sell-out yet — but it plans to.
Yes, the show will be majestic, but it will also be mayhem.
Be prepared.
The Claw awaits.
Sean Daly can be reached at sdaly@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8467. His Pop Life blog is at blogs.tampabay.com/popmusic.
If you go
Listen up, U2 Fans!
If you’re one of the 10,000 or so with general admission tickets, the first-come, first-serve line starts at 9 a.m. HOWEVER, they won’t start admitting people until 5 p.m. The temperature is expected to be a brutal 90-plus, so plan accordingly. And don’t worry about not bellying up to the stage; the sight lines will be great no matter where you stand.
Ready to rock?
U2, with opening act Muse, performs at 7 p.m. at Raymond James Stadium, 4201 N Dale Mabry Highway, Tampa. Doors open at 5 p.m. Tickets are $30-$250, if there are any left. Toll-free 1-877-598-8698; livenation.com.
U2’s massive intimacy
Filed under: Bono, News, Tour, Tour News, U2, U2 360 Tour North America, U2 360° Tour
U2’s massive intimacy
U2’s 360 Tour is the latest evolution of the stadium tour, one that tries to be both big and small
Mike Doherty, Weekend Post
Brett Gundlock / National Post Just one man in a stadium: Bono serenading via his great circular catwalk on Wednesday night at Toronto’s Rogers Centre.
It’s no secret ambition bites the nails of success – or so Bono likes to tell us. And after taking on world famine, war, and pestilence, he and his U2 bandmates have set themselves arguably their biggest task yet: trying to make a stadium show feel intimate.
On their 360 Tour, they’ve spared no expense to do so: they’ve commissioned a 150-foot steel structure housing a 54-ton video screen made up of a million separate pieces, all of which takes four days to put together (and reputedly 120 trucks to cart across North America, although this was the one figure their tour publicist declined to confirm – justifying their carbon footprint to the press, it seems, would be one miracle too many).
But why should it take so much effort, material, and money to create intimacy? The rock ‘n’ roll stadium show has always been a strange beast, created from commercial and logistical, rather than artistic, concerns. Thrust into an enormous space designed for sporting events, what’s a band to do?
When the original stadium band toured across North America, no one had a clue how it would work, and thus expectations were low. Footage of The Beatles’ famous first concert at Shea Stadium reveals how little it took to make large numbers of young fans scream in 1965. The band played for a mere half-hour on an unadorned stage near second base on an otherwise empty baseball field, using a direly inadequate sound system – they couldn’t hear each other play, and the 55,000 in attendance saw very little, and heard nothing but their own prolonged hormonal shrieks.
Dissatisfied, the Fab Four retired from live performance just a year later, leaving their successors to cope with fans who had higher demands. In the early ’70s, video screens sprang up above stages to ensure that stars always looked larger-than-life. At first, the strategy had problems: a 1971 Billboard magazine article lamented that the black-and-white screen projections at a concert by the band Chicago “created an impression in the rear seats that we were being fobbed off with a low-budget TV show. High-budget visuals, though, have since proved difficult to resist. In 1988, The Edge told Rolling Stone, “With U2, it’s the music that makes the atmosphere. There’s no laser show, no special effects.” Four years later, on the Zoo TV tour, he and his bandmates would appear on stage flanked by 36 video screens showing a flashy jumble of images. 1997’s PopMart Tour used an 8000-square-foot next-generation LED screen as a backdrop, and the 360 Tour has a 14,000-square-foot cylindrical video screen made up whose interlocking segments can detach from one another and expand into a giant cocoon.
And yet, one doesn’t want to lose the human figure entirely; intimacy shouldn’t only be an illusion created by the proximity of screens. But how to bring the artists physically closer to their fans? In 1974, David Bowie sang Space Oddity from a crane suspended above his audience – which worked brilliantly, apart from when it failed to retract and he had to crawl back to the stage along its arm. Recently, Coldplay have taken to serenading punters in the nosebleed sections directly, by running up to the aisles with acoustic guitars. U2 have always been better at swaggering than sprinting; for Zoo TV, they built their first “b-stage,” where they could go and strum stripped-down songs, pretending they were still that little band from Dublin in the early ‘80s. The 360 Tour, with performances in the round, finds them reaching out onto the stadium floor with a great circular catwalk.
So once you have managed to be seen by the masses while maintaining your common humanity, the next step is to entertain, usually by playing with concepts of scale. Since the mid-’70s, bands have gleefully trotted out giant versions of animals or objects that look as though they’d be normal-sized if they were right in front of you. Pink Floyd had immense pigs that flew (and a pyramid that wasn’t supposed to but did anyway, if the wind was strong enough); The Rolling Stones commissioned gargantuan inflatable lips and a gigantic yellow dog; Fleetwood Mac built a 70-foot penguin that would never properly inflate. For PopMart, U2 erected a 100-foot swizzle-stick, a 12-foot olive, and a 40-foot lemon out of which they would emerge – when it didn’t get stuck, forcing them to sneak out an “escape hatch.”
For the 360 Tour, the stage set itself is an oversized prop: Bono calls it the “spaceship,” although it looks curiously like a four-limbed version of the spindly-legged alien invaders that Tom Cruise battled in 2005’s War of the Worlds. The band members play inside its mammoth carapace, atop which a pole stretches into the sky, bearing aloft a great disco ball that shines glittering lights all around the stadium.
At the Rogers Centre in Toronto this past Wednesday, it was as if the band had descended to colonize the stadium with their message of intergalactic hope: they beamed in Bowie’s Space Oddity before their set and signed off with a recording of Elton John’s Rocket Man; in between, astronaut Frank DeWinne recited one of the verses to their song Your Blue Room. When you can play music with someone who’s in space, the idea goes, you’re shrinking our corner of the universe down to size.
And in truth, this is what the best stadium shows do – they flabbergast us with special effects, but they also create a feeling of intimacy by bringing everything, and everyone, closer together. In Toronto, U2 offered a few such moments: as Bono backed off the mic for the first verse of I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For and the audience sang spontaneously along with the Biggest Karaoke Back-Up Band of All Time; as Bono and The Edge cut back on the bombast and hushed us with a unexpectedly moving acoustic duet version of Stay; and at the very end, as all the lights went off and Bono suggested, “Let’s turn this place into the Milky Way.” Hoisting our own video-screen props – our cell-phones – we created a stadium full of tiny stars while the band played the hymn-like Moment of Surrender. Commander Bono may have been resorting to a hoary big-concert cliché, but his strategy worked – it’s a safe bet that everyone in the stadium, at that point, felt as though they were not alone.
EXCLUSIVE: Behind the Scenes With U2 on Tour!
EXCLUSIVE: Behind the Scenes With U2 on Tour!
U2 Kicks Off North American Tour at Chicago’s Soldier Field
By CHRIS CUOMO, CHRIS STRATHMANN and LINDA OWENS
If you want to see a huge tour by one of the biggest rock bands of all time, look no further than U2. The pop legends just kicked off their long-awaited 360 Tour in the United States this weekend, and “Good Morning America” got exclusive backstage access.
Chris Cuomo goes behind-the-scenes with the band currently on tour.The band’s North American tour began at Chicago’s Soldier Field in front of 65,000 screaming fans, on a circular stage underneath a 90-foot-tall, four-pronged canopy that lead singer Bono referred to as a “spaceship.” The steel structure took four days to build and housed not only the band but a 150-foot pylon and a 54-ton cylindrical video screen that lit up the stadium.
U2 hasn’t performed in open arenas in the United States in more than a decade, and the band members said they wanted to do it in a very big way. Reportedly, $40 million was spent to build the 360-degree stage. But when you put all that together with U2 in front of these American audience, the value is priceless.
“We’re so exposed,” said guitarist the Edge. “And when the four of us come together, there’s this clear view for everybody. They can really see the interaction.”
“I think, in general, the whole idea of U2 is to engage with our audience,” drummer Larry Mullen Jr. said. “So we had to figure out how to do it and how to really engag. … That’s what’s special about this show. It’s in 360. And the audience is such a big part of what we do.”
U2 played for just over two hours each night, performing 22 to 24 songs spanning the band’s career. The tour is supporting their recent album “No Line on the Horizon.” The Chicago Tribune called it one of the best stadium shows of the last decade.
“Chicago has just always been a great music town, hasn’t it?” said bassist Adam Clayton. ” You know, there was always that — the blues musicians coming up in the ’50s. And there’s always something going off here. And I think it’s very musician-friendly. So it’s good to be back. And we’ve always had great audience and a great reaction.”
Mullen, who started the band decades ago, says, “I didn’t choose these guys. It turns out that they chose me.”
He joked that he regrets not sticking with the name the Larry Mullen Jr. Band.
“In fact, that is one of my big regrets,” he said. “I think we could’ve been bigger.”
“U2 is such a crap name,” added the Edge, laughing.