Zoo TV Tour - Stage Design and Show Production

Stage Design and Show Production

The Zoo TV stages were designed by Willie Williams, U2's stage designer since the War Tour of 1982–1983. In place of U2's austere and minimalist productions of the 1980s, the Zoo TV stage was a complex setup, designed to instill "sensory overload" in its audience. The set's giant video screens showed not only close-ups of the band members performing, but also pre-recorded video, live television transmissions (intercepted by a satellite the group brought on tour), and text phrases. Electronic, tabloid-style headlines ran on scrawls at the ends of the stage. The band's embracing of such technology was meant as a radical departure in form, and as a commentary on the pervasive nature of technology. This led many critics to describe the show as "ironic".

Several versions of the stage were used during the tour. The first two legs were indoors and used the smallest of the sets, which included four Vidiwalls (Philips-branded giant television screens); six painted Trabants suspended above the stage; 36 television monitors; and a B-stage, a small remote platform connected to the main stage by a ramp. A seventh Trabant by the B-stage doubled as a DJ booth and a mirror ball.

To redesign the set for the North American outdoor stadium leg—dubbed "Outside Broadcast"—Williams collaborated with stage designers Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park, both of whom had worked on The Rolling Stones' Steel Wheels Tour stage set. The set was expanded to include a 248-by-80-foot (76 by 24 m) stage, and the Vidiwalls were supplemented by four larger mega-video screens. Williams faced difficulties in designing the outdoor lighting system, as the stage did not have a roof. He settled on using the venues' house spotlights and strategically placed lights in the structure behind the band. The spires of the stage, intended to resemble transmission towers, were tall enough that the Federal Aviation Administration required them to have blinking warning lights. The stage's appearance was compared to the techno-future cityscapes from Blade Runner and the works of cyberpunk writer William Gibson. The B-stage was located at the end of a 150-foot-long (46 m) catwalk. The larger set used 176 speaker enclosures, 312 18-inch (46 cm) subwoofers, 592 10-inch (25 cm) mid-range speakers, 18 projectors, 26 on-stage microphones, two Betacam and two Video-8 handheld video cameras, and 11 Trabants suspended by cranes over the stage. The outdoor stage used for the 1993 legs of the tour was smaller due to budget concerns, and it discarded the Trabants hung from cranes, instead featuring three cars hanging behind the drum kit. All of the projection screens were replaced with "video cubes", as the projectors were not bright enough for the European summer nights, when daylight remained later into the evening.

"We really wanted to do something that had never been seen before, using TV, text, and imagery. It was a very big and expensive project to put together. We allowed ourselves to be carried away by new technology."

To realise the video production ideas, the equivalent of a television studio control room—costing US$3.5 million—was built for the tour. Beneath the stage, Dodds, the video director, operated a system custom-built by Philips called CD-i. It used five broadcast camera systems, 12 Laser Disc players, and a satellite dish, and it required 12 directors, 19 video crew members, and two separate mix stations to operate. Despite the production's complexity, the group decided that flexibility in the shows' length and content was a priority. Guitarist The Edge said, "That was one of the more important decisions we made early on, that we wouldn't sacrifice flexibility, so we designed a system that is both extremely complicated and high-tech but also incredibly simple and hands-on, controlled by human beings... in that sense, it's still a live performance." This flexibility allowed for improvisations and deviations from the planned programme. Eno recommended that the band film its own video tapes so that they could be edited and looped into the video displays more easily, instead of relying entirely on pre-sequenced video. Eno explained, "their show depends on some kind of response to what's happening at the moment in that place. So if it turns out they want to do a song for five minutes longer, they can actually loop through the material again so that you're not suddenly stuck with black screens halfway through the fifth verse." The band shot new video for the displays over the course of the tour.

The 180-person crew travelled in 12 buses and a chartered jet known as the Zoo Plane. For the American stadium shows, 52 trucks were required to transport 1,200 short tons (1,089 tonnes) of equipment, 3 miles (4.8 km) of cabling, 12 forklifts, and a 40-short-ton (36 t) crane; the million-dollar stage was constructed in a 40-hour process with the help of 200 local labourers. The sound system used over one million watts and weighed 30 short tons (27 t).