War Tour - Themes and Legacy

Themes and Legacy

The War Tour was the first U2 tour on which the lighting and stage design was done by Willie Williams, who would continue to perform that role in all of U2's subsequent tours. While originally hired for just lighting, Williams quickly became involved in all aspects of the group's visual presentation. Starting with the Pre-War Tour, the minimalist stage design featured a red carpet-covered riser on which the drums and keyboards stood. Three large white flags were placed at the back of the stage, representing the notion of "surrender"; electric fans set the flags flying at designated moments in the show. Stage fog was also used in places. One newspaper review said that "Lighting was starkly beautiful for this concert, in tune with the occasional ominous tone of some of the songs."

During "Sunday Bloody Sunday", Bono would march waving a white flag around to illustrate his anti-war and anti-nationalist stances and spur audiences to shout, "No more! No war!" The white flags were also sometimes handed off the stage, where they would be passed around amongst the audience. Bono said that his "limited voice" compelled him to search for other ways to express a song's meaning, and here this was the "idea of a flag drained of all colour, the idea of surrender." This became the focal image of the tour, with Rolling Stone saying of the Red Rocks performance, "The sight of Bono singing the anti-violence anthem 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' while waving a white flag through crimson mist (created by a combination of wet weather, hot lights and the illumination of those crags) became the defining image of U2's warrior-rock spirit." So strong was the image that the group became somewhat ambivalent about it; years later, bassist Adam Clayton would say, "If you had to reduce U2 down to the waving of the white flag, which is a moment from the War Tour, that would be the worst thing. At the time, I think it was in the spirit of the performance. But we weren't very ironic people back then. We were pretty serious people, and we didn't see that we could have been a little more subtle about things like that. But hey, as mistakes go, that's probably not a bad one."

The move upward from clubs to halls to arenas that the War Tour spanned did not faze the group. This had been their plan, and Bono said, "If we stay in small clubs, we'll develop small minds, and then we'll start making small music." And early on, Bono had told Williams that someday the group would do "Pink Floyd-size shows." But the medium-sized venues of the War Tour were enough at the time; two decades later, the band's Red Rocks performance captured on Live at Red Rocks: Under a Blood Red Sky was included on Rolling Stone's list of the "50 Moments that Changed the History of Rock and Roll".