Zoo TV Tour
| Tour by U2 | |
 | |
| Legs | 5 |
|---|---|
| No. of shows | 157 |
Zoo TV was a massive, elaborate, innovative, postmodern, multifaceted and multimedia, and very commercially successful world concert tour by the rock band U2 that took place in arenas and stadiums during 1992 and 1993. Different phases of the tour were also known as Zoo TV – The Outside Broadcast, Zooropa, and Zoomerang.
If U2's 1991 album Achtung Baby was, as lead singer Bono said, the sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree, then Zoo TV, the accompanying tour, was the sight of four men trying to reject the white-flag-waving, achingly earnest stage performances that had typified their previous tours in the 1980s. The tour demonstrated immense confidence in the new album, typically opening with six to eight consecutive new songs before playing any old material, surrounding the songs with bewildering visual effects and a subversive take on the band's collective persona.
The tour began in Lakeland, Florida on February 29, 1992 and ended almost two years, five legs, 157 shows, and over four million audience members later in Tokyo, Japan on December 10, 1993. It was the highest-grossing tour of 1992.
The Stage
The stage was designed by frequent U2 collaborator Peter 'Willie' Williams, and featured 36 video monitors, numerous television cameras, two separate mix positions, 26 on stage microphones, 176 speakers, and 11 elaborately painted Trabants, several of which were suspended over the stage, which all required 1 million watts of power to operate: enough to run 2,000 homes.
In order to take this technological monstrosity on tour, 52 semi-trailers were required to transport the 1,200 tons of equipment and 3 miles of cabling, and 200 labourers, 12 forklifts and one 120-foot, 40-ton crane was needed to contruct the stage once it all arrived at the venue.
The Show
The tour, partly inspired by CNN's ad nauseam coverage of the Gulf War, was on one level a straight-faced satire on the media overload that came to define the Nineties. The tour's television screens displayed an eclectic mixture of seemingly random images and slogans created by artists such as Kevin Godley, Brian Eno, Mark Pellington, Carol Dodds, and multimedia performance artists Emergency Broadcast Network in an effort to reflect the desensitising effect of the modern mass media.
The shows began with a memorable fixed sequence of songs. In an interview on the Zoo Radio program, The Edge described the visual material that went with the first three of them:
- "Zoo Station" is four minutes of a television that's not tuned in to any station, but giving you interference and shash and almost a TV picture. "The Fly" is information meltdown – text, sayings, truisms, untruisms, oxymorons, soothsayings, etc., all blasted at high speed, just fast enough so it's impossible to actually read what's being said. "Even Better than the Real Thing" is whatever happens to be flying around the stratosphere on that night. Satellite TV pictures, the weather, shopping channel, cubic zirconium diamond rings, religious channels, soap operas ...
From there, "Mysterious Ways" featured a live belly dancer. "One" was accompanied by the title word shown in many languages, as well as Mark Pellington-directed video clips of buffalos leading to a still image of David Wojnarowicz's "Falling Buffalo" photograph. A song that – like the tour – had many levels of meaning, it was during these shows that "One" rose to the level of one of U2's most beloved. Next Bono unleashed a series of egotistical rock star poses in "Until the End of the World". Another blast of video montage led into "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World", during which Bono would do a champagne spray and his traditional dance with a young female fan pulled from the crowd, except that they captured each other with a live consumer camcorder video feed shown to the audience, a device that had been used on earlier numbers as well.
Zoo TV was one of the first large-scale concerts to feature the "B stage", a smaller stage in the middle of the floor, intended "to be the antidote to Zoo TV." Here the four members would play quieter numbers such as a stripped-down arrangement of "Angel of Harlem". After that it was back to the main stage for some U2 classics played straight, but by the time the encores began, Bono's alter-egos were back in full force.
Thus Zoo TV saw U2 mocking the excesses of rock and roll by ironically embracing greed and decadence - even at times, away from the stage. However some missed the point of the tour and thought that U2 had "lost it", and that Bono had become an egomaniac.
However irony took a backseat on the Zooropa European leg of the tour after the band began initiating nightly live link-ups with people living in war-torn Sarajevo. Inspired by filmmaker Bill Carter's documentary "Miss Sarajevo", they hoped to bring world attention to the suffering of the people living in the war zone that the world media had forgotton about. Aside from bringing much needed attention to the issue, the remarkable link-ups sometimes even allowed people who had escaped the conflict to speak with family members and loved ones within the war zone. The problem was that Zoo TV was a rock show, and being accused of inaction and apathy by people in constant fear of death by shelling or machine gun fire often deadened the mood of the audience, and the band.
Other Highlights
Other highlights of the tour included a nightly duet by Bono and a pseudo-live but pre-recorded video of Lou Reed singing his classic song "Satellite of Love" (with a real appearance from Reed on August 12, 1992 at Giants Stadium), and an almost nightly phone call to the office of American president George H.W. Bush. Though Bono never got through to the president, Bush did acknowledge the calls during a press conference, noting his confusion about why the singer was doggedly attempting to contact him.
When Zoo TV played to London's Wembley Stadium on August 11, 1993, the novelist Salman Rushdie joined the band on stage. The surprise appearance was sensational in view of the author's well-publicised fear of violence from Islamic extremists, due to the controversy raging over his novel The Satanic Verses. When confronted by Bono's MacPhisto character, the author wryly observed that "real devils don't wear horns."
The tour also had a Confessional Booth were concert-goers could record a personal confession on camera. These confessions were often incorporated into the show, being displayed on the main television screens in the intervals between main show and encore.
Before the show began and between opening acts, Irish disk jockey BP Fallon acted as emcee, generally trying to add further confusion to the mix. Fallon would also host Zoo Radio, a distributed radio special that showcased selected performances from Zoo TV, audio oddities, and half-serious interviews with U2 members as well as with sometime opening acts Public Enemy and The Disposable Heroes of Hiphopracy.
Bono's Personas
One of the other main highlights of the tour was Bono's array of on-stage personas, the most prominent of which was The Fly, who was also immortalised in the music video for the song "The Fly". The Fly was a stereotypical rock star with wrap-around shades - for which Bono became famous - and exaggerated, blatantly sexual mannerisms. The character was invented in Berlin while U2 were recording Achtung Baby. Bono felt that the shades, given to him by an associate of the band, gave him a sense of de-individuation, and he could really "let loose" when he wore them. The shades came to symbolize the "new U2", a diametrically opposed aesthetic to what fans and critics came to love (and hate) about the previously pious, rootsy U2 from The Joshua Tree-era. The Fly has also been interpreted as Bono giving a middle finger to all the critics who said U2 were filthy rich rock stars trying to pass themselves off as do-gooders. He stated in interviews, "They [critics] wanted it, and now they're going to get it."
Another prominent persona was The Mirror Ball Man, who typically came out for the last few songs of the main set and the encores. This character was intended to be a parody of American televangelists. Thinking other parts of the world wouldn't understand the televangelist personal, Bono traded in his Mirror Ball Man persona for Mr. MacPhisto on Zooropa and Zoomerang legs of the tour which visited Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.
MacPhisto was imagined by Bono to be a corrupted future version of the Fly character who had become an amalgam of The Devil (heavily drawing from the Pegleg character in Tom Waits' "The Black Rider") and Las Vegas-era Elvis Presley. (This character would subsequently figure prominently in the 1995 music video for "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me" lifted from the soundtrack of the movie Batman Forever. The video featured an animated version of Bono as a rock star battling between two personas: the Fly and MacPhisto, which was intended to parallel the conflict between Bruce Wayne's ordinary playboy persona and his crime-fighting Batman persona.)
Zooropa the album
U2 went back into the studio to record their next release during a break at the end of the third leg of the tour. The album was intended as an additional EP to Achtung Baby, but soon Zooropa expanded into a full-fledged LP and was released in July 1993. Influenced greatly by both tour life and the ideas of media barrage and irony that they were examining through the tour, Zooropa was an even greater departure from the style of their earlier recordings, incorporating techno style and other electronic effects. A few selections from Zooropa were played on the subsequent Zooropa and Zoomerang legs of the tour.
Vertigo homage
More than a decade later, during the first two legs of U2's 2005 Vertigo Tour, the band often played (usually as the first encore) a mini-Zoo TV set of "Zoo Station", "The Fly", and "Mysterious Ways", using some of the original Zoo TV video effects set against the Vertigo Tour's curtains of lighted beads.
Tour Legs
Leg One
Dates: February 29, 1992 – April 23, 1992
Touring: North America
Venues: Indoor arenas
Leg Two
Dates: May 07, 1992 – June 19, 1992
Venues: Indoor arenas
Outside Broadcast Leg (3)
Dates: August 07, 1992 – November 25, 1992
Touring: North America and Mexico
Venues: Stadiums
Zooropa Leg (4)
Dates: May 07, 1993 – August 28, 1993
Venues: Stadiums
Zoomerang Leg (5)
Dates: November 12, 1993 – December 10, 1993
Touring: Australia, New Zealand and Japan
Venues: Stadiums