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"I don't think it's a big part of our music to be drunk, or out of it. We're out there enough as it is." -- Bono |
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"I don't think it's a big part of our music to be drunk, or out of it. We're out there enough as it is." -- Bono |
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U2 Pull Plug On Live 'Mega Gigs'
Sunday Times (London),
August 17, 1997
The rock band U2, famed for its ambitious stadium concerts, is to abandon large-scale live performances after its present tour ends.
Bono, the lead singer, says the "mega-gigs," as popularised by Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones, has reached the end of the road. The Irish foursome, who have sold over 50m albums over 17 years, will arive in Belfast on August 26 to play a concert, then play two gigs at Lansdowne Road in Dublin a week later. The group will complete their American tour in the autumn and will play about 100 shows in all. The tour, called PopMart, mocks and exceeds the escalating excess of the stadium rock shows of the past decade. With it's motto "we believe in kitsch" the show features the largest video screen in the world, a familiar looking "golden arch" and a giant olive spiked on a 100-foot cocktail stick. It takes 250 people using 75 lorries and a Boeing 727 plane to move the 500 tons of equipment between venues. Bono, speaking in Prague this weekend, said PopMart had already taken more money that the previous extravaganza Zoo TV, but U2 was tired of trying to top previous live achievements. He said: "I can't imagine us playing live again. I don't think we would be stupid enough to take this on again." "I think it is as big as a live show can go. It's a shame but I can't imagine how we could advance a live show beyond PopMart. We will not bring another show the same size on the road again. The way we would like to go now is to start making some extraordinary records instead." Bono said that to design PopMart the band became architects, film-makers and engineers to create a set which, on some nights, dwarfed the musicians in the way Hollywood effects can reduce an actor. He did not find the technology a comfort: "I'm still physically sick from nerves before going on stage." The band appear to have decided to stop touring only last week. Last month their manager, Paul McGuinness, said U2 were already thinking about their next tour: "We have just learnt how to do this and you do not quit just after you have cracked the formula." U2 started planning PopMart in 1995 before a wave of troubles hit their rivals. The Rolling Stones had to abandon the concluding dates on their last tour after falling out with promoters in the Far East while half the members of R.E.M. fell ill during their Monster tour two years ago. PopMart too has been far more difficult than previous U2 tours. Volkswagen sponsored an earlier tour, sharing some enormous bills but this time Microsoft, the favoured sponsors, declined to underwrite a similar share of the Ł600,000 a week running costs. The technology has created its own nightmares, including rain seeping into the 150-foot video wall that caused some concern in Raleigh, North Carolina, to be scrapped. "The technology for the screen came into being four months before the tour began. It was still being developed while we were getting the tour into shape. It was not until one month before the start that we got a call to say that the screen worked. I just thought, 'Do we really need to be doing this to ourselves?' " British journalists flown into Las Vegas to catch early shows described it as pretentious, confused and at up to Ł40 a ticket, overpriced. U2 conceded that the concert was under-rehearsed. Paul Wasserman, U2's publicist, admitted that ticket sales for 20% of the dates on the North American tour had been "less than overwhelming" with one venue in Denver offering 60,000 seats only to attract fewer than 27,000 people. Critics may say that Bono's suggestion that this will be the last big tour is either mid-tour blues or a calculated attempt to boost ticket sales. There is another economic worry for bands such as U2: sponsor-aided tours may pay for themselves, but they are no longer enough to fulfill the original aim of promoting an album. The Rolling Stones played to packed houses on their Voodoo Lounge tour, but the album failed to sell in sufficiently large numbers. Sales of Pop, the latest U2 offering, are lagging far behind previous hits such as The Joshua Tree. Bono remains unperturbed. "We got a kicking at Las Vegas, but anything new needs a bit of generosity to get it going and I'm hopeful we will get that at Wembley." Asked if there was a danger that U2 would end up like several toothless dinosaur bands, splitting up and then playing lucrative reunion tours, Bono said: "We'll go out in flames rather than do that." He also revealed the sometimes disturbing side effects he suffers on stage. "I used to have a recurring dream that I was Kenny Rogers singing 'Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town,' that I was standing there with the microphone with this baritone coming out, thinking 'This is fantastic! I have died and become Kenny Rogers.' It may have something to do with a fear of being smooth," he said. © Sunday Times, 1997. All rights reserved.
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