U2 360° Tour
The U2 360° Tour was a worldwide concert tour by the Irish rock band U2. Staged in support of the group's 2009 album No Line on the Horizon, the tour visited stadiums from 2009 through 2011. The concerts featured the band playing "in the round" on a circular stage, allowing the audience to surround them on all sides. To accommodate the stage configuration, a large four-legged structure nicknamed "The Claw" was built above the stage, with the sound system and a cylindrical, expanding video screen on top of it. At tall, it was the largest stage ever constructed. U2 claimed that the tour would be "the first time a band has toured in stadiums with such a unique and original structure."
In an era of declining music sales, analysts expected U2 360° to be a major source of income for the band. Every date of the tour sold out, many within minutes of tickets going on sale. To accommodate the time required to assemble and transport "The Claw" between tour dates, three separate stage structures were required on tour. The 360-degree production increased the capacity of venues by up to 25%, leading to attendance records at over 60 venues. Various themes were incorporated into the shows; portions of the concerts featured outer space themes, due to "The Claw's" resemblance to a spaceship. Pre-recorded messages from the International Space Station were displayed during the shows, as were sociopolitical statements from Desmond Tutu and Aung San Suu Kyi. The setlists were adjusted for each year of the tour; for the 2010 shows, unreleased songs were debuted live, while for 2011 legs, the group performed more 1990s songs to mark the 20th anniversary of the release of Achtung Baby.
Comprising three legs and 110 shows, the tour began on 30 June 2009 in Barcelona, Spain, and concluded on 30 July 2011 in Moncton, New Brunswick. It twice visited Europe and North America, while making stops in South America, Africa, and Oceania. The 2010 North American leg of the tour was postponed until the following year after lead vocalist Bono suffered a serious back injury. U2 won Billboard Touring Awards for Top Tour and Top Draw of 2010 and 2011, and for Top Boxscore at a single venue in 2009 for shows at Croke Park in Dublin. A 2009 show at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California was filmed for the concert video U2360° at the Rose Bowl and was streamed live over YouTube; the concert set a new US attendance record for a single headlining act. The tour was generally well received by critics and fans. By its conclusion, U2 360° had set records for the highest-grossing concert tour with $736 million in ticket sales and the highest-attended tour with over 7.3 million tickets sold; both records stood until 2019.
Conception and stage design
, who has worked on every U2 tour since the 1982–1983 War Tour, was again a designer for this tour; Mark Fisher served as the architect. Williams had been toying with ideas for 360-degree stadium staging for U2 for a number of years, and presented sketches of a four-legged design to the group near the end of their Vertigo Tour in 2006. The inspiration for the "spaceship-on-four-legs" design, nicknamed "the Claw", came from the landmark Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport. Early reports referred to it as the Kiss the Future Tour, though the name was later changed.The tour featured a 360-degree configuration, with the stage being placed closer to the center of the stadium's field than usual. The stage design featured a large four-legged steel structure that held the speaker system and cylindrical video screen and hovered above the performance area. The stage was surrounded by a circular ramp, which connected to the stage by rotating bridges. Fans with general admission tickets could be placed both outside the ramp as well as between the ramp and stage. The stage had no defined front or back and was surrounded by the audience. The stage design was able to increase the venues' capacities by about 15–20%. Tiered football stadiums were preferred venues in this scheme, compared to flat fields or baseball stadiums, although a few of the latter added to the routing. As with many large-scale tours of its era, the U2 360° Tour had both the workforce and the revenues associated with a medium-sized company.
The stages were built by the Belgian company Stageco along with the U.S.-based company Enerpac. Each stage deployed high-pressure, state-of-the-art hydraulic systems. These were used for the first time ever to assemble and dismantle the high-tonnage structure. Stageco designed a unique system, based on Enerpac's Synchronous Lift System, to raise the modular construction to a height of 30 metres in an efficient and effective manner.
The steel structure was 51 metres tall, was able to hold up to 200 tonnes underneath it, and required 120 trucks to transport each of the three sets constructed to support the tour. Each leg of the structure contained its own sound system. The cost of each structure was between £15 million and £20 million. As a result, the tour was heavily insured. The size of the stage led to some problems with its construction in certain venues. The band paid $2 million to raise the HD video screen in Cowboys Stadium for their concert in Arlington, and paid $3 million to expand the Hippodrome de Montréal into a temporary stadium for their concert in Montreal. The 360° tour crew consisted of 137 touring production crew supplemented by over 120 hired locally. Daily costs of the production were approximately $750,000, not including the stage construction; the majority of this came from truck rentals, transportation, and staff wages. The tour was not expected to break even until the conclusion of the second leg.
When the tour was announced, U2 guitarist The Edge said of the show's design: "It's hard to come up with something that's fundamentally different, but we have, I think, on this tour. Where we're taking our production will never have been seen before by anybody, and that's an amazing thing to be able to say. For a band like U2 that really thrives on breaking new ground, it's a real thrill." Lead singer Bono said the design was intended to overcome the staid traditional appearance of outdoor concerts where the stage was dominated by speaker stacks on either side: "We have some magic, and we've got some beautiful objects we're going to take around the world, and we're inside that object." He also said that the group's goal was for the show to not be too choreographed. Williams said the goal is to establish a physical proximity: "The band is just sitting in the palm of the audience's hand." At the conclusion of the tour, the intent was to leave the three structures in different parts of the globe and turn them into permanent concert venues. An auction of the stages was planned following the last concert. In April 2018, it was announced that the Loveland Living Planet Aquarium in Utah had reached a deal to permanently install one of the claw stages on its expanded campus; the structure was planned to be fully assembled by July 2019.
The transforming video screen was designed by Mark Fisher in a collaboration with Chuck Hoberman and Frederic Opsomer. The screen was fabricated by Opsomer's company Innovative Designs of Belgium, using LED pixels manufactured by Barco. The screen was purchased and rented to the tour by XL Video. It is made up of elongated hexagonal segments mounted on a multiple pantograph system, which enables it to "open up" or spread apart vertically as an effect during the concerts. The video screen is composed of over one million pieces: 411,000 pixels, 320,000 fasteners, 150,000 machined pieces, and 30,000 cables are needed to create the visual display at each concert. The screen is mounted on a cabled pulley system to enable the entire screen and pantograph system to move lower and closer to the band. The automation for the screen deployment was provided by Kinesys UK. The LED segments of the screen are weather-resistant.
U2 announced that it would purchase carbon offsets to take into consideration the environmental impact of the large production, which has been estimated to be up to 65,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide; approximately the same amount that would be emitted in flying a passenger plane 34 million miles. In addition to the carbon offsets, the band also set up a page on PickupPal so that people could carpool to concerts in an attempt to lower the carbon footprint. Additionally they launched a fan travel carbon offset program in partnership with Offset Options. Most of the carbon emissions are a result of transporting the three stage structures across Europe and North America. An environmental consultant to carbonfootprint.com noted that to offset the tour's 2009 emissions, the band would have to plant over 20,000 trees. In an interview with BBC Radio, The Edge reiterated that U2 were offsetting their carbon emissions, also stating, "We'd love to have some alternative to big trucks bringing the stuff around but there just isn't one."
Load-out of the massive set from venues took as much as days. Sound and light equipment was packed into the fleet of trucks first during the four hours following the concert; the remainder of the time was spent deconstructing the steel structures making up the stage using four cranes. The extensive amount of time it took to assemble and disassemble the stage interfered with the development of the schedule for the 2010 Major League Baseball season, due to U2 scheduling shows at four MLB stadiums: O.co Coliseum in Oakland, Angel Stadium in Anaheim, Rogers Centre in Toronto, and Busch Stadium in St. Louis. U2 was also forced to reschedule what would have been their final Giants Stadium concert, when the NFL changed the start time of a New York Jets game, and load-out time from the concert a day and a half prior would have been insufficient.
Commercial partnerships and philanthropy
The tour was U2's first under their 12-year deal with Live Nation. It was sponsored by BlackBerry, in a move that broke U2's prior relationship with Apple Inc. and opened possibilities for collaborations between U2 and Research in Motion on mobile music experiences. Lead singer Bono said of the new relationship, "I'm very excited about this. Research in Motion is going to give us what Apple wouldn't: access to their labs and their people so we can do something really spectacular." The explicit corporate sponsorship of a tour was a first for the group, and was due to the anticipated production costs being higher than for any previous U2 tour. The first commercials for a new BlackBerry application, called the "U2 Mobile App", began airing in early July 2009 against the song "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight"; the application allows the user to listen to the album No Line on the Horizon, contains a news section which features updates about the tour, and an interactive section that allows the sharing of images and enables the user to see their position during a concert relative to the band and other application users. Models of the stage were added to Google Earth approximately a week before the scheduled concert took place; tour architect Mark Fisher stated, "We thought it would be interesting to put up on Google Earth a piece of portable architecture."A category of stage-close seats called "The Red Zone" was created to be sold by an auction process, at prices estimated at up to €1,000. All proceeds are to be donated by U2 members to charity, with The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria expected to receive much of it. Approximately €9 million in U2 360° Tour profits is expected to go to charity. The band asked fans to bring masks of Aung San Suu Kyi to concerts and wear them during performances of "Walk On" in her support; the song was originally written for Suu Kyi.
The tour was subject to minor criticisms, at both the events surrounding the opening concerts in Barcelona, and the concerts in Dublin. When rehearsing for the tour in Barcelona, residents of the city complained about the band's noise after 10 pm, which was the time until which the city allowed the band to rehearse. The setup of the band's stage for the Croke Park concerts in Dublin was criticised by fans for only allowing seating around part of the circular-shaped stage, taking away from the 360° seating configuration that was used at other venues. One fan claimed that only 270° of seating around the stage was being utilised for the three Dublin concerts, and that there was no reason that the stage could not be placed in the middle of the venue. Additional criticisms about the Croke Park shows arose from about 80 Dublin citizens, who protested against the Dublin City Council for allowing the band's crew to dismantle the stage in the middle of the night following the three concerts, due to the loud noises caused by the crew. The protest blocked several crew trucks from exiting the venue, putting the tour behind schedule, and tour promoter MCD Productions delivered a letter to the protesters informing them that they could be sued for any of the tour's financial losses due to the protest. In addition to the loudness of the band's crew, the Dublin City Council decided to withhold the band's €80,000 bond, after breaking the 75 decibel maximum volume at all three of the Dublin concerts.
Like most concerts, tour venues have benefited from hosting concerts. North Carolina State University's agreement with Live Nation resulted in $166,000 in parking proceeds and $175,858 food and beverage concessions. Additionally Live Nation agreed to pay for replacing the sod on the football field where the stage and floor seating was located up to a cost of $250,000.