POPMART tour U2 1997

Production Manager: Jake Kennedy
Show Director: Willie Williams
Architect: Mark Fisher
Lighting Design: Bruce Ramus
Video Direction: Willie Williams
Technical Director: Richard Hartman
Video screen Consultant: Frederic Opsomer
Engineering: Atelier One, MC McLaren PC
Steelwork: Stage Co
Scenery Construction: Tait Towers Inc, Brilliant Stages, Tomcat USA Inc

Mark Fisher writes:
Born to shop. Popmart was a satire on consumer culture created from a cornucopia of superlatives. The show featured the largest video screen in the world*. The tallest cocktail stick, impaling the biggest olive ever stuffed. The only self-propelled mirror ball lemon ever made. And the best animated pop-art - by Roy Liechtenstein and Keith Haring - ever seen. (*And still the largest video screen ever toured - Ed.)

In 1992 Mark Fisher and U2 show director Willie Williams created the U2’s ZooTV, stadium tour, a production that exploited video projection technology on a massive scale to present an entertaining critique of mass media driven society.  In 1996 they started work on the Popmart stage for U2.  The design eclipsed the hyperbole of ZooTV by presenting a parody of its excesses, based around the largest video screen that had ever been built in the world at the time (1996).

The major features of the Popmart stage were the video screen and stylised architectural elements that branded the composition as a satire on consumer culture. The giant video screen (150' x 50') employed the newly emerging LED technology. The first LED video screens, which were assembled from individual red, green and blue LEDs that were clustered into pixels approximately one inch in diameter, became commercially available in late1995.  For the U2 project, Fisher took the individual pixels and spaced them further apart on an open lattice grid.  The pixels were mounted three inches apart on hinged panels formed from rows of folded aluminum tubes. Each panel was approximately 8ft x 6ft; the panels were linked by self-locking hinges into chains that formed vertical strips of video screen 50ft tall.  The primary structure for the video screen was built from StageCo roof trusses and roof masts.  The standard components were assembled into a plane open framework with a header truss at the top from which the strips of video screen could be lifted.  The wall was stabilized by knee-braces that extended upstage behind the screen and provided support for a monopitch fabric roof, which covered the technical and maintenance areas.  The knee braces and the main masts of the stage were anchored to the ground by water tanks at their bases.  Each tank contained approximately 5 tonnes of water.

Each individual chain of video panels was lifted by a hoist from a header truss at the top of the screen, sliding into tracks formed from heavyweight aluminium extrusions normally used for wall cladding in StageCo stage roofs.  The tracks aligned the panels and connected them to the primary structure that braced them against wind loads.  The panels were stored horizontally on pallets that could be moved by forklift and rolled straight into a truck.  The chains of panels page-folded onto the pallets, alternately face-to-face and back-to-back.  This arrangement allowed the video screen elements to be assembled very quickly with a small number of people.  The whole screen was usually up and running about three hours after the first pallet was taken out of a truck.

The bright yellow Popmart arch was built around a load-bearing armature of roof masts, which also supported the central PA cluster. The plastic honeycomb composite panels were attached to the masts by custom-designed rollers mounted on their back faces.  The rollers ran on heavy-duty curtain tracks that were attached to the masts at ground level before they were erected by crane.  The rollers on the backs of the panels allowed the panels to be attached to the tracks at ground level and hoisted into place from above, avoiding most of the safety problems encountered in the Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge set. The cladding for the arch proceeded in parallel with the assembly of the video screen, taking less than three hours to complete.

(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
The PopMart Tour, often referred to as simply PopMart, took place from 1997 to 1998, in support of the group's 1997 album, Pop.

History
U2's ninth studio album, Pop was recorded in 1996, in Dublin, Ireland, and Miami, Florida. Planning for the tour started with set designer, and long-time U2 friend, Willie Williams. As their previous tour, Zoo TV, was a satire of television and media, Williams decided the band's next tour would be a satire of consumerism.  The tour was named "PopMart" similar to the title of a retail store, and featured a shopping cart revolving around a lemon as its logo, in reference to the band's song "Lemon," from their previous album, Zooropa.
Going along with the tour's satirical theme of consumerism, the band announced their tour in February 1997 by holding a press conference at a Kmart store in New York City, which was broadcast live on various radio and television stations across the world.  The band performed "Holy Joe" at the press conference, hoping the song would be on the album; however, the song was only released as a bonus track on Japanese versions of Pop and as a B-side on the "Discothèque" single, and was never played on the PopMart Tour or during any other future live performance. 
Although the album was not finished at the time, manager Paul McGuinness was told by the band to book the shows for their upcoming PopMart Tour during the middle of the recording sessions. As it came closer to the start of the tour, the band ran out of time and rushed the album to completion. Some song verses were written and recorded as late as the final day in the studio, as the band had no choice but to release their record before the beginning of the tour. Bono later admitted that allowing McGuinness to book the tour before the album was completed was the worst decision the band had ever made, as it forced them to finish the recording sessions much earlier than they wanted.  Despite the fact that the band felt they still needed at least two or three more months to finish working on the album, Pop was released in early March 1997, and the PopMart Tour began in late April, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The stage set
The set was designed by frequent U2 collaborator Willie Williams, and entertainment architect Mark Fisher, who together had also designed their previous tour, Zoo TV. Williams worked with Fisher to develop several concepts for the PopMart stage. An early concept was to "take the show to the audience" by featuring LED video screens mounted on trucks, which would drive around the stadium and up onto the stage. The idea of the trucks was abandoned after Fisher introduced the concept of creating a very large, low resolution LED screen by deconstructing a conventional LED screen. Williams and Fisher decided to feature one giant 15 x 50 meter (50 x 165 foot) LED video screen behind the stage. It contained over 100,000 pixels, each holding eight LEDs. The video screen was the largest in the world at the time. In addition to the video screen, Fisher and Williams' final design of the stage featured several "pop-architecture motifs" to fit the show's theme. The center of the stage featured a 100-foot tall golden parabolic arch, suggestive of the McDonald's Golden Arch logo, and a central orange-colored PA system in the middle of the arch. The right side of the stage held a huge martini olive spiked high on a towering 30-meter (100-foot) toothpick, and an 11-meter-tall (35-foot) mirrorball lemon. Bono joked with David Letterman on the Late Show, saying, "It could have been an artichoke, but we wanted a more practical fruit." A B stage was constructed towards the right end of the stage, which extended into the audience where the band would perform several songs throughout the show.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PopMart_Tour