Wheel of Fortune

“Overnight, 94 trucks were to go in and out, one every three and a half minutes. Why should we suffer because their schedule is too tight?” resident Barbara Ward said sharply, conscious more was to come straight afterwards, ahead of the All Ireland football quarter finals.

While the protesters were targeting Dublin City Council and stadium owner the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), their actions meant trucks containing the U2 tour’s only PA and screen system missed their scheduled ferry crossing, putting them against the Gothenburg clock.

“It got to a point where the only thing to do was go back to the hotel and come back in the morning, when level heads prevailed,” Berry told Access, afternoon of show one, Gothenburg. “We had a meeting [with the GAA] in November. I was fairly blunt. I said, ‘Before we start, here’s a picture of our stage. We’re going to drive in four 150 tonne cranes, and we’re going to [ruin] your grass. Do you want the show or not?’ I can have sympathy with the residents, but none of us could understand why we had permission to do it from the council, then it was ‘No you can’t’.

“The knock on effect was the last of the trucks got here 14 or 15 hours late. But you cannot miss a show. You cannot fall behind. You have to find a way. We have a fantastic crew, everybody chips in. We triple drove the video trucks, and we waited for PA and a bit of staging. The last things arrived with the band gear.

“If you ever went back, you’d make sure the venue didn’t book stupid football games too close to the show. We wouldn’t schedule too tightly, so it would end, and we could walk away, keep the residents happy, and come back 8:00am and load out. You don’t want to piss people off when you go to a neighbourhood. You have to think, ‘How would I like it if my house was next to that?’”

“Thank you for helping us build this dream,” Bono told all who could hear, with particular poignancy, early in the set on both nights in Gothenburg.

On the road

Brand U2 is colossal. Sales of the new album might be a little less than spectacular, but it’s live that the band has won its critical mass. From Red Rocks, Colorado in 1983, which served to cast the spell across the pond, through arenas and stadiums ever after.

Like the Rolling Stones, their touring productions get more and more spectacular. And the two bands have several other components in common. Suppliers like Stageco, Clair Brothers, and PRG, along with flesh and blood, Willie Williams, Mark Fisher, Berry and more besides. Together they have designed, built and developed the three 64m by 30m Space Stations, or Claws, leapfrogging the tour map.

Design

The original idea for 360° came at the end of the Vertigo tour in 2006.

“I remember sitting in the venue in Hawaii, I think it was Bono who came up and said, ‘Can we play in the round?’ I said, ‘You can do anything you like’,” Berry smiled. “Willie had been playing around with the concept, so it emanated from him, with a lot of help from Mark. If you put a small stage in a stadium like Wembley, Stade de France, Nou Camp in Barcelona or San Siro in Milan, it kind of looks like a postage stamp. So the thought was, if we make this a large production, we will make the stadium look smaller.” From Williams’ sketches, via Stufish, the design team hooked up with Stageco in May 2008, and from there, the concept had legs.

“To my mind, it’s [Stageco] the only company with balls enough to take this on. It’s an amazing feat of engineering, and you take your hat off to somebody prepared to put themselves out on a limb, to go where nobody’s ever been before.”

Jake Berry said of Stageco

Probably the largest stage in any field of entertainment, the central grid is 28m high, with four legs spread the width of the Ullevi’s playing surface. The steel structure weighs 220 tonnes, and it supports 170 tonnes of screens, audio and lighting. And, to that end, Stageco’s designs worked from the top down rather than the traditional bottom up.

“Certainly, this is the biggest achievement for us, so far at least, but anything can be done with the right combination of ideas, technology and money,” Stageco’s project manager, Dirk De Decker, told this magazine. “It was a challenge, but never impossible. We put a good team together early in the project, and we started the fabrication in January. Technical rehearsals were in Belgium in May, and the band got on the stage about two weeks before the first date. You’re building while you’re still designing.”

The company has 20 people committed to each stage, and the build is getting quicker in hours, although it’s always going to need the best part of a week.

“The system is so complicated, you can never get it below the critical time,” De Decker explained. “It will never be fast enough to have an influence on the schedule.”

High rise

Three 60 tonne cranes lift the central octagon, which carries the lighting, sound and screens, suspending it on a standard truss. Lifting portals either side of each leg help to get the platform to height, and additional segments of the legs are added as it goes up. In place and secured, the supports are removed and dismantled.

A 52 tonne screen, 888 moveable hexagonal sections, like flexible chainmail, supporting 500,000 Barco LED panels, XL Video’s biggest single investment, hangs in the middle. It’s capable of growing from a 7m ‘belt’, or cummerbund, to a conical shape more than 22m wide as the show requires.

Again conceived by Williams and Fisher, New York’s Hoberman Associates together with Innovative Designs engineered the screen, which provides similarly sublime sightlines from all corners. While fans are want to get as close to the band as they can, the show actually grows bigger further back. “That’s the concept,” Berry nodded. “If you can make it look better when you’re further away, that’s pure art isn’t it?”

Automation specialist Kinesys designed and supplied the bespoke motion control system that moves and shapes the screen, working with Nick Evans, technical coordinator for promoter Live Nation, and Jeremy Lloyd of Stufish. It consists of 40 Evo zero-speed chain hoists and eight custom built winches, driven by a K2 3D software control package. The hoists are connected to the screen structure at equal intervals and at four different heights following pre-defined paths.

Hoberman supplied the movement profiles in the form of a spreadsheet, fed directly into K2 and referenced by each of the chain hoists. Accurate tracking of the profiles is essential to maintain the structural integrity
of the screen, and complex algorithms were employed within K2 to ensure that reality always mirrors theory. Combined, it makes for one of several USPs.

“We are the equivalent of two stadium shows touring at the same time,” Berry said. “I wouldn’t like to be the production manager on a tour that goes up another notch, but we’re on a roll now. Just give us power, labour and food and we’re laughing.”

At the end of the European leg, U2’s 360° hits America, then there’s talk of a fourth stage next year and more European and US dates, ahead of a possible turn in South America and places else. It’s a genuine spectacular, and with 10,000 budget tickets per show, and no finish on the horizon, it’s one for all.