/ / ZOOTV Tour / /

Start date February 29, 1992
End date December 10, 1993
Legs 5
Shows 157

The Zoo TV Tour was an elaborately-staged, multimedia concert tour by Irish rock band U2 that took place in arenas and stadiums over 1992 and 1993. It was a show that operated on many levels; designed to instill a feeling of "sensory overload" in its audience, it used the video age for much of its inspiration. In 2002, Q magazine called it "still the most spectacular rock tour staged by any band."

Different phases of the tour were also known as Zoo TV – The Outside Broadcast, Zooropa, and Zoomerang. The tour began in Lakeland, Florida on February 29, 1992 and ended in Tokyo, Japan on December 10, 1993. It comprised five legs, 157 shows, was seen by about 5.4 million people, and was the highest-grossing tour in North America of 1992.

If U2's 1991 album Achtung Baby was, as lead singer Bono said, "the sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree", then the Zoo TV Tour marked a shift from the band's previously achingly earnest stage performances that had typified their previous tours in the 1980s. Differing from all previous and subsequent U2 tours, the Zoo TV shows opened with six to eight consecutive new songs before playing any older material. The songs were complemented by a myriad of bewildering visual effects.

The tour was alternately spelled ZooTV, ZOO TV, and ZOOTV.

The stage

The Zoo TV Outside Broadcast stageThe stage was designed by frequent U2 collaborator Willie Williams, and featured vidi walls, 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 with spotlights inserted into headlights, which all required 1 million watts of power to operate: enough to run 2,000 homes.

A total of 52 trucks were required to transport the 1,200 tons of equipment, 3 miles of cabling, 200 labourers, 12 forklifts and one 40-ton crane, required to construct the stage.

The show
The tour, partly inspired by CNN's seemingly endless coverage of the Gulf War was, on one level, a straight-faced satire on the media overload that came to define the 1990s. The tour's television screens displayed a mixture of seemingly random images and slogans created by artists such as Kevin Godley, Brian Eno, Mark Pellington, Carol Dodds, Philip Owens, David Wojnarowicz, and multimedia performance artists Emergency Broadcast Network in an effort to reflect the desensitizing effect of the modern mass media.

The 1993 Zooropa and Zoomerang shows opened with a seven minute piece created by Emergency Broadcast Network, which wove looped images from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will with various war and news imagery sources. Following this, the stadium was darkened and moments later Bono appeared onstage, silhouetted against a giant screen of blue and white video noise. The show began with a 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 ... ”

Trabants from the Zoo TV Tour now adorn the lobby of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.The imagery used during "Zoo Station"'s performance was created by blending video noise with stop motion animation sequences of the band members 'filmed' on a photocopier. Some of "The Fly's" meltdown messages included 'Taste is the enemy of art', 'Religion is a club', 'Ignorance is bliss', 'Rebellion is packaged', 'Believe' with letters fading out to leave 'lie', and 'Everything you know is wrong'.

"Mysterious Ways" featured a belly dancer on-stage. "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. People found in the song, as they did with the tour, many levels of meaning; released as a single as the tour began,"One" quickly became one of U2's most popular songs. During "Until the End of the World", Bono unleashed a series of egotistical rock star poses with the chaotic visual approach, this time created from a rapid-fire jumble of numbers, many of which reflected topics close to the video artist's and band's heart,[citation needed] including production crew members' birthdays, the date of Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder, the date of release of U2's first 12-inch single release in Ireland, the date of 'Bloody Sunday'. More video montage led into "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World", during which Bono would continue his long practice of dancing with a young female fan pulled from the crowd, only now spraying themselves with champagne and captured each other with a consumer camcorder video feed shown live to the audience.

U2 had used backing tracks in live performance before (such as the synthesized backdrops to "Bad" and "Where the Streets Have No Name") but, with the need to synch live performance to the high-tech visuals of Zoo TV, almost the entire show was synched and sequenced, with most numbers featuring pre-recorded percussion, keyboard, or guitar elements underlying the U2 members' live instrumentals and vocals. This practice has continued on their subsequent tours.

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 acoustic arrangements of "Angel of Harlem" and "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)". After that it was back to the main stage for some U2 classics played straight, but when the encores began, Bono's alter-egos returned.

The concerts usually ended with Achtung Baby's gentler "Love is Blindness", although later in the tour, it was followed by a cover of Elvis Presley's "Can't Help Falling in Love".

According to VH1's Legends: "Zoo TV saw U2 mocking the excesses of rock and roll by ironically embracing greed and decadence. However, some missed the point of the tour and thought that U2 had 'lost it', and that Bono had become an egomaniac."

Other aspects
Between U2 and the support acts, eccentric Irish disk jockey BP Fallon acted as emcee, playing records and giving a running commentary while wearing a top hat and cape and seated inside a Trabant on the B-stage. He also hosted 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 Hiphoprisy. Eventually Fallon's off-stage antics got him thrown off the tour by Larry Mullen and Paul Oakenfold, who would go on to become one of the world's most prominent club DJs by the end of the 1990s, replaced him on the 1993 legs.

The tour also had a Confessional Booth where 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.

The shows included a nightly duet between Bono and a pre-recorded video of Lou Reed singing his 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.

The novelist Salman Rushdie joined the band on stage in London's Wembley Stadium on August 11, 1993 despite the author's well-publicized fear of violence from Islamic extremists, due to the controversy over his novel The Satanic Verses. When confronted by Bono's MacPhisto character, the author observed that "real devils don't wear horns."

A number of European shows featured nightly live link-ups with people living in war-torn Sarajevo. Arranged by aidworker Bill Carter, (who later with Bono's help made the documentary film Miss Sarajevo), it was intended to bring world attention to the suffering of the people living in the war zone. Carter saw an interview on MTV where Bono mentioned the theme of the Zooropa leg to be an unified Europe; he felt compelled to inform Bono of the plight of the Bosnians in Sarajevo at the time.[citation needed] The link-ups allowed people who had escaped the conflict to speak with family members and loved ones within the war zone, or to accuse the West of inaction and apathy. The link ups though, drew criticism[citation needed] as being inappropriate for a rock show. In 2002, Larry Mullen said: "I can't remember anything more excruciating than those Sarajevo link-ups. It was like throwing a bucket of cold water over everybody. You could see your audience going, 'What the fuck are these guys doing?' But I'm proud to have been a part of a group who were trying to do something."

Leg 1
Dates: February 29, 1992 – April 23, 1992
Location: North America
Venues: Indoor arenas
Shows: 32
Supporting act: Pixies

Leg 2
Dates: May 7, 1992 – June 19, 1992
Location: Europe and UK
Venues: Indoor arenas
Shows: 25

Leg 3 - Outside Broadcast
Dates: August 7, 1992 – November 25, 1992
Location: North America and Mexico
Venues: Stadiums
Shows: 47
Supporting acts: The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy and Primus; later Public Enemy and Big Audio Dynamite II; later Public Enemy and The Sugarcubes

Leg 4 - Zooropa
Dates: May 7, 1993 – August 28, 1993
Location: Europe, UK, Ireland
Venues: Stadiums
Shows: 44
Supporting acts: many, sometimes changed with every venue

Leg 5 - Zoomerang
Dates: November 12, 1993 – December 10, 1993
Location: Australia, New Zealand and Japan
Venues: Stadiums
Shows: 10
Supporting acts: Big Audio Dynamite II; also Kim Salmon and the Surrealists in Australia, Three D's in New Zealand