PopMart Tour
| Tour by U2 | |
| File:Edgepop.jpg | |
| Legs | 4 |
|---|---|
| No. of shows | 95 |
The Popmart Tour was a concert tour by the Irish rock band U2, which took place from 1997 to 1998, in support of the group's album Pop. Popmart was a parody of consumerism; the band kicked off the tour by holding a press conference at a Kmart store.
The show was designed by frequent U2 collaborator Willie Williams, who had also designed their previous tour, Zoo TV. The stage included a 100-foot tall golden parabolic arch suggestive of the McDonald's logo, and a 150 x 50-foot LED video screen, the largest in the world at the time. [1], and a 40-foot-tall mirrorball lemon. Drummer Larry Mullen Jr. joked that "it could have been an artichoke, but we wanted a more practical fruit." [2]
The performances began in the same style as a boxing match, with the band (heavily guarded with suited men) walking through the crowd towards the end of the b-stage while the "Popmart mix" of M's "Pop Muzik" was played. The show proper usually opened with "MOFO". As the group played, the audience would be bombarded with images and colours, all designed towards the show's ironic embrace of tackiness and pop-ular culture. The band would walk out from inside the giant lemon during the shows' encore (although it failed to open three times, in Oslo, Sydney and Tokyo).
Although the extravagance of the tour was visually and technically impressive, the early dates of Popmart were, on occasion, marred by less-than-par performances. The band had booked the tour before the album was finished, and with a planned November 1996 release pushed back until March 1997 to finish the album, valuable tour rehearsal time was lost. This lack of preparation manifest itself in the show's, poorly received opening night in Las Vegas (the band messed their timing on the song "Staring at the Sun", stopped playing partway through, and then started over), contributing to the backlash against both the album and the tour. Nonetheless, the quality of the band's performances had improved greatly by the second leg in Europe (evidenced by the PopHeart EP, which features three songs from the first European show in Rotterdam). The appearance at the Belfast Botanic Gardens was U2's first show in Belfast in over ten years.
Despite its cleverness and some positive critical response, many fans felt alienated by the shows; new material from the Pop album didn't go down as well as U2 might have hoped, and too many people just didn't seem to get the joke. U2 had dressed as The Village People in the "Discothèque" video, and their willingness to mock their serious image continued during Popmart. They wore cowboy outfits on stage, and performances regularly featured a karaoke slot, in which The Edge would sing The Monkees' "Daydream Believer" or similar song against a cheap karaoke CD, complete with lyrics shown on the giant screen.
Like Zoo TV, Popmart was another huge success in terms of revenue, although it was not profitable for the band. Despite taking $80 million in revenue, the show cost $100 million to run. Drummer Mullen Jr. said that the only thing that saved the band from financial ruin was T-shirt sales.
Among the tour's highlights was a heavily emotional (and heavily bootlegged) show in Sarajevo where they were the first major band to perform after the war. They promised to play into the city following the controversial Satellite link-ups in the Zoo TV Tour during wartime. They were arranged by aid worker Bill Carter and ordinary people were interviewed about their experiences of the War. 50,000 people attended and effort was made to make sure all the ethnic groups were present. There was no major incident. One news story said: "For two magical hours, the rock band U2 achieved what warriors, politicians and diplomats could not: They united Bosnia." Trains were running for the first time to enable people to see the concert and they again stopped after the concert. According to Mullen Jr., "there's no doubt that that is an experience I will never forget for the rest of my life. And if I had to spend 20 years in the band just to play that show, and have done that, I think it would have been worthwhile." [3]
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