Mexico City pre-show – Meetings, meetings. Preparations followed by a David Lynch style karaoke.
Mexico City. Slept late, then got up and headed in to see the venue. I’d seen photographs, so I had the general idea, but you never really know till you see it in the flesh. Its not ideal, but it’ll be OK. The place is extremely wide, and the stage is set back a long way from the grandstands, which makes for a lot of open space, which might look weird or just be a black hole on TV. Many meetings ensued, of course, and ended up having dinner in the crew hotel, before a nightcap in the hotel bar where there was an Mexican entertainment group, on a stage surrounded by illuminated reindeer, singing a Karaoke version of The Sound of Music, all done without a trace of irony. If you saw that in a David Lynch movie you’d say it was too far fetched...
30.11.1997 Mexico City pre-show – More meetings.
Mexico City pre-show – More meetings. More cameras, more lighting for more atmosphere.
Mexico City. Much of the day I spent with Allen Branton and Bruce Ramus, in further on-site discussions about how best to handle lighting the TV broadcast. Its an interesting process, in that the goals are somewhat different from doing a straight live show. When you watch a live show in a stadium, you can take in the whole show and feel what the event is about. When your only access point to the show is watching it on TV, its a different matter. Unless you make a point of showing the TV audience what’s going on and give them context, they’ll have no idea of what the big picture is - the show could be coming from anywhere. To achieve this goal we are adding about a dozen more cameras and a lot more lighting. Again, in a stadium if the staging or the building isn’t lit specifically, you still have a sense that its there - you can feel it. On TV if something doesn’t have a light pointed at it, you can’t see it. Much of the lighting is to make the audience visible to the TV cameras, so U2 appear to be playing to a heaving sold out stadium crowd, rather than in somebody’s basement. It takes a lot of effort and experience to make it work, but almost all of this team has worked together before on numerous occasions, so there’s a common direction and spirit to what we’re attempting. So far so good.
01.12.1997 Mexico City pre-show – Covering every angle.
Mexico City pre-show – Covering every angle. In Mexico City you need to watch the pollution levels. Oxygen can help. A long day wrestles the TV show logistics into submission, despite becoming locked in the stadium.
December already. Advent and all. Down here in Mexico City the rather lo-tech but utterly charming Christmas decorations are going up at a pace. On the way to the gig today I drove past a huge market packed with people, buying up fir trees, tinsel and assorted electric flashing objects. This is such a huge city. At 24 million inhabitants I think that makes it the most densely populated spot on the earth’s crust - it certainly feels like it. The pollution here is quite literally breath-taking, which combined with the extremely high altitude makes a man realise how much he takes oxygen for granted much of the time. In our hotel there’s a charming note which says \"we recommend you stay indoors when the pollution index level is too high. Please contact the concierge for todays pollution index reading.\" Amongst the street billboards advertising local and international products, there are ones advertising oxygen. A stylishly dressed model with flowing hair and that post-produced flawless dental smile has a demeanor of rapturous joy as she holds up her \"industrial chic\" plastic oxygen mask, connected to a rather scientific looking green cylinder. William Gibson where are you?
It was a long day at the gig. The band came in to sound check both for the live sound and the recorded sound going to the broadcast truck. They then rehearsed for a couple of hours to allow us to view all the new camera positions and re-light them accordingly. Our only major problem was that our colossal video screen proved to be way too bright for the new cameras. With a regular screen \"turning down the brightness\" would be simple enough, but this being the first of its kind it was a little tricky. By midnight most of the crew had left, leaving the lighting and video teams to work through the night, looking at the show cue by cue, re-lighting, balancing, changing, adapting, re-adapting. Its a slow process (though still done at lightning speed compared to shooting a movie) but fortunately we really have the \"A\" team here. All too often in these situations, when a tour has been up and running all year the arrival of the \"film crew\" can seem like an invasion. Making a show look good on TV is an entirely different discipline to making it great for the stadium viewer, so some compromises to the existing show are inevitable. Fortunately all the players involved here have been around the block so many times now that we all understand the common goal.
Myself and Allen were in the truck looking at sixteen video monitors - one for each of the TV cameras, whilst Bruce and the lighting team and Monica and the video screen team were out in the field making it happen. It was exciting to see the show from all of these new angles. At 5.30am we called it a night and sleep-walked onto our Mexican shuttle bus to take us back to the hotel. Our driver was an enthusiastic non-English speaking chap who got very excited when we reached the stadium gates and found them chained up, with the night watchman long gone. (\"...and then depression set in...\") Fortunately no major tour ever travels without a sturdy pair of oversized industrial bolt-cutters, so we were soon on our way home...
03.12.1997 Mexico City show – Looking good on TV.
Mexico City show – Looking good on TV. The show was great so was the shoot, phew!
Mexico City. Two nights at the Autodromo, the second of which (tonight) went out on live television to most of the planet. Mercifully, we won. The show was great and the shoot was great too. This stage production looks like it was made for television - I think its because despite being huge it is a very simple design - just an arch and a line, really. All were pleased and in which is now becoming a tradition, we all jammed into the band’s dressing room to watch the tape playback. We cheered at our favourite moments and pointed fingers and laughed at each other’s greatest mistakes of the night. Back to the crew hotel we watch the sun rise through the viscous pollution which hangs over Mexico City. So there it is, its printed, PopMart is on video tape and just two shows to go before our Christmas holidays. Any excuse for a party.
04.12.1997 Mexico City/San Francisco – Sleepwalking back home.
Mexico City/San Francisco – Sleepwalking back home.
Went to bed at 9.30am, so the lobby call to meet Joe and go to the airport was more painful than I care to recall. We are both bound for San Francisco for the few days off we have whilst the tour equipment trundles the thousands of miles from Mexico City to Vancouver. I’ll sleep for most of them I think...
09.12.1997 Vancouver show – Bruce’s big day.
Vancouver show – Bruce’s big day. Bruce Ramus is given an affectionate hard time in front of his home town audience.
Vancouver gig. Penultimate gig of the year, and end of term fever sets in. Its also the home town of our lighting director Bruce Ramus, and the local TV were viewing this as a media event. He was interviewed at the mix position in the afternoon, so we took the opportunity to torture him mercilessly, making him laugh, showing pornography on the giant screen behind him, etc, etc. Bono did give him a ‘thank you’ during the show though, which was nice.
11.12.1997 Seattle pre-show – PopMart Crew Awards.
Seattle pre-show – PopMart Crew Awards. A hearty drinking night of hilarity as end of year awards are handed out.
Seattle load-in day, after which we held a \"Rigger’s Arms\" party, in order to host the 1997 PopMart Crew Awards ceremony. It is something of a tradition on long rock tours to honour those amongst us for their triumphs, failures, lapses of good judgment and lapses of consciousness. We held the event in a local pool hall, which turned out to be a great idea. After an hour or two’s socialising (i.e. heavy drinking) we had reached a suitable frame of mind for the event. A couple of weeks ago, ballot forms with nominations were issued to all tour personnel, outlining all the award categories and requesting nominations and votes. The results were announced and presented with trophies made by Monica Caston our video director. Sam O’Sullivan, Larry’s drum-tech arrived with a snare and cymbal so with Pete the Greek on CD samples they made up the orchestra. Oh how we laughed. Opening envelopes, nominations, ‘and the winner is...’ for \"Excess Baggage of the Year\" (wardrobe dept.), \"Rookie of the Year\" (Mona from the catering dept.), \"Fashion Statement of the Year (sound tech, Jo Ravitch in a Heidi wig), \"Party Animal of the Year\" (a backline and wardrobe departments tie) and climaxing with the highly coveted \"Biggest Fuck Up of the Year\" (the Lemon not opening in Oslo).
12.12.1997 Seattle show – Bono goes bald.
Seattle show – Bono goes bald. Christmas show, Bono reveals his cranium on a night of merry japes.
The last day of school - show day in Seattle. On arrival at the gig, I noticed that the steel crew had erected a twelve foot tall Christmas tree - 100 feet up in the air on top of the Arch, complete with flashing lights. Very slick. The show was a party of course. For reasons which never quite became apparent, Bono shaved his head, so when he pulled his hood off during the middle of \"MoFo\" there was an audible gasp from the audience. And from the crew for that matter. Pranks were running high. Bono’s muscleman character for \"Real Thing\" was joined by an extra half dozen bald and muscled Bono clones, and his cheek to cheek dance partner in \"Velvet Dress\" turned out to be Pete the Greek in a wig and lingerie. As Bono said, \"that’s the thing about road crews... you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them.\" Well, we’ll all be living without each other for the next six weeks, as we break for Christmas, and dispense with 1997. And what a year that was...
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