page_title: PopMart Tour
section_title: Set design
hierarchical_section_title: PopMart Tour / Set design
caption_attribution_description: English: U2 PopMart Tour, Botanic Gardens, Belfast, Northern Ireland, August 1997
context_page_description: The PopMart Tour was a worldwide concert tour by rock band U2. Launched in support of the group's 1997 album Pop, the tour's concerts were performed in stadiums and parks in 1997 and 1998. Much like the band's previous Zoo TV Tour, PopMart was elaborately staged. Its lavish stage design had a 165-foot-wide LED screen, a 100-foot-high golden arch, and a large mirror-ball lemon. As with the Zoo TV tour, the band delivered an image and performance that were ironic and self-mocking, deviating from its earnest performances of the 1980s; the band performed in costumes that, along with the PopMart stage design, poked fun at the themes of consumerism and pop culture.
  The PopMart Tour's five legs and 93 shows attracted about 3.9 million fans. The tour took U2 to South America, South Africa and Israel for the first time. The tour was booked while the band were still completing Pop, which was planned for release in the 1996 holiday season. However, the recording sessions went long, delaying the release until March 1997 and cutting into rehearsal time for the tour.
context_section_description: After producing the band's previous tour, Zoo TV, which featured a complex setup involving 36 different video screens,  Williams did not want to produce another video-based show unless it was going to be completely different from its predecessor. His initial proposals to U2 featured physical designs, including a center stage surrounded by a racetrack with circling trucks and motorbikes.  Fisher researched one of the first LED screens to be imported into the United States. (It was built for the State Fair of Texas in 1995).  Fisher proposed to make a much larger LED screen by spacing the pixels further apart, thus creating a lower resolution image. A prototype was built with LED pixels placed 75 mm (3 in) apart on a cargo net. It worked successfully and served as a basis for the proposal of the design. The idea for producing another video-based tour gained much interest when Fisher and Williams were determined to create the largest video screen in existence at that time.  When the idea for the screen was proposed to U2, they decided to take the risk of creating a show based on an undeveloped technological experiment, and invested US$7 million to develop the screen.
  Fisher proposed the idea of creating an LED screen on a flexible fabric sheet that could be draped over the stadium seats behind the stage. It was later decided that it would be easier to build the screen if it was hung in its own frame, so a sloped frame was added to the screen.  Several months were spent experimenting with and demonstrating the capabilities of LED video.  The screen designed for the show was ten times larger than all 36 Zoo TV screens put together, with a total size that ranged between 150–170 feet (46–52 metres) wide and 50–56 feet (15–17 metres) tall, approximately the same size as the backdrop used during the band's Lovetown Tour in 1989. The screen was created with the help of three separate companies, each of whom manufactured different components.  The screen contained 150,000 pixels, each of which contained eight separate LEDs of various colors. The pixels were manufactured by SACO Technologies, a Montreal-based company, which specialized in manufacturing control systems and panels for nuclear and hydrogen power stations. U2 were SACO's first client, and prior to the PopMart Tour, the company had no experience with video technology. Each of the pixels were mounted onto 4,500 separate aluminium tubes, which were then broken down into 187 foldable panels, spread across 22 columns, which would easily fit into two trucks.
  The set's public address (PA) system was initially designed by Fisher who proposed a monophonic system with speakers mounted on top of two large antler-like structures in front of the video screen. While discussing the structure to support the centralized PA system, Williams recalled a statement Bono made on the Zoo TV Tour about having a "secret fantasy to play a show underneath a set of gigantic golden arches". So the design was changed to feature a 100-foot (30-m) parabolic arch supporting the PA in the center of the stage. To further develop the concept, Fisher drew a version of the concert stage transformed into a supermarket, which later appeared in the Pop album artwork.
  While the set's overall design consisted of simply an arch in front of a sloped video screen, Williams wanted to incorporate a mirrorball into the set, which had previously been featured on both The Joshua Tree and Zoo TV Tours. Bono proposed that the mirrorball should be used as a vehicle in which the band would travel over the audience and onto the B-stage during the show, while making reference to the Parliament-Funkadelic spaceship.  Williams took Bono's idea seriously, and suggested that the mirrorball should be lemon-shaped, a reference to U2's song "Lemon" from their album Zooropa.  Fisher designed a 40-foot (12 m) motorized lemon mirrorball, which was placed on the right side of the stage.  The final additions to the set included a 12-foot-wide (3.8-m) olive mounted onto a 100-foot (30-m) cocktail stick.
caption: The mirrorball lemon that U2 emerged from for encores. The prop occasionally malfunctioned, trapping the band inside.
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