page_title: Vertigo Tour
section_title: Stage design
hierarchical_section_title: Vertigo Tour / Stage design
caption_attribution_description: English: U2 concert, stage and light design, Philadelphia, 22 May 2005. Taken by me.
context_page_description: The Vertigo Tour was a worldwide concert tour by the Irish rock band U2. Staged in support of the group's 2004 album How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, the tour visited arenas and stadiums from 2005 through 2006. The Vertigo Tour consisted of five legs that alternated between indoor arena shows in North America and outdoor stadium shows internationally. Much like the previous Elevation Tour, the indoor portion of the Vertigo Tour featured a stripped-down, intimate stage design. Protruding from the main stage was an ellipse-shaped catwalk that encapsulated a small number of fans.
  The tour grossed US$260 million in 110 sold-out concerts in 2005, making it the top-grossing tour of the year. In North America alone, the tour grossed $138.9 million from 1.4 million tickets sold. The Vertigo Tour won the 2005 Billboard Roadwork Touring Awards for Top Tour, Top Draw, and Top Single Event, and U2's management company Principle Management won for Top Manager. By the time it finished, the Vertigo Tour had sold 4,619,021 tickets from 131 shows, and became the second-highest-grossing concert tour with $389 million earned.
context_section_description: The Vertigo Tour's production was designed by architect Mark Fisher and stage and lighting designer Willie Williams. Key elements were an ellipse-shaped ramp on the floor connected to the stage, with some fans inside it and some outside it (similar to the heart-shaped ramp used on the previous Elevation Tour). The inside area of the ellipse came to be known as the "bomb shelter", in reference to the supporting album.
  In the North American shows, a set of seven retractable, see-through LED-based lighted bead curtains hung behind and to the side of the stage, showing abstract patterns, maps, moving figures, and occasionally text. The curtain design permitted concertgoers around the arena to have an excellent view of the curtains above the band and the images they displayed. The roll-drop LED screens were designed by Fisher using 360deg golf-ball pixels developed with Frederic Opsomer of Innovative Designs in Belgium. The spherical LED product joined the BARCO product line as the Mi-Sphere. The Vertigo Tour used 189 strings of these "MiSphere" LED balls suspended from custom truss, which allows the LED curtains to be rolled up. High above the center stage hung the MiSphere strings, each containing 64 spheres and totaling nine meters long. Dynamic, "moving" lights were also embedded in the stage and the B-stage ramp, as well. Four screens suspended above the stage showed close-ups of each member of the band, another element reused from the Elevation Tour.
  For the European, Latin American and Australian stadium shows, the bead curtains were replaced by an LED screen behind the band.  The screen was assembled from BARCO O-Lite modules.  The assembly of the screen was similar to the rigging used for the LED screen in the PopMart Tour. The ellipse was also replaced with two catwalks leading to two B-stages in the style of the 'Vertigo target'.
caption: The stage and LED curtain viewed from the rear at the Wachovia Center in Philadelphia on 22 May 2005.
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