(November 1997)–Soon after this issue of TCI hits the newsstands, U2 and the visually provocative POPMART tour will once again be on display in North American stadiums. For any cave dwellers who may have missed the original media blitz, the tour kicked off in Las Vegas on April 25, and just finished wowing Europe with the world’s first and largest LED video screen (170′ x 56′), accessorized by outlandish props that include a 100′-tall swizzle stick carrying an internally illuminated giant olive with rope light rings and a 35′-tall fuel-powered lemon mirrorball. Yet even among such prodigious production elements, saying that the sound design serves as the linchpin of U2’s spectacular POPMART tour doesn’t come to close to fully describing audio’s obvious importance on any rock tour. This is the first stadium tour in which the traditional bookend speaker clusters have merged, forming one big, bright orange structure, and supported by a 100′ yellow arch. Dubbed “The Great Pumpkin” by the crew, it has become the centerpiece of a stage set that is resplendent with a variety of Day-Glo? colors backed up by a
gold-minted screen with “POPMART” painted in red across its entire length.
Understanding how such a departure from the standard left/right speaker format crystallized requires going back more than a year ago, when tour designer/director Willie Williams and set architect Mark Fisher were presenting visual ideas to the band. Williams had started the brainstorming process in the winter of 1995–long before the band had even started recording the POP album–and he enlisted Fisher to help conceptualize the stage set. “At the time, everyone was going around in circles because every time we showed the pop stars something, they would say, ‘This doesn’t look different enough. It all looks the same.’ Well, of course the reason all rock shows tend to look the same is that you have stereo PA–and the PA is necessarily big–so loudspeakers occupy about 30% of the front elevation of what you see,” Fisher explains. “You have to change the architecture of that if you’re going to make it look like it has a different form.”
Having affirmed with a British PA company that a single-cluster/monoaudio setup could possibly work in a stadium venue, Fisher sent Williams a sketch of the design. “Willie quite liked it, and we showed it to the band and they liked it,” Fisher says. “That’s basically how it came about.” So, in the name of art, the traditional bookend speaker setup was eschewed.
“Putting the PA in a central position was truly the great breakthrough, because we all wanted to do that, and Mark found a solution,” Williams adds. “He originally had the PA held up on these fantastically ornate corkscrew legs, and I reworked that into the arch. Then he spent forever getting the arch exactly right. Mark’s triumph, really, is the architecture of it.”
The triumph for actually making it sound good came courtesy of Joe O’Herlihy, the band’s veteran FOH sound engineer, and the band’s longtime audio supplier, Clair Brothers Audio. O’Herlihy had been Rory Gallagher’s sound engineer for six years as well as the owner of an audio company in Cork City, Ireland, when he met the neophyte band on September 25, 1978. “U2 was fifth on a five-band bill; XTC was the headliner,” O’Herlihy recalls, “and I’ve been with them ever since.” So, when U2 went into the studio in March 1996 to make the POP record, O’Herlihy went along with them. “The setup there was like it is onstage live,” he explains. “We use live onstage monitors in the infancy stage to create the sound structure. That’s where the learning curve begins for me, to know what they are expecting. Understanding the artist is very important for my job. Although it’s often difficult, it’s a crucial element in presenting the show. I’ve always had that feeling. It’s a bit more than just turning the thing on and saying, ‘Go.’”
In September 1996, the album was in the mixing stage, but its release was held up by a series of delays. “But by this time, the conceptual stage was already in the works,” O’Herlihy says. “For the tour, the band had decided to go a particular way based on various creative options, and because of the video screen’s nature and size, the audio would have to be new and different. A conventional audio stadium setup is to have a right and left stacked system, but we looked to the center cluster possibility and running the sound in mono so as not to block sightlines and adhere to the visual design. “Willie and I have worked together for years; we very much respect each other’s talents, and I completely accepted the challenge of putting this system together,” O’Herlihy continues. “It’s taken a lot of hard work, and it changes every day, but the system we have on this tour provides us with wonderful coverage. We had to completely depart from the tested left/right format and create a very adventurous new design. But as a result, the audio quality matches that of any previous tour we have done.”
O’Herlihy set the trim height for the central cluster at 45′ above the stage center, where it is also directly above the video screen’s high-density section. There are 60 Clair S4 P-type speakers (all painted Pantone Orange 21 by Clair Brothers) that make up the center cluster, which is divided into four full-range sections so the frequencies are split into low and high. There are also two columns of 12 S4s each positioned to left and right behind it at the edges of the video screen. The front perimeter of the stage houses 16 P4 cabinets for front fill and 40 sub bass speakers across. “On Zoo TV, we had an 80-degree gap between the staging and the 144 S4 speakers,” O’Herlihy says. “The sound was 45′ behind Bono and 18′ behind Larry and the drum riser, so the challenge there is nothing new. But here we’ve taken away the 72 S4s that would be in the conventional left and right setup, so the system has to incorporate a distributed, delayed, and fragmented format. Each position in the system has its own matrix feed, so we can turn it up or down depending on what is needed. We’ve time-aligned each delay tower; each one can be set independently, which is the most technical way of approaching it.
“Behind the mix position in the field we have our four 62′-tall delay towers, and on each are flown six S4s and four super high
intelligibility horns,” O’Herlihy continues. “There are also two sub bass speakers per tower. The positioning of the delays is crucial to the distribution of the audio, to ensure that they have the same time alignment. It’s like dropping a stone in a pond and watching the ripples fan out. So it’s very true that the best seats for this show, visually and audio-wise, are the nosebleeds in the back.”
For the point in the show when the band moves to the smaller B stage, there are 12 P4 speaker cabinets. “Out there, we want to create an atmosphere so those near the B stage can connect with the audio from where they are,” O’Herlihy explains. At the mix position, O’Herlihy and audio crew chief Jo Ravitch control the sound from two Midas XL4 consoles. “Before a tour starts, I go out and look at the latest technological advances, and this year I looked at the ATI Paragon and the Yamaha PM4000 consoles; but the Midas XL4 is a computer-assisted, not driven, console with moving fader control. That’s very important, because the audio will pass on through no matter what happens. Even if the computer locks up, I’ll have hands-on control, which is certainly nothing new for me. So this new console has had a major influence on the design.
“It’s helped us achieve the same kind of studio quality as the record, because we also have to consider the adrenaline of the band playing live and give the best possible return to the ingredients we had in the studio,” O’Herlihy explains. “We also need freedom to be creative with the live show, and this console accomplishes that. There is quite a bit of fader movement and effects going on throughout the whole show, and being able to preprogram much of that has been very helpful. For the support bands, there is a FOH package that includes a Yamaha PM3000 and a whole set of effects that goes with it.”
Audio effects are also driven from underneath the stage, where the massive monitor department, run by Clair Brothers’ Dave Skaff and Don Garber, resides. Skaff handles lead singer Bono’s and lead guitarist Edge’s mixes, while Garber concentrates on doing the same for drummer Larry Mullen and bassist Adam Clayton. These engineers have yet to see a live show; instead they watch the performances on video monitors, which are perched on four 52-channel Yamaha PM4000M consoles. “Four boards may seem like a lot, but with the amount of mixing required, including effects and the fact the we have to segregate the in-ear monitors from the floor wedges, we use up a lot of channels,” Skaff explains. “But we’re very structure-based here, so it’s actually a Spartan setup. The system is complex but it’s conventional in many ways as well. “We have in-ear monitors and wedges; that would be redundant for most bands, but each system here is twice the size of a normal tour’s monitor system,” Skaff continues. “We have two times as many inputs for each member. Plus, the ear monitors have stereo mixes.”
“Adam is strictly on the wedge system because it’s hard for him to get the feel he likes through ear monitors,” Garber adds. “We have to watch the radio frequencies as well, because the ear monitors are wireless. It’s very important, especially for a show this size, because the lead singer needs to hear the same thing as everyone else, with the same consistency. The problem with having the small stage is the speed of sound coming out there to Bono from the main stage, so they really need the ear monitors. We have signal boxes tell us which mic he is on. With a tour this large, you really need a good rapport with the band, because their attention is split so many ways. But if we do our job well, they’ll never know we’re here.”
Also invisible to the audience is keyboard programmer/technician and occasional player Des Broadbery, who has been with the band for 12 years. From the stage’s underbelly, he operates a sampler and keyboards. “A lot of what is on the album couldn’t be created live. I also play the lemon’s sound effects [during the show's encore] and the cartoon spaceship’s effects on the keyboard,” Broadbery explains. He also handles the show’s recorded material, including the opening song, “Pop Musik,” which plays as the band enters the stadium, and the song “Daydream Believer” during which the Edge leads the crowd in karaoke sing-along. For the latter, Broadbery sends a feed of the recording out to O’Herlihy at the mix position, while the sound engineer handles Edge’s vocals, which are live.
“The regular keyboards during the show are either done by the Edge or me, and then Larry has a click track that he listens to and gets his timing reference from,” Broadbery adds. “A lot of work went into the initial setup. Some songs are greatly flexible live, but some are not, so I made a program to chop between songs or different sections of songs so they’re not tied to strict structures. Everything has worked out really well.”
Broadbery’s nearest neighbor is Dallas Schoo, who maintains the Edge’s 32 guitars. “He generally uses about 11 of them during a show, but only one is a new guitar; the rest are all completely vintage,” Schoo says. “There are five Sony transmitter packs, which I rotate during the show. The amps have designated delays and include a TC2290 digital and three Roland SDB3000s, which are analog. “Edge really likes the analog amps because he feels they’re warmer sounding,” Schoo says. The main system is onstage, but there are 36 effects controlled by two Bradshaw computers, which have old and new effects. He’s a handful to take care of, and he requires a lot of himself as well.”
The other side of the stage’s underworld houses Bono’s tech, Fraser McAlister and Adam Clayton’s tech, Stuart Morgan.
We’re very lucky to have the crew that we do,” O’Herlihy says. “Sam O’Sullivan, the backlinecrew chief/drum tech, is the best. All of the backline technicians are exceptional musicians themselves, which is a great asset–especially for us when we do sound checks without the band.” O’Herlihy also uses CDs or DAT tapes to gauge the sound and scope out the reflective surfaces in particular stadiums. “That allows us to judge technically how the stadium will respond as a building,” O’Herlihy says. “Of course, temperature and environment change the frequency as well, and you have to adjust to that. I’ve got 25 years of experience, so that’s what I rely on to judge.”
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