The Zoo TV Tour was a worldwide concert tour by rock band U2. Staged in support of their 1991 album Achtung Baby, the tour visited arenas and stadiums from 1992 to 1993. The tour’s concept was inspired by disparate television programming, coverage of the Gulf War, and the desensitising effect of mass media. It was depicted in the Grammy Award-winning 1994 concert film Zoo TV: Live from Sydney.
About Zoo TV Tour in brief
The Zoo TV Tour was a worldwide concert tour by rock band U2. Staged in support of their 1991 album Achtung Baby, the tour visited arenas and stadiums from 1992 to 1993. The tour’s concept was inspired by disparate television programming, coverage of the Gulf War, and the desensitising effect of mass media. It was the highest-grossing North American tour of 1992, and overall sold around 5. 3 million tickets and grossed US$151 million. The band’s 1993 album, Zooropa, was recorded during a break in the tour and expanded on its mass media themes. Critics regard the tour as one of rock’s most memorable tours—in 2002, Q’s Tom Doyle called it \”the most spectacular rock tour staged by any band\”. The tour was depicted in the Grammy Award-winning 1994 concert film Zoo TV: Live from Sydney, which was released the same year as U2’s second album, Achtung Baby. The group’s 1989 Lovetown Tour did not visit the United States, and at the end of the tour, lead vocalist Bono announced on-stage that it was \”the end of something for U2\” and that “we have to go away and… just dream it all up again.’’ The group were fascinated with the possibilities of radio and video and how they could be used to spawn cultures where it’s hard to get bootlegs. The wild antics of pirate radio station on the tour inspired the band with the notion of taking a video show into Peking or Prague for free video.
They were also interested in using video as a way of making themselves less accessible to their audiences. U2 embraced a more lighthearted and self-deprecating image on tour. To escape their reputation for being earnest and overly serious, U2 embrace a more serious image. The band believed that cable television had blurred the lines between soap operas, local news, and television programming. While they watched television coverage of Gulf War on Sky News, they tuned into local German television to see local soap opera shows. The shows incorporated channel surfing, prank calls, video confessionals, a belly dancer, and live satellite transmissions with war-torn Sarajevo. On stage, Bono portrayed several characters he conceived, including the leather-clad egomaniac \”The Fly\”, the greedy televangelist \”Mirror Ball Man\”, and the devilish \”MacPhisto\”. In contrast to other U2 tours, each of the Zoo TV shows opened with six to eight consecutive new songs before older material was played. Although the tour provoked a range of reactions from music critics, it was generally well received. It was widely bootlegged and was widelybootlegged in the 1990s, with some shows reaching a radio audience of 500 million people and being widely bootleged in Europe and the U.S. The tour alternated between North America and Europe for the first four legs.
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This page is based on the article Zoo TV Tour published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 17, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
