OzAurora said:
Personally I would hate to see U2 play one of the Australian festivals, usually the acts at festivals like Livid or The Big Day Out only do one set and you get the thrill of seeing the artist in amongst 30, 000 other people- a lot of whom are probably not major fans. I would much prefer to see them play on their own right, not in a festival atmosphere.
Hi, this is actually Tyler Durden here...
Anyway, I know for a fact that Big Day Out people and U2's people and Universal Records people have had a chat together about them doing the BDO before. Back during the Elevation tour. Back then you may remember the AUS$ was a joke and we missed out on a lot of great tours, Elevation included. There were two ways around the $ problems at the time for promoters. One was paying appearence fees to artists, instead of giving them their % of the gate. For example, Eminem was just paid a flat fee of $1 million per show last time he toured here in '01. Didn't matter whether it was a sell out or 15 people showed up. If Eminem was $1 million per show for one show in Sydney and one show in Melbourne, imagine how much it would have cost to bring U2 and the whole Elevation show over here for a bunch of gigs all over the country. The promoter who brought Eminem here made a massive loss on it and no-one was game to try it that way on such a big act again.
The other way was simply the festival circuit. The expenses are minimal. The hardware costs are going to be there anyway, and in a sense 'split' between a whole bunch of bands. They play a much shorter set. And in the case of a band like U2, people wouldn't expect to see the full Elevation show and all its extras at a festival. Plenty of great bands during that period ditched their tours for Australia and just hit the festival circuit. They are also paid and up front fee, not a %, and due to the shorter sets and a bunch of other factors, the fee is way, way less then it would be should it be their own show.
Universal initiated talks in trying to get U2 to do the BDO. The reason it didn't go ahead (and it fell down early) was simply because they figured that no matter how many other bands were on the bill, and no matter who they were, U2 were bigger than the BDO. The Sydney BDO sells close to 70,000 tickets. They figured at that stage, U2 alone could have sold that many, and they were afraid that the BDO would be swamped by people who were only buying tickets to see that one band. They didn't want 5 stages with no crowds, while 40,000 people sat down in front of the main stage all day just waiting for the headliner at the end of the night, and thousands of p*ssed off music fans who didn't care for U2 but missed out on getting tickets to the BDO because of U2 rush.
The BDO deal fell down early (I don't even know if U2 would do it, even if the BDO people agreed, but I doubt it) and Universal came up with a 'mini-festival' idea. To cover the costs of the Elevation Tour, and make a profit worthy of touring here, with the AUS$ the way it was at the time, standard tickets to Elevation would have been up around AUS$150 (this is unless the promoters paid U2millions up front and bore the loss themselves). Obviously thats not good. Universal worked on pulling together some significantly cheaper, (but still very popular) bands and having say a 5 act bill tour round the country. Make $150 a ticket look worth it for a 'super show'.
They were after, first of all, a great double billing: The greatest band in the world, and the greatest Australian band. Then another good 'party' band from overseas, then one or two decent Aussie acts. The line up was looking like this:
U2/Powderfinger/No Doubt/Aussie act/Aussie act.
If you look back on past tours for Powderfinger and No Doubt, you'll notice they were both touring around Australia at the same time in 2001, at about the time U2 were heavily rumoured to be heading here. It very nearly happened. I think simply, no matter which way they looked at it, U2 couldn't bring the full Elevation show here and make a decent profit. They were seriously burned in Australia on the Popmart tour.
I wouldn't like to see U2 do a festival here. Not next. The $ is back in a position where a full scale U2 tour could make money. Certainly an arena tour would. Possibly a stadium tour. Basically, I'd rather see a 20 song U2 set over a 10 song U2 set, although yes, it would be sweet to see them in that format one day.