Defending U2’s PopMart*

By Mark Reed
2005.11

"I have a very vivid memory of what the first PopMart show was like. I remember just being so aware of … extreme fear. The whole of the first week was like that, every night. We didn’t know what was going to happen with the technology. It was like being on a magic carpet that part if you expected to fly and part of you knew there was no way it could."—Adam Clayton in the November 2000 issue of Q Magazine.

Now reviled by many as U2′s lowest ebb and biggest mistake, the album "Pop" and the PopMart tour represent for an important minority of U2 fans what could be the band’s highest achievement. Now before you think that this is the rambling of some fan to whom U2 can do no wrong, I have three small words for you—"Rattle and Hum."

Despite well known and oft-voiced complaints by the band that at least another month in the studio was needed to make "Pop" a brilliant album, it’s fairly easy to see that "Pop" is a damn good album already. No, not perfect. After all, the band hadn’t written the chorus for "Last Night on Earth" until the morning it was recorded, and the vocals for "The Playboy Mansion" were recorded in the mastering room after U2 had officially finished the album and delivered it to Island. Later on, during the course of the PopMart tour and recording for 2002′s “Best Of,” the band rerecorded half the album.

The circumstances behind the flawed opening to the PopMart tour are well documented, namely a tour booked before the album was complete. Pressure was on to release the album in summer 1996 and thus to provide an infusion of cash into the troubled Island Records, who U2 had a seven percent percentage share in lieu of unpaid and deferred royalties from the ’80s. Album sessions slipped, with release dates moving to autumn, before the record was finally unveiled in March 1997.

Faced with an immovable object—PopMart’s scheduled April 25, 1997 Las Vegas launch—the band decided to cut short rehearsal time to work further on the record. Multiple titles for the record reflect the chaos of the time. Faced with a straight-into-the-stadiums tour starting April 25th (and no secret TV shows, club gigs, or a small-scale arena tour to ease them into the void after a 40-month break from performing, still U2′s longest absence from the touring stage), and with an enormous amount of cash on the table, U2 was faced with a simple, stark choice.

Shows couldn’t be cancelled or postponed. With a tour costing £400,000 (approximately $709,000) a day—even when the band wasn’t performing—canceling even 10 shows to rehearse would cost the band £4 million (approx. $7.09 million) in costs alone. Doubled up with the lucrative deal with promoters, and the costs of canceling each show would come to up to £10 million (approx. $17.7 million). In actual, and real terms, losing even ten shows may cost them up to £14 million (approx. $24.8 million).

But what was the lucrative deal? The rarely-seen, or mentioned, "PopMart: The Roadies" documentary, aired only on little-seen cable channels in their graveyard slot and, hopefully, will appear as an extra on the oft-delayed PopMart DVD, lifts the lid on the bands financial dealings, albeit a little.

Promoters paid U2 £1 million (approx. $1.77 million) a performance. U2 provided a "black box solution." The promoters paid the money and U2 did the rest. The band turned up with its entire show in 17 trucks, took the money, and any difference between the cost and the fee was a profit. It was a brave and excellent choice. With some careful financial thinking and organization, the profit per performance could be as high as £600,000 (approx. $1.06 million), even if only 20,000 people turned up. Simply put there was too much money on the table to cancel.

Come opening night in Las Vegas, the eyes of the world were on U2. The last time the band had toured, Nirvana was a going concern and Oasis barely a speck on the horizon. The world had changed. What was U2 going to do next?

The press is a fickle thing. In 1997, having indulged U2′s irony and mockery, it felt to me that the press was saying to the band, "OK, enough, we get you can do irony. Now let’s have the hats and flags back." And while ZooTV was a distinctly urban, industrialized exercise in mockery, PopMart was a lot more sincere. But some people mistook the wrapping for the gift.

Simply put for some people, "Pop" and PopMart were a step too far. The idea of U2, once the most sincere band in rock, in Village People outfits, performing sub-Jesus Jones technopop, was a bridge too far. "Pop" failed because it worked at both levels—both utterly sincere and utterly satiric at the same time. The message of U2 hadn’t changed, but the medium had, and in a culture which is presented as all surface/no subtext, some people were simply unable to compute. And, matched with a recession that saw many
thousands of expensive unsold tickets sitting in offices across the United States, it was not too hard to deduce that maybe U2 should get back to basics and ditch the window dressing. U2 was never as experimental again after PopMart closed for business, nor is it likely the band ever will be.

But to me, and some other U2 fans, U2 was never as interesting as when it had that window dressing. In some respects, the Vertigo Tour is the offspring of both PopMart’s grand staging and Elevation’s intimate atmosphere.

The posthumous savaging of PopMart was undeserved and perhaps the first sign that, for some in the band, it had perhaps confused being the biggest with being the best. So where did PopMart go wrong?

Certainly the band was under rehearsed. A listen to the first few shows of the tour sees the band performing as yet undefined arrangements of the songs—the familiar chunky bass run of "Mofo" that announced U2′s arrival to the stage was submerged under a barrage of drums and guitars on the first dates. Bono’s voice was out of practice. The band had yet to nail the definitive versions of the songs and the guitars lack the colossal bite of later shows on the tour.

On the opening night, the one under the eye of the world’s savage media, U2 stopped two songs, "I Will Follow" and "Staring at the Sun," early and Bono fudged the lyrics to "Pride (In the Name of Love)." "Mofo" was an unapologetic mess and "Discotheque" was a shadow of the song, Edge couldn’t see what he was meant to be doing or playing in a fog of dry ice and dropped his guitar pick. In later interviews he said that scrabbling on the floor in a white cowboy outfit under the watchful eyes of 70,000 people in Vegas looking for a guitar pick was a low point of the tour.

But to U2′s credit, the majority of the set was solid and strong. Just a few shows later, the band was already beginning to attain the height of the powers that it was renowned for. But the damage was done. In the eyes of the press, U2 had blown it.

Somewhat oddly, when the band launched Vertigo in San Diego and made a similarly uncertain debut, U2 was hailed as the best band in the world back on form. For example, at San Diego, Bono fluffed lyrics in several songs, guitar cues were missed and some versions of the songs sounded distinctly underwhelming. At $160 (approx. £90.33) a ticket for some seats, to have the show called "a rehearsal" by the singer must have seemed a little disrespectful. Again, it sounded as if the band was working hard but wasn’t quite there. But savaged in the press the band was not. U2 had ditched the irony and the press was hailing it. But, to me, PopMart is still U2′s finest hour.

So what made PopMart to me, the band’s finest—and most underrated—moment?

Firstly, the vision. PopMart was huge and had a heart to match. PopMart took the established conventions of U2 and ZooTV, and instead of gritty and dirty, it went Day-Glo and playful.

The first time I saw the PopMart arch in the flesh was from a car. Driving into London’s Wembley Stadium, the first thing I saw was that Arch. Legendary already for being a 100-foot tall yellow McDonald’s sign, from miles away I could see a thin sliver of yellow and, yes, an inflatable olive poking off the top of a stick. I knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore. By the time we entered the stadium and were looking at the gutsy and ridiculous stage, I knew that U2 had created something that some people just could not
get. Some people just would not be able to comprehend what they were seeing. Some people don’t like a challenge.

"I suppose in retrospect you have to draw the conclusion that the PopMart concept was asking a lot of American audiences. Whatever it was that we were playing around with, it wasn’t touching the right buttons."—Adam in the November 2000 issue of Q Magazine.

On the stage images seemed to come from everywhere with the world’s biggest video screen, four of the best musicians and some of the best songs, it was difficult to know what to do next or where to look. PopMart was the place where art and artifice met.

From a staging perspective, it was probably the most courageous staging the world has seen—an enormous art installation with a kick-ass soundtrack, topped off with a 100-foot tall olive, a 40-foot lemon on wheels, a 150-foot wide TV and an arch taller than the roof of a football stadium supporting a fluorescent orange pyramid of speakers. Given that there were no speakers at the sides of screens, the feeling was overwhelming, sound seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere, and the eyes were assaulted by a playful perversion of nearly every cultural icon known to man.

And for PopMart U2 took previously disparate elements of culture and welded them together into a coherent and overwhelming whole. From the opening moments of the concert, where the stadia of the world were converted into giant shopping malls—"Thank You For Shopping At PopMart" read the signs and the plastic bags—and long-established conventions of cultural reading were reversed, we knew that nothing was what it seemed and yet everything was what it seemed. The joke was on capitalism and some people
didn’t like it.

The McDonald’s arch became a grotesque speaker stack. The biggest television in the world was our backdrop. Established conventions were perverted, music became a product to be packaged and sold, and not only that, to be established as being sold knowingly as a pop group. U2 deconstructed the nature of commercialism with PopMart and showed the wiring under the board.

Some people didn’t want to look even though it had pretty lights with whizz-bang sounds. Some people only like their rock sincere. Some people can’t handle subtext. U2 was tired of playing it straight and here, PopMart took ZooTV to its logical conclusion. The band took the rule of Burroughs’ "Interzone" and made it flesh. "Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”

On the screens we were presented with Day-Glo, Warholesque interpretations of the world. The band members themselves became fodder for pop art, their faces duplicated on the screen in a variety of hues. Icons of the dead were irreverently presented as heroes of the age, and yet also as hip cool product, mixing fiction and fact. Ziggy Stardust was one of the Icons of The Passed Away shown during "Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me,” alongside Bob Marley, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison.

At this time, U2 took long established conventions and works of art and perverted them. Munch’s "Scream" was recreated by The Edge and reset as a single cover. Warhol’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe was recast with the prime movers in Ireland’s political crisis. U2 was cast as The Village People in the video for "Discotheque" and, then again, as superheroes in a deserted city for the video of "Last Night On Earth." Lichtenstein’s pop art comic books of war were brought to life on the PopScreen. Kubrick’s "2001" was
re-imagined as a Windows screensaver during "Where the Streets Have no Name." The established ways of reading a text no longer applied: the ZooTV ethos of "question everything" was extended to its logical extreme with PopMart.

Next came a belly dancing, cross dresser on the video screens and a UFO landing into "Lemon" whilst gigantic mechanized fruit traversed the stadium. At this time U2 was at its most audacious, most ballsy and, yes, most playful. No white flags, no sermonizing about war and human rights.

But to many the wind had changed. U2 couldn’t do this. Where were the three chords and the truth? Even now some fans lambaste U2 for making techno with "Pop" and for getting off message. People like to place bands in boxes. Sincerity, white flags, hats? That’s U2. Ballads about John and Jane fighting to achieve the American Dream? That’s Broooooce. People don’t like bands to step out of those boxes. Some people decided what they wanted U2 to be and in their minds U2 could be nothing else. U2 never went off message, just put the same picture in a new, shiny frame with glitzy disco balls. And it was fabulous.

"The irony is, there’s no irony in those songs [on Achtung Baby, Zooropa, and Pop]. There’s never been any artifice in the material itself… the past decade of artifice [was in] the presentation of the material."—Bono in the November 2000 Q.

The message was still there but the members of U2 were also working as great artists. Seeing the world through a lens and re-presenting it to us through their own eyes. Art is how the artist sees the world.

As Bono said on that fateful night in Dublin, U2 had to go away and dream it all up again, in new colors and with brand new shoes. PopMart was, and is, the band’s finest achievement in mixing a serious message with a fundamentally flippant medium and speaking the truth in a way that ensured it could be believed if it could seen. Sadly, with time and circumstance, many people now no longer wish to admit that they saw it and no longer can admit that PopMart was, and is, one of the best concert tours of all time and, despite baffled reviewers and sometimes poor ticket sales, was the band at the peak of its abilities. We may never see U2 in that light again.