Well, it’s that time again. 4000 posts and a new status, so here it is. Enjoy:-
The PopMart Tour, often referred to as simply PopMart, was the concert tour that took place from 1997 to 1998, in support of 1997’s album, Pop.
Planning for the tour started with set designer, and long-time U2 friend, Willie Williams. As their previous tour, Zoo TV, was a satire of television and media, Williams decided the band's next tour would be a satire of consumerism. The tour was named "PopMart" similar to the title of a retail store, and featured a shopping cart revolving around a lemon as its logo, in reference to the song "Lemon".
Going along with the tour's satirical theme of consumerism, U2 announced their tour in February 1997 by holding a press conference at a Kmart store in New York City, which was broadcast live on various radio and television stations across the world. The band performed "Holy Joe" at the press conference, hoping the song would be on the album; however, the song was only released as a bonus track on Japanese versions of Pop and as a B-side on the "Discothèque" single, and was never played on the PopMart Tour or during any other future live performance.
The set was designed by Willie Williams and entertainment architect Mark Fisher, who together had also designed Zoo TV. Williams worked with Fisher to develop several concepts for the PopMart stage. An early concept was to "take the show to the audience" by featuring LED video screens mounted on trucks, which would drive around the stadium and up onto the stage. The idea of the trucks was abandoned after Fisher introduced the concept of creating a very large, low resolution LED screen by deconstructing a conventional LED screen. Williams and Fisher decided to feature one giant 15 x 50 meter (50 x 165 foot) LED video screen behind the stage. It contained over 100,000 pixels, each holding eight LEDs. The video screen was the largest in the world at the time. In addition to the video screen, Fisher and Williams' final design of the stage featured several "pop-architecture motifs" to fit the show's theme. The center of the stage featured a 100-foot tall golden parabolic arch, suggestive of the McDonald's Golden Arches logo, and a central orange-colored PA system in the middle of the arch. The right side of the stage held a huge martini olive spiked high on a towering 30-meter (100-foot) toothpick, and an 11-meter-tall (35-foot) mirrorball lemon. Bono joked with David Letterman on the Late Show, saying, "It could have been an artichoke, but we wanted a more practical fruit." A B-stage was constructed towards the right end of the stage, which extended into the audience where the band would perform several songs throughout the show.
The Show
The performances began in the style of a boxing match, with the band (heavily guarded with suited men) walking through the crowd towards the end of the B-stage while the "PopMart Mix" of M's "Pop Muzik" was played. Each of show opened with a performance of "Mofo."
Following "Mofo" at every show, the band performed "I Will Follow," "Even Better Than the Real Thing," "Gone," "Last Night on Earth," and "Until the End of the World." As the group performed, the audience was bombarded with images and colors, all designed towards the show's ironic embrace of tackiness and pop-ular culture. Each show featured "Staring at the Sun" during the middle of the set, and most shows featured "New Year's Day," and "All I Want Is You". "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," "Pride (In the Name of Love)," and "Bullet the Blue Sky" (often preceded by "Miami") were also played at every show. Those songs were often followed by an "Edge Karaoke" slot, in which The Edge would sing The Monkees' "Daydream Believer" or a similar song against a cheap karaoke CD, complete with lyrics shown on the giant screen.
At Sarajevo and then several times after this was replaced with Edge doing an acoustic version of “Sunday Bloody Sunday”
The end of each main set featured "Please," which segued into "Where the Streets Have No Name."
At the end of the main set, before the first encore, the giant lemon moved to the middle of the stage. There a sheet fell off exposing a huge disco ball that lit up the stadium in spinning lights while the Perfecto Mix of "Lemon" played over the PA. The band then would walk out of the giant lemon onto the B stage to perform "Discothèque."
The rest of the first encore typically consisted of "If You Wear That Velvet Dress" and "With or Without You." After another brief break, the band would return to perform "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me," their single from 1995 for the Batman Forever soundtrack, followed by "Mysterious Ways." "One" was always performed following, which ended a handful of shows, otherwise it was followed by one more song. "Unchained Melody," "Wake Up Dead Man," and "MLK" followed "One" to close the show. On a handful of occasions, the show ended with another song, such as "Rain," "Hallelujah," "Mothers of the Disappeared," "40," or "Can't Help Falling in Love." "She's a Mystery to Me" and "Staring at the Sun" each ended a single show, as well.
A total of 55 different songs were played throughout the tour. Out of the 12 songs on Pop, each song was played in full at least once, with the exception of "The Playboy Mansion," which was only featured as a snippet several times at the end of "Where the Streets Have No Name." "Do You Feel Loved" was only performed during the first six shows, and "If God Will Send His Angels" was performed once by the full band, plus about 20 other times solely by Bono and The Edge. "Bad" and "Desire" were also played at a handful of shows.
Popularity
Although the extravagance of the tour was visually and technically impressive, the early dates of PopMart were, on occasion, marred by subpar performances. The band had booked the tour before the album was finished, and with the planned November 1996 release pushed back until March 1997 to finish the album, valuable tour rehearsal time was lost. This lack of preparation manifested itself in the shows, particularly during the poorly received opening night in Las Vegas where the band lost their timing on the song "Staring at the Sun," stopped playing partway through, and then started over. Nonetheless, the quality of the band's performances improved greatly by the second leg in Europe, evidenced by the "Please" single that features three songs from the first European show in Rotterdam.
Despite its cleverness and some positive critical response, many fans felt alienated by the shows; new material from the Pop album didn't go down as well as U2 might have hoped and too many people just didn't seem to get the joke. U2 dressed as the Village People in the "Discothèque" video, and their willingness to mock their serious image continued during PopMart. U2's "big shtick" failed to satisfy many seemingly confused by the band's new image and elaborate sets. One NME critic later recalled a "ludicrous hullabaloo" that was a departure from "Planet Reality." Also, having been booked before the release of Pop, the tour's early shows were negatively impacted by the band's choice to sacrifice rehearsal time in order to complete recording of their four-month-overdue album.
Live Recordings
In December 1997, the two PopMart Tour concerts in Mexico City were filmed for various future video and audio releases. In November 1998, PolyGram and Island Records released the video PopMart: Live from Mexico City on VHS and Video CD. The video combined footage from the two concerts, and featured all 25 songs performed at both shows. The VHS and Video CD releases have since been out of print, however a DVD version was released for the first time in September 2007. In 2000, the album Hasta la Vista Baby! was released exclusively to members of Propoganda (although it was then subsequently included on The Complete U2 from iTunes), which featured 14 of the 25 songs from Mexico City on one CD. Released around the same time were the various "Beautiful Day" singles, which featured the live versions of "Discothèque," "If You Wear That Velvet Dress," and "Last Night on Earth,” the latter of which was also featured on the "Elevation" single. The live video of "Last Night on Earth" appeared on the Australian "Beautiful Day" single, and the live video of "Gone" appeared on The Best of 1990–2000 video releases.
In addition to the recordings from Mexico City, live versions of "Please," "Where the Streets Have No Name," and "Staring at the Sun" from Rotterdam, as well as "With or Without You" from Edmonton, were released internationally on the Please: PopHeart Live EP, and later on the "Please" single in the United States. A live video of "Please" filmed in Helsinki, known as the "Live Mural Cut," was featured on the bonus DVD of the special edition release of the album, The Best of 1990–2000.
With thanks to Wikipedia and some other sites
Of the 94 shows played, 92 are available as bootlegs here. Amongst the best are:-
1997-08-28 - Leeds, England - Roundhay Park
1997-09-23 - Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina - Kosevo Stadium
1998-02-11 - Santiago, Chile - Estadio Nacional
If you can be bothered, check out U2.com’s official Popmart website HERE
