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The friendly folk over at Big Concerts posted a picture of the mammoth stage construction being undertaken in the FNB Stadium at the moment. It shows the initial stages of the staging for this weekends’ U2 concert being erected. (You can see the snap and related comments here.)
Just from that picture alone, one starts to get a feeling for the scale and complexity of the 360° Tour, and its’ centre-piece: the spaceship on four-legs that has been fondly nick-named “The Claw”.
The set, as is common for many large tours, has multiple identical versions. In the case of the 360° Tour these sets are known as Red Steel, Green Steel, and Blue Steel. The sets essentially need to leapfrog from city to city, with four days required to load in (set-up) and two days to load out (dismantle) at each of the tours’ venues. It’s not clear which of the sets is being used for the South African concerts. Whichever they are, the process of erecting and then later dismantling the stage and set is fascinating to watch.
It’s like a giant Meccano construction set that develops from the ground up into this magnificent edifice to rock music, and which then gets pulled down, packed up and shipped off to the next place, leaving nothing of itself behind.
The video below, set to No Line on the Horizon, is a series of photographs and video clips stitched together time-lapse style to show the whole process from start to finish – essentially it shows 6-odd days on the U2 tour, from the stage crews’ perspective:
Awesomeness of epic proportions!
13 Comments
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Morena Kokong, Greg Pillhofer. Greg Pillhofer said: U2 360° Claw Stage Setup Time Lapse – http://bit.ly/i6zjKT #U2SA #U2JHB [...]
Now all we need is the set list………..maybe a post requesting song requests???? Check out http://www.u2setlists.com
Swell idea. Will set it up on the morrow…. Check out U2 Gigs as well – huge database of U2 info from all their live performances over the years. The 360 Tour song lists are collected here: http://www.u2gigs.com/360__Tour.html
This (brilliant) website has all setlists and even gives stats as to how often which song is played on tour etc etc. Your can compare all the 360 Tour setlists played worldwide.
http://www.setlist.fm/
Thanks Jeanette! Setlist is indeed very impressive, and we’ll link to it as soon as the Joburg setlist is up so that those going to the CTown concert can get an idea of what to expect. That said though, by the looks of things there seems to be subtle differences in each of the shows. I heard that the final set-list is only decided on literally on the day of the show, and even then Bono invariably slips in an impromptu acapella verse or two anyway!
Wow! This is super cool. Thanks for sharing!
I am amped for the 18th! U2 awesomeness on the way!
All I need is a set of wings, and I am sorted. Maybe I will get a pair for Valentines Day.
The questions is will they be angel wings or bat wings?
Dude, if the lady looks even half as hot as her profile pic avatar thing suggests she does then they definitely will and angel wings!
Awesome video! Amazing to see the whole operation like that.
Does anyone know where that was made? What stadium is it?
Would love to know that as well A-R. Come on people – someone, somewhere must recognise it!?
if I’m not mistaken, that is Berlin
The lovely Tina is the winner!
Turns out that it is indeed the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. That gap in the roof and stands was the give-away maybe?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Olympicstadium2.jpg
[...] Blog, and Jenny decided to go and visit the site herself, specifically to watch the video in our U2 360° Claw Stage Setup Time Lapse [...]
hi Greg.
ive got tickets fot section 117 row r (jhb) trying to work out if is “behind the stage” or are they ok tickets?