Continuing our discussion with Willie Williams, creative director for U2's iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE Tour. Start with part 1 here if you haven't read it already.
Live Design: What were the challenges for you in the design process?
Willie Williams: I suppose the biggest challenge is not to repeat ourselves whilst working within the surprisingly strict "rules of combat." The requirements of backline, monitoring, and so forth, are far from insignificant, and it would be a brave man that would mess with the known format. For a long time, we were proposing to do away with the backline "bunkers" that conceal the crew and gear, but ultimately, this just makes things ugly. The technical requirements for a U2 performance are very concrete, and the stage footprint has remained pretty much the same for the past 25 years. We have squished the shapes a little from tour to tour, but the basic stage layout and bunker set up is always there. Eventually I understood that there’s no point in fighting it, so opted for a thematic approach, with a stage that echoes their "Innocent" period. The square stage is, in fact, the Joshua Tree stage. It’s exactly the same, a trivia point that has been noted and enjoyed by several of the U2 trainspotting community.
LD: What about challenges or changes in rehearsals? Did most ideas on paper come to full fruition?
WW: One of the most remarkable things about the show is that almost all of the ideas we talked about from the very beginning came to fruition. Some of these have ended up being expressed in different ways than the original thought, but the spirit of them has been retained, which I have found extremely satisfying. The narrative of the light bulb, the teenage bedroom, the street where you grew up, violence without and within and escaping to "the world" out there has seen many different iterations along the way, but it’s all still there.
LD: Talk about the lighting rig and the fixtures you chose.
WW: The lighting is really very simple and—don’t laugh—actually very minimal in a spread-all-over-the-arena kind of a way. At first glance, the staging looks like a fairly standard “A” and “B” stage set up with a catwalk in between. However, the different parts of the staging are used at different times and each area, including the catwalk and the "video screen," is a performance areas in its own right. The sheer acreage of staging means I need quite a few fixtures, but they are used very sparingly.
Consequently, I have found myself working in a minimalist way on a very large scale. As I often seem to do, I managed yet again to design an environment with extremely limited placement possibilities for lighting instruments. When the screen-stage is deployed, it cuts the space in half, making it really tough to light the staging areas. The set-up also demands enormously high trim heights for sightlines so, when it came to it, the rig pretty much designed itself around the given parameters.
The rig layout is very simple; there are three trusses above the square stage and further trusses that follow the line of the edge of the arena floor. The mood of the square stage is straight forward rock 'n' roll, echoing the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, which is thematically where that part of the show is set. We’ve essentially built a punk club, and I wanted to summon that kind of mood in the equipment.
At floor level, there are vintage [Martin Professional] Atomic strobes with scrollers and actual DWE molefays for that fantastic brown low color-temp feel. LED be damned! It’s the glitchiness of these fixtures that I enjoy the most.
The signature fixture is a caged fluorescent strip, inspired by the kind you might find in an underpass or dodgy public toilets. At first, I was insistent on using real fluorescent strips but was eventually talked out of it due to the accompanying RF nightmares. In the end, I agreed to go with cool white LED facsimiles but only on condition that each unit was one circuit only and that they weren’t able to change color.
My programmer/operators, Alex Murphy and Sparky Risk, have spent forever building manual chases to simulate random fluorescent tube flicker and non-linear strobe effects. Sparky has done me proud in his embracing of manual bump-button strobe hits that feel like lighting time travel. It all feels vastly more organic and human than anything you’d ever get out of an effects engine.
PRG Bad Boys and Best Boys, both spot and wash, are the workhorse units. I chose these primarily for their output, given the throw distances involved and my desire to minimize the number of fixtures. I am loving keeping it bold and unfussy. The three trusses above the square stage house a total of only 16 fixtures, which is fewer than we had on the War Tour in 1983!
Followspots were always going to be an issue for this design, given that "front-of-house" becomes a somewhat meaningless term here. Chris Conti from PRG showed me the Bad Boy spot some time ago, which got my interest. The notion of being able to ring the arena with truss spots that would do the job of front-of-house spots seemed a good solution and the continuity of color, gobos, dimming, zoom, and so forth that we’d have by using Bad Boys was very appealing. I was nervous about putting all my eggs in that particular basket, because if the output didn’t live up to expectation, I’d be royally buggered.
I asked Chris if there was any headroom in terms of bulb size, and he said there was. I then asked him to experiment with putting increasingly bright bulbs into a Bad Boy Spot until one of them melted, and then we’d take whatever output went before that one. This he did, presenting us with an impressively souped-up unit that Allen Branton, who stopped by rehearsals to help us with the camera lighting, deemed to be at least the equivalent of a [Strong] Super Trouper.
Alex Murphy calls and runs the spots and, most ironically, the only issue we’ve had with them is that they’re too bright. In the main, we have been running them at around 40% output, but I haven’t yet had the heart to tell Chris Conti.
Check out the full lighting and video gear lists here.
Read part 1 here, part 2 here, or continue to part 4.
Check out our full coverage, sponsored by SHS Global at our Project In Focus on U2's iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE Tour here, and check back often for continuing updates.