August 6, 201113 yr IT WAS TRULY A SHOW TO REMEMBER Mind. Blown. It may not even need saying but I am talking about the U2 concert last weekend. Not much of a concertgoer myself, I had no idea what to expect. All I knew going into it were three things: * U2 is playing, * Arcade Fire is opening * There was a giant claw. It turns out I was right about those three points but I had missed many, many more. In light of it being the largest event in Moncton I can write about and my own desire to avoid vague description I will write of the Moncton U2 experience. Not my specific experience mind you, but that which the average spectator would have seen. If you were one of the 80,000 people who attended last weekend (and mathematically, it is likely) then compare my idea of the general viewer to your actual experience and see how I did. Firstly, getting into the place was an event in itself. On the march to the hill, you could expect to see scalpers and merchants, entrepreneurs and even doomsayers as the procession of audience members kept going. If you took the buses there, you might have received what at first look seemed like a U2 pamphlet but was really just some more doomsday propaganda. I kept mine as a memento. Coming around the hill, as the trees cleared, the claw made its debut. If you have not already seen it or pictures of it, it was a huge, four-fingered green claw with orange spots protruding all over. It looked alien, it looked like it should be shooting lasers at the people, which is appropriate because, later, it technically did. At this point the crowd was thin and people were free to roam around with relatively little mud and people to block or slow them. This would soon not be the case. The show began. Carney played and were pretty good. They seemed to really work at the whole rock star image pretty hard. Then Arcade Fire played. They were good but they were still only second fiddle (coincidentally they also had several fiddles, drums, guitars, xylophones and even an accordion going at any given moment). A hush fell over the crowd. Two fighter jets began to zoom overhead, lower then many people had probably seen before. A wave broke out spontaneously in the stand and even through the ground audience. After many loops around the stage it, too, finally died down. Then U2 themselves appeared. The Claw came to life and the true show began. They played on and on, song after song and I was impressed by how many I knew, a little more then half of the songs had yours truly singing along. The screens moved and arranged themselves and two bridges connecting the inner and outer stage spun around carrying U2 around. The show carried on and their political side was shown. The plight of prisoners in Burma was shown and several major world peace organizations were present. It was truly, a show to remember. timesandtranscript.com
November 15, 201113 yr Author From http://www.rttnews.com/Content/Entertainme...760672&SM=1 U2 Take Top Honors At Billboard Touring Awards 11/14/2011 (RTTNews) - U2 was among the top winners at Thursday night's Billboard Touring Awards, held in New York City. The Irish rockers took home the Top Draw and Top Tour awards for most-attended tour and highest-grossing tour, respectively, for their 360 Tour, which spanned two years and included 110 shows in 30 countries and wrapped up in July. Their award was accepted by concert promoter Live Nation's Tres Thomas, who thanked the band, its manager Paul McGuinness, and the rest of the management team for their efforts. Other big winners for the night included Kenny Chesney (who took home the Top Touring Package Award for his Goin' Coastal Tour with Zac Brown Band, Uncle Kracker, and Billy Currington), Bon Jovi, Taylor Swift and Journey, whose guitarist Neal Schon and bass player Ross Valory accepted the band's Legends of Live Award. The awards are determined on the basis of global box office numbers reported to Billboard Boxscore from October 1, 2010, through September 30, 2011.
October 7, 201212 yr The biggest rock tour in history: Behind U2's gigantic £450 milllion live performances http://i50.tinypic.com/eb7e6a.jpg PUBLISHED:6 October 2012 The band's 360° tour has had a 200-ton arachnid forming the stage, a million-piece video wall, 300 crew and a budget of $750,000 a day THE CLAW: Weighing 200 tons, with a central pylon reaching 151ft, the stage for U2’s 360° tour enabled the band to perform in the round, with every fan at each venue enjoying amazing views. Known as ‘The Claw’, it derived from an initial model on Bono’s breakfast table made from cutlery and a grapefruit For the last 20 years, U2 have been in the business of ‘Big’. As far as their live performances stand, their only rivals in terms of scale and ambition are the Rolling Stones, but even they were pushed unceremoniously into second place by U2’s 360° show. Not only was it the highest-grossing tour in history, with sales totalling $730 million (£450 million); it was also seen by over seven million people. More...Five bands you must see live now: Radio 1's Zane Lowe on the hottest acts on tour 'Play the Super Bowl? Did it! Play the World Cup? Did it! Get a president elected? Did it!': How Will.i.am conquered the world U2’s 360° tour started in the summer of 2009 and eventually finished in the autumn of 2011, taking in North America, South America, Russia, Europe, Australia and most points in between. It was not only the biggest ever staged by a rock band, not only the most technologically innovative and the most expensive; it also featured the largest stage and the loudest sound system ever assembled for a rock ’n’ roll tour. It made Pink Floyd’s The Wall look like a village fete. For each of the 110 dates, Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr played inside a 200-ton arachnid, a nomadic behemoth nicknamed ‘The Claw’. VIDEO SLINKY: Suspended over the centre of the stage was a vast cylindrical video screen composed of 888 individual panels and containing a total of 500,000 pixels. A cable pulley system enabled it to expand and contract like a giant Slinky This extraordinary stage featured a giant cylindrical LED screen conceived especially for the show and capable of beaming videos from Nasa’s International Space Station or messages from Desmond Tutu, which enabled the band to deliver the sort of spectacles normally reserved for Olympic ceremonies. Planning for this global extravaganza began as the last leg of the Vertigo tour drew to a close in Honolulu in December 2006. Bono and the band’s production designer Willie Williams were already considering how they would follow it up. ‘It’s important to think about it while you’re doing it,’ explains Bono. ‘The feeling you get performing in front of thousands of people gradually wears off, so to fully understand it you need to make decisions when you’re actually in the middle of it. Bono and his bandmates have been seen by over seven million people on this tour ‘We knew we were going to play outdoors, and we wondered how we could do it differently to everyone else who’s ever done it. The stage needed to be different. 'It needed to be bigger, and better. Then I thought there might be a way. 'So I got these knives and some forks, and a grapefruit, and started mucking around, placing the knives and forks over the grapefruit, trying to build this thing in my head. I did it on the breakfast table, much to the dismay of my family, who thought I’d lost it. ‘I’ve always been obsessed with the things that separate you from the audience. I’ve been in small clubs seeing bands and I’ve felt a million miles away as there is no connection, no relationship, so it’s not always about the size of the venue. 'It’s about how you communicate. That was the breakthrough, realising that. It’s about trying to get in the face of your audience.’ ‘Bono had been thinking of ways to bring the stage closer to the centre of the field,’ says The Edge. ‘So he pitched this idea to Willie, who went off to try and make it work.’ Architect Mark Fisher, who has designed elaborate sets for the Rolling Stones, Elton John and Pink Floyd, came up with the extraordinary template for the stage, an enormous structure meant to sit in the middle of a stadium and which allowed everyone in the audience a view of the band. The whole point of The Claw was to create something so huge it dwarfed the stadia it would sit in, thus creating a more intimate environment. The next challenge was wrapping it with video, allowing it to become a screen onto which the band could be projected. The whole point of The Claw was to create something so huge it dwarfed the stadia it would sit in, thus creating a more intimate environment ‘On every tour we’ve done, we’ve been the first people to use a given technology,’ says Bono. ‘On PopMart I asked if we could do a screen that would be a pop art installation, and we used LEDs – not in clusters, but across the stage so you got this huge screen. And now everyone uses an LED screen.’ Cylinders, flat surfaces and various other options were tried before the final design was reached: an expandable structure using ‘free-form pixels’. ‘We had to manufacture half a million separate hexagonal LED pixels,’ says the Belgian Frederic Opsomer, who has been instrumental in designing many of U2’s groundbreaking video displays. ‘They cost about €10 apiece.’ The tour's overheads were in the region of $750,000 a day The result looked like a vast shaving mirror. Weighing in at 54 tons, it was made up of over one million pieces, including 888 miniature LED panels containing the 500,000 weather-resistant pixels, and which opened out to an area of 14,000 sq ft at its largest. A cable pulley system enabled the construction to be moved up and down. When the design was complete the band found they were the owners of a sci-fi cathedral, a gargantuan cyborg with moving walkways, rotating lighting rigs and a huge central conical video display. It took the crew eight hours to set up the video screen and six to break it down after a show. http://i48.tinypic.com/nxo91.jpg The central section looked like a submarine full of lights and was assembled in situ. The cylindrical screen was then suspended from The Claw, itself 213ft wide, 161ft deep and 89ft tall, with a central pylon that reached 151ft. The stage was required to support a further 250 tons of mechanical and technological wizardry, including 250 speakers, the screen and lights. All these components required 120 trucks to take them from one location to the next – of which 38 were for the steel, 32 for The Claw and 15 for the flooring. The total crew numbered around 300 for each show, of which 130 moved with the band from gig to gig. Around half of those had been with the band since the early days. The tour’s overheads were in the region of $750,000 a day. ‘There’s definitely a sense that we’re the only people prepared to spend this kind of budget on a show,’ says Adam Clayton. ‘With 360°, once we’d figured out you could go into a stadium and do it on our terms, it kind of gave us a lot of room to play around. 'Everything about it – the shape, the size, the cylindrical screen – was a game-changer. You have to find ways to make the songs touch people more, to disorientate people so they’re more open to being touched.’ PUTTING IT TOGETHER: The tour was a mammoth undertaking: 120 trucks were needed to move the stage, the screen, the lights, the 250 speakers and more from venue to venue. The screen alone took eight hours to set up and six to dismantle The 360° tour launched at the Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona on June 29, 2009. As with every other date on the tour, the set started when the PA began blasting out David Bowie’s Space Oddity, and the screen showed the band walking onto The Claw from backstage. The pre-show ritual never changed. Each night, before they go on stage, U2 do exactly the same thing. They walk from their individual dressing rooms, or from their hospitality suites, and they convene with each other. It’s their way of reconnecting. ‘We always have half an hour before we go on stage,’ says Bono. ‘It’s a hard thing to describe, but we sort of pray. We tell each other how lucky we are.’ By October 2009, the band had been to Zagreb, London, Glasgow, Chicago, Toronto, LA and many other cities besides. There was going to be a hiatus until the following summer, when they were due to start the second leg of the tour in Salt Lake City on June 3, 2010 – but a serious injury to Bono’s back put paid to that. The singer’s subsequent surgery also postponed their long-awaited Glastonbury debut, scheduled for that summer. After convalescing for three weeks, Bono worked with doctors including sports physician Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt, who has treated Usain Bolt, Ronaldo and the German World Cup squad. By August, when the band returned to The Claw in Turin, U2’s frontman was describing himself as ‘Bono 2.0’. U2 finished the second leg of the tour 31 dates later in Perth, Western Australia, before the final push began in Johannesburg the following February. After dates in South America, they returned to North America in May 2011, taking a short break to fly from Baltimore to Cardiff in order to play Glastonbury – a gig that cost them $2 million. Seven hundred and sixty days after starting out in Barcelona, the tour closed in Moncton, Canada, by which time the band had been supported by 26 different acts, including Snow Patrol, Muse, the Black Eyed Peas, Kasabian, Razorlight, Kaiser Chiefs, Florence and the Machine, Arcade Fire and Jay-Z. ‘After two years, three birthdays, a back injury and a hell of a lot of heartache, we’re finally coming up with something that we’re proud of,’ reflected Bono near the end. The big question, however, is what’s next? ‘We’re still struggling with the same things we struggled with 25 years ago,’ Bono admits, ‘which is to say, we’re on the verge of irrelevance. Why should we think anyone wants a new U2 album? That’s the challenge.’ Mail UK Edited October 7, 201212 yr by Sydney
December 3, 201212 yr Dr. Dre, U2 and Elton John Lead Forbes' List of 2012 Highest Paid MusiciansAdd CommentNovember 29, 2012 08:36:37 GMT This year's list is made up of an international ensemble and shows that most musicians still make a big part of their earnings from touring. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Forbes Magazine has just released its list of 2012's highest paid musicians and it shows an international cast of pop stars, hip-hop giants, and rock icons. Rap mogul Dr. Dre leads the pack of this year's top earners, followed by Pink Floyd's Roger Waters, The Rocketman Elton John, rock legendary group U2, and British boy band Take That. The list also shows that most of the artists' earnings came from their rigorous touring and live shows. Dr. Dre did not have a new album released this year, but that did not stop the super producer from collecting dollars from his past records, concert productions, and of course his music accessory biz, headphones. Forbes reports that Dre took in $110 million from his Beats headphone line. Meanwhile, Pink Floyd's founding member Roger Waters followed in as second top earner this year with $88 million, thanks to his successful The Wall Live tour. According to Billboard Boxscore, the 69-year-old musician grossed $131 million from November 2011 to May 2012 alone. Another British music veteran, Elton John, made it as the third highest earner in 2012 with $80 million. Most of his income came from doing 100 shows during the scoring period, including a series of shows in Las Vegas. Irish rockers U2 placed fourth with $78 million. The band are close to wrapping up their record-breaking 360 tour. The tour grossed $736 million over three years. Rounding up the top five are British boy band Take That with $69 million. The group's reunion tour grossed a record $61 million for eight dates at London's Wembley Stadium. Their reunion gig was also the highest-grossing single-stadium stand put on record at that point and the band also played dozens of dates around Europe. Forbes Highest Paid Musicians 2012: 1.Dr. Dre - ($110 million) 2.Roger Waters - ($88 million) 3.Elton John - ($80 million) 4.U2 - ($78 million) 5.Take That - ($69 million) 6.Bon Jovi ($60 million) 7.Britney Spears ($58 million) 8.Paul McCartney and Taylor Swift (tie- $57 million) 9.Justin Bieber and Toby Keith (tie- $55 million) 10.Rihanna ($53 million) 11.Lady GaGa ($52 million) 12.Foo Fighters ($47 million) 13.P. Diddy and Katy Perry (tie- $45 million) 14.Kenny Chesney ($44 million) 15.Beyonce Knowles ($40 million) 16.Red Hot Chili Peppers ($39 million) 17.Jay-Z ($38 million) 18.Coldplay ($37 million) 19.Adele and Kanye West (tie- $35 million) 20.Michael Buble ($34 million) 21.Sade ($33 million) AceShowbiz.com
December 5, 201212 yr Author Dr Dre makes most of his money from headphones apparently. Who'd have thought there was so much money in headphones? :blink:
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