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Jul. 20th, 2008 08:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_elyanIt's another sign of my unpleasantly increasing age that the most notable rock show of my teenage years - U2's Zoo TV- is now over 15 years old. I remember wondeing at the time whether it would be looked back on as a bold social statement, or a colossally pretentious pile of crap.
In practice, of course, it's not remembered as anything so notable as any of that, just as another rock show. But, watching the DVD (filmed in late 1993) it still looks like a bloody good rock show. They were touring an exceptional album - Achtung Baby -coupled with a more experimental but still interesting collection, in Zooropa. And underpinning all the stunts and the massive technological edifice was some dependably fine music.
Bono was a prat, of course, as he had been previously, and is now. But at least his alter-egos - the Fly, and the repellent McPhisto - were clearly alter-egos, rather than his more recent attempts to elevate himself to world (if not to say cosmic) influence. The phone-calls were ogf course idiotic showboating, but could be written off to egomaniac rock star excess. And the rest of the band put up with the costumes with the lemons on them, and got on with producing a pleasing noise.
Zoo TV does stand at the end of a line of BIG rock shows, and marks the culmination of the attempt to make the band an anonymous aspect of the spectacle - a trick pioneered by Pink Floyd, who also had their last tour as a group at about that time (their reuion for Live 8 in 2005 was notable innocent of pyrotechics). The fashion for BIG rock shows fell away in the mid-90's, as the two pre-eminent UK bands of the mid-decade - U2 and Radiohead - both shied away from theatrical touring. Zoo TV is also interesting in its wide-eyed embrace of nascent technology which is now part of everyone's lives.
For their next tour, PopMart, U2 tried to top the excess of Zoo TV, and fell spetacularly on their arses, not helped by the fact that Pop wasn't a terribly good album, anf this led directly to the back-to-basics ethic of their two most recent albums. Zoo TV, however, stands as a flawed but fascinating example of a conscious attempt to create something bigger than a mere rock show, and is still watchable today, even if you do want to ram McPhisto's horns where the sun don't shine...
In practice, of course, it's not remembered as anything so notable as any of that, just as another rock show. But, watching the DVD (filmed in late 1993) it still looks like a bloody good rock show. They were touring an exceptional album - Achtung Baby -coupled with a more experimental but still interesting collection, in Zooropa. And underpinning all the stunts and the massive technological edifice was some dependably fine music.
Bono was a prat, of course, as he had been previously, and is now. But at least his alter-egos - the Fly, and the repellent McPhisto - were clearly alter-egos, rather than his more recent attempts to elevate himself to world (if not to say cosmic) influence. The phone-calls were ogf course idiotic showboating, but could be written off to egomaniac rock star excess. And the rest of the band put up with the costumes with the lemons on them, and got on with producing a pleasing noise.
Zoo TV does stand at the end of a line of BIG rock shows, and marks the culmination of the attempt to make the band an anonymous aspect of the spectacle - a trick pioneered by Pink Floyd, who also had their last tour as a group at about that time (their reuion for Live 8 in 2005 was notable innocent of pyrotechics). The fashion for BIG rock shows fell away in the mid-90's, as the two pre-eminent UK bands of the mid-decade - U2 and Radiohead - both shied away from theatrical touring. Zoo TV is also interesting in its wide-eyed embrace of nascent technology which is now part of everyone's lives.
For their next tour, PopMart, U2 tried to top the excess of Zoo TV, and fell spetacularly on their arses, not helped by the fact that Pop wasn't a terribly good album, anf this led directly to the back-to-basics ethic of their two most recent albums. Zoo TV, however, stands as a flawed but fascinating example of a conscious attempt to create something bigger than a mere rock show, and is still watchable today, even if you do want to ram McPhisto's horns where the sun don't shine...
