Designing live concerts: U2 show how it's done

If you're a designer (or just into good design) and a music fan, I'd like to recommend the book U2 Show.  Despite the uninspired and nondescript title, this is a book about how the various U2 tours were designed -- from Boy all the way through Elevation.  The book explains the countless hours that go into stage design, lighting design, sound & speaker stack design, and a whole bunch of other areas (and it has some great photos too).  I really enjoyed the window this book provides into what goes into the design of a large rock concert, and it showed me again that basic principles of good design translate to all media forms.

Here are a couple of quotes from tour manager Willie Williams.  First, on how the PopMart tour came into being:

There was also a very direct (and very rare) brief to me that this tour would be ‘design-led’, rather than being intimidated by scale or logistics.  Having proved to themselves and to the world with ZooTV that, in terms of what can be toured, ‘anything is possible’, U2 were of a mind that the only limits to be placed on the creative ambitions of this tour were to be financial ones.

On the impossible design requirements given to the sound engineers:

Mark Fisher’s frustration with years of stage design constrained by traditional loudspeaker stacks led him to propose that we should keep the huge video screen free from clutter by placing the entire sound system in one central ball.  Most sound engineers would have resigned on the spot, but Joe O’Herlihy rose to the challenge of mixing a live show through what would essentially be a mono PA.

I like how they talk about the huge differences between the PopMart tour and the Elevation tour:

After the broad, churchy strokes of the Lovetown show and the sensory assault of Zoo TV and the garish, high-concept japery of PopMart, here are U2 playing their songs hard, straight and in your face.

It goes into detail on the simplicity of the Elevation stage and lighting design:

Video is not something that can simply be added to a show, a fact that is the downfall of many otherwise potentially interesting stage productions. We are so conditioned to look at television that moving camera pictures automatically become the focus of attention.

Because of this they went with what they call "Unmediated iMag", which means that the screens showing the band members will be static cameras, and showing everything in black-and-white to avoid distraction from what is happening on stage:

This proves once again what I have always believed to be the single most important purpose of visual design: to allow the content  to shine through elegantly, without distraction.  Pick up this book at Amazon if you're interested -- with more than just pretty pictures it brings a great design perspective to the enormous live concert industry.