U2’s Zoo TV Tour had the greatest selection of support bands ever
Everybody, and we mean everybody, found themselves winning key support slots for U2’s mammoth Zoo TV Tour multimedia extravaganza.
Bono wasn’t kidding back in 1989. Addressing Dublin’s Point Depot crowd in December toward the end of the Lovetown Tour, the long-haired and Western-clobbered frontman let slip U2’s need to “Go away and dream it all up again.” Smarting from the critical fatigue of Rattle and Hum’s desert-wandering earnestness and rootsy Americana bolo act, the Irish stadium rockers looked to the electronic underground and Germany’s political upheaval to fuel a much-needed transformation.
Out went bluesy twang and widescreen spirituals, in came industrial clangour and the alternative end of dance music. Catching the last official flight to East Germany in October 1990, U2 eagerly embraced a new sound for a new decade, holing up in Berlin’s famous Hansa Studios to begin the sessions for 1991’s Achtung Baby and commit their emerging taste for sarcasm, irony, and subversion for a send-up of the whole messianic rockstar shtick they’d wavered so closely to the edge only handful of years earlier.
“The sound of four men chopping down The Joshua Tree” needed a live show to match, and no expenses were spared. It’s unlikely that the Zoo TV Tour will ever be beaten in full, gesamtkunstwerk spectacle, a multimedia explosion exploring the decade’s “sensory overload” built with numerous video screens flashing anything from war reports to shopping channels and affording the formerly stuffy U2 the chance to indulge in all the irreverent theatre and broadcasting drama they could think of. Live on stage, Bono could prank call the White House, order 1,000 pizzas, or switch to a genuine satellite link-up of reporters on the ground during the Bosnian War.
The stops weren’t pulled for the opening acts either. From the tour’s kickoff in Florida’s Lakeland Civic Centre on 29th February 1992, Pixies played support across 30 dates of the first North American leg, with tensions between Black Francis and Kim Deal reaching a boiling point across the shows and playing their last set before the Pixies’ first hiatus following Vancouver’s Pacific Coliseum slot.
After a stretch in Europe across May and June with Cork’s The Fatima Mansions, a jump back to North America treated audiences to Primus on several dates, and then a double whammy of Public Enemy, still just about within their golden age and Mick Jones’ Clash successor Big Audio Dynamite II for Zoo TV’s September and October US dates.
It’s already impressive stuff, but the opening calibre starts becoming ridiculous once U2’s touring tech tableau reaches its ‘Zooropa’ chunk of dates from May 1993. Forming one of the key inspirations of U2’s newfound sonic attack, Germany’s Einstürzende Neubauten brought their industrial racket to the second show of Rotterdam’s Feijenoord Stadion, only lasting one night after one of the members threw an iron bar into the audience. Madrid counted the Ramones, and Strasbourg managed the almighty coup of a reformed Velvet Underground, the classic Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker line-up warming the crowd at Stade de la Meinau on 23rd June.
Later in July, Pearl Jam was roped in for Rome’s Stadio Flaminio in the run-up to their Vs sophomore, and PJ Harvey joined Zoo TV regulars Stereo MCs for four shows in the Scandinavian region a few days later. Curiously enough, Björk played a support slot in London’s Wembley Stadium just a month after her Debut smash, but also had played several earlier dates across the second North American run with her former band The Sugarcubes. Perhaps the ultimate skål on top, but U2 convinced ABBA’s Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus for a special rendition of ‘Dancing Queen’ for their second night at Sweden’s Globen on June 11th, 1992.
It’s a musical blitz perfectly befitting U2’s cocksure jump into their satirical art-project circus, an arch-prank behemoth that even the biggest stars of rock and pop were keen to sink their teeth into. Such zeitgeist-grabbing command feels like ancient history in the U2 story now, hurtling toward a safer realm of corporate rock once ‘Beautiful Day’ won back their old fans in 2000, but for a moment in the early 1990s, Zoo TV was the station that even the most committed naysayers couldn’t help but eagerly tune in to.
