U2 Live & Dangerous - U2 360 Tour

“Not only did it work, but it looked fucking amazing...”

Not a lot of people know this story, but at the start of the U2360° Tour, the band weren’t planning to shoot the Rose Bowl. At all. They wanted to do a shoot in Fez, a town in Morocco, where they’d done some of the writing and recording for No Line On The Horizon, which was the ‘album of the tour’. They wanted us to film it in a ‘riad’ – a type of Moroccan house built around an open “360 degree” courtyard – and there would be 100- 200 invited people there to see it. The opening shot was to be from outer space, through the ozone and zoomed into the house through the open roof. That seemed very manageable!

Then, three weeks before filming was due to start, I got a text from Paul McGuinness saying: ‘Hi Malcolm, we’re killing Fez. But don’t worry, we’re thinking about the Rose Bowl!! Ring me!

Now, the Rose Bowl is 100,000 people – so to go from a tiny riad in Morocco to that was like… let’s say it was “ambitious!” So I met PauL and he wanted to know if this could be pulled off. I didn’t know if we could get the visas, the work permits, never mind getting everything done. I mean the Rose Bowl is massive! It’s one of the biggest open-air venues in the world and its shape is unique. And for this tour, they’d designed “the Claw “ with a 360° screen. It was an enormous proposition. It wasn’t done lightly, but in the end we decided to give it a stab. One of the things that saved our bacon, really, was that there were lots of cameras in the stadium already, so it became more a matter of enhancing the technology that was available, rather than trying to invent the wheel. But there were other difficulties. This was U2 after all: they do not know how to do things the easy way and their vision is always unique – which is probably why they’ve been so successful!

For example, the band wanted a skycap – a fabulous piece of kit that’s sometimes used in baseball games, where it flies literally over the audience’s heads, so you get these amazing tracking and zoom shots just like you would with a drone. It is built on a grid of wires, but aside from being a great addition to filming, it is also an incredibly tricky, complicated piece of kit… but it delivers fabulous shots.

Then there was the small matter of the whole thing being streamed live on YouTube: the first ever LIVE global webcast on this scale! It sounds crazy now, but no one had any idea whether this would work – or not! We did a live dry run with a few cameras to see if it worked, to see if the signal would come on. We were all watching it from Paul McGuinness hotel room, and… bingo! Right on cue, there it was. And not only did it sound incredible, but it looked fucking amazing. We all said, ‘Maybe we can pull this off after all!’

‘In the end, I think we used 46 cameras shooting that show… including state-of-the-art Go-Pros, which are tiny cameras, on and off-stage. I’d produced the Brits for eight years, I’d shot countless different concerts from Wembley Stadium to Madison Square Garden and we’d never, ever had anything like that number in a shoot. To cover any gig that’s ‘in-the round’ requires more equipment anyway, but to cover something like that, with the retractable concertina claw and the wraparound screen – it broke all the rules.

On the night, there were over 97,000 people there, which was a record for a single concert in the US…and I think most of Hollywood rocked up that night as well. In many ways, what was even more amazing than the gig itself – which was phenomernal – was that we were getting messages from all over the world as the show was being shared live. I remember getting messages from fans of the band in China which we fed up on the big screen. Then, at one point, they started saying, ‘We’re being shutdown! We’re being blocked’ Then bang! – there was a blackout from all the people watching in China. But slowly, the feed crept back in again, because all these ingenious kids there were finding ways of hacking through the bloody firewall. This really was a 360° webcast now! It felt like U2 were connecting with the whole world and making history. And, of course, with that tour, they were. It went on to become the biggest-grossing rock tour in history.

So I guess the lesson is: never be afraid to change your mind! However, one day, I hope we will get to shoot the band in that little house in Fez! That would also be very special...