U2 Live & Dangerous - Zoo TV Tour

“We were improvising, flying by the seat of our pants...”

I got a call from Bono after Achtung Baby had come out about shooting a video for ‘Even Better Than The Real Thing’, and that’s when I first met every in U2 properly. Zoo TV was going through its birth-pangs in terms of the visual approach, although they had already captured some of it with ‘The Fly’ video. But then Zoo TV was never really finished: it was in incubation from beginning to end as a way of thinking.

It was an area of experimentation and research that interested me. The idea of the spinning camera in the video was to capture the momentum of the song. Anything on top of that were kind of punctuation marks delving into the Zoo TV aesthetic. The band wanted to reflect the effects of media saturation and how the world of communication was changing, entering a new era that would lead to where we are now.

Shooting the Zoo TV outside broadcast was tricky; I didn’t want to just capture the live performance. That was too safe. I tried to imagine channel-surfing during a rock ‘n’ roll show, so the clichés that you were aware of in sport and news and drama were included. You had a guy commenting on the show the whole way through and then coming onstage to interview Bono. It was unexpected, yet expected because you had seen it before in a different context.

I saw the show a few times before we started, but the main process was when my wife and I flew out with Gavin Friday to a full production rehearsal in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a few weeks before opening night. We watched from the mixing desk and then had post-mortem discussions about what we felt might work better. This was the American tour, a much bigger production, with the big fuck-off screens above the stage.

My job was essentially to tour with them and film two shows. We would shoot ideas that would either be shown onstage or used in the film of the performance. It was very free yet disciplined, as access to the band wasn’t always possible. We were improvising, flying by the seat of our pants – you’d have an idea, make a few drawings, approach people, and then get approval.

Everything was influencing everything else, so the TV special probably fed back into the show itself and, thankfully, the band had the wherewithal, the ambition, and the resources to carry it off, once the idea was good. No one had seen anything like it before. It was a huge step forward in terms of live production, both technically and creatively. We became more daring when we realised the overall theme was working. I don’t think it’s dated at all, really. It was very prescient.

In terms of the actual filming, it was like shooting a battle scene, as there was so much going on. You want to capture both the scale and the details, so rather than just shoot close-ups, you’d swing the angle around to catch what else was going on. We had a lot of material to work with, so the final editing was as crazy as the filming itself.

A lot of acts don’t understand the various aspects of this particular medium, but U2 really do. They know exactly what works visually for them. I can’t think of any other band that I’ve worked with who’ve existed for this length of time and have this sensibility of constantly moving forward, tapping six months ahead of the zeitgeist, to create something that is relevant for today, rather than resting on their laurels.

They’re the only band at this level that seem to have that approach. To me that’s remarkable.