U2's Zoo TV Tour: How It Anticipated Our Current Dystopian Landscape

The LA Times critic Robert Hilburn described U2's 1992-93 global Zoo TV extravaganza as "the Sergeant Pepper of rock tours". Certainly, in our current dystopian environment, the show's vision of a technologically-charged future, facilitating mass communication and shared experience, but also fraught with danger, seems more prescient than ever.

U2 were the first band I became a proper fan of, and they initially caught my attention at the tail end of 1992. At the time, they were right in the middle of the Zoo TV tour, and had developed a penchant for situationist pranks – including having a group of lookalikes perform a song in their place on Pat Kenny's RTÉ chat-show Kenny Live. I was hooked, and was immediately captivated by the anarchic concept of Zoo TV, although the show itself was still shrouded in mystery to some extent.

These, of course, were the days before global entertainment, including up-to-date concert footage, was instantly available at the click of a button – an era predicted by the show (there is something simultaneously wonderful and eerie about being able to retrospectively enjoy a wide array of Zoo TV shows courtesy of 21st century technology).

I finally got to see an entire broadcast version when Zoo TV Live from Sydney went out in late 1993, and I was blown away. In the spring of '94, I immediately the shown on video when it was released, and duly played it to death over the following few years – eventually, it literally fell apart, tattered and torn after repeat viewings.

In a review of the Achtung Baby deluxe boxset from 2011, Pitchfork's critic wrote that Zoo TV remains a concert experience that "no artist, including the band themselves, have been able to expand upon in any meaningful way". In terms of large-scale shows, for me, it remains an artistic and aesthetic pinnacle, with only Nine Inch Nails' Twenty-Thirteen tour achieving a similar level of awe-inspiring technological brilliance.

Having started indoors in America in early 1992, when Zoo TV subsequently went into stadiums, it achieved – as author Bill Flanagan noted in his outstanding chronicle of the period, U2 At The End Of The World – a chilling effect reminiscent of Blade Runner.

As with all of the 1993 shows, Zoo TV Live From Sydney opens with a montage that, in March 2020, cuts almost too close to the bone: a jumble of images suggesting technological overload and a hyper-intense, globalised multimedia environment, with brief – but still unnerving hints – of social disintegration and far-right authoritarianism (the underlying rhythm is provided by the beat of a Hitler Youth's drum).

U2 designed the 1993 leg of the Zoo TV tour, or Zooropa as it was dubbed after the accompanying album, to reflect the fraying nature of Europe's social fabric. They particularly focus on the persecution of Turkish immigrants – newly arrived into German society – by neo-Nazi groups.

In 2020, with the continent finding itself in the grip of a pandemic, U2's hints at societal breakdown have a deeply uncomfortable resonance. These dark dystopian elements continue to surface throughout the show. On 'The Fly', Bono – surrounded by screens spitting a succession of words suggesting imminent mass panic – howls: "It's no secret that the stars are falling from the sky / The universe exploding cos of one man's lie".

The undercurrent of dread reaches its fullest expression on 'Until The Of The World'. Kicking off with The Edge's scorching riff – amidst chaotic imagery of political speeches, mass rallies and pandemonium – the song concludes with an apocalyptic surge of noise, as the screens, like something from the Book of Revelations, flash a series of numbers that feel like a countdown to Armageddon.

It's a moment to make the blood run cold, and it would have done justice as a soundtrack to Chris Carter's end-times TV masterwork, Millennium. Later, the early '90s far-right resurgence and consequent social tensions are again reflected in an ominous 'Bullet The Blue Sky', when the burning crosses on the screens twist into the shape of swastikas.

This being U2, though, the show was never going to end a downer and there is a quiet optimism to be found in the final moments. Bono, as his devilish alt-ego MacPhisto, is alone and spotlit amongst the giant screens, crooning Elvis' 'Can't Help Falling In Love' – a haunted figure in a post-modern landscape, searching for salvation.

In an Irish Times souvenir supplement published prior to the U2's Irish Zoo TV shows, David Bowie wrote that, "They may be all shamrocks and Deutschmarks to some, but to me, they are one of the few artists even attempting to hint at a world beyond the next great wall – the year 2000."

It was a major foreshadowing of what was to come, even if its darker elements tweak a raw nerve in the current climate.