The Megagig Economy

Deep in Amish Country, Tait Towers designs live sets for U2, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift. Its aim: to make rock stars’ grand visions come alive - and create Instagram gold

In December 2016, designer Ric Lipson was in New York on a conference call with Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. Lipson is a senior associate at London based design firm Stufish, the company that, along with U2’s set designer Willie Williams, has created all of the band’s tours since 1992’s Zoo TV. In October 2016, U2 had played software giant Salesforce’s annual conference on the site of the old Geneva Drive-In Theatre in Daly City, California. In homage to the Geneva, the stage had a movie screen and little else.

Now, the band wanted something similar for The Joshua Tree anniversary tour in 2011. The four musicians were leafing through proposed designs from Stufish and Williams when Bono grabbed a Sharpie and drew a rough outline of a Joshua tree breaking out through the top of the screen. That’s what should be on the stage, he told Lipson.

It’s always a difficult moment for designers such as Lipson and Williams when rock stars doodle their concepts for stage shows. To get a stadium tour from notion to opening night costs tens of millions. Thousands of people are needed to design, build, assemble, market and sell the show. The technology involved often doesn’t exist yet.

In this case, at first, the set design looked simple – a 61-metre-wide, 14-metre-high 8K LED video screen painted gold with a silhouette of a Joshua tree picked out in silver. During the second half of the show, the screen would show epic high-definition American landscapes shot by photographer and director Anton Corbijn. There would be a tree-shaped catwalk and satellite stage extending into the audience, plus steel trusses that detangle lights and speakers high above the stage.