exploremusic

To read Gary’s open letter, go here. 

And if you’re wondering what U2′s massive "Claw Stage" looks like, let me take you behind the scenes.
 
 

Sure, U2 fans are thrilled that their band is on tour again, but the real star is turning out to be the massive stage called The Claw.  Sure, the three versions of the 164ft tall stage (the one that’s been taken down at the last gig, the one that’ll be used for the current gig and the one that’s being assembled for the next gig down the road) are apparently resulting in a large carbon footprint, but damn, this thing is impressive.

As everyone knows (hah!), it’s design is based on a Hoberman sphere, which, of course, is really a polyhedron known as a icosidocdecahedron, similar to signature building in the middle of the LAX airport in Los Angeles.

Each stage weighs 74 tons and contains 25 KILOMETRES of cables.  There are 500,000 pixels in the LED display.  Broken down, the thing is made up 1,000,000 constituent parts.  At 164ft, it’s twice as high as what the Rolling Stones used on their A Bigger Bang tour.  My favourite stat?  The set-up contains 72 separate subwoofers.

But back to the carbon footprint.  To move these Claws around requires 120 trucks. According to U2’s environmental critics, the band who have to plant 20,118 trees for every year this tour is on the road to offset the CO2 output.  (Let’s not get into the debate as to whether C02 is a harmful greenhouse gas, okay?  But if you’re interested in this area, check out some of the fascinating writing of Christopher Booker of the Telegraph in the UK, starting with an article called “Climate Change:  The Sun and Oceans Do Not Lie.")