The Innocence + Experience Tour (styled as iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE Tour) was a worldwide concert tour by the Irish rock band U2. Staged in support of the band's 2014 album Songs of Innocence, the tour visited arenas throughout 2015. It was U2's first time playing arenas since 2005–2006 on their Vertigo Tour. Comprising two legs and 76 concerts, the Innocence + Experience Tour began on 14 May 2015 in Vancouver, Canada. It visited North America from May through July, and Europe from September through December. Shows were predominantly booked in pairs for each market.
Concerts were structured around a loose autobiographical narrative of "innocence" passing into "experience", with a fixed set of songs for the first half of each show and a varying second half, separated by an intermission—a first for U2 concerts. The stage spanned the length of the venue floor and comprised three sections: a rectangular segment representing "innocence"; a smaller circular B-stage representing "experience"; and a connecting walkway to represent the transition between the two themes. A double-sided video screen was suspended above and parallel to the walkway; the structure featured an interior catwalk between the video screens, allowing the band members to perform amidst the video projections. For the tour, U2's sound system was moved to the venue ceilings and arranged in an oval in hopes of improving acoustics by evenly distributing sound throughout the arena.
The Innocence + Experience Tour was well received by critics. According to Billboard, the North American leg of the tour grossed US$76.2 million from 36 sold-out concerts. In total, the tour grossed US$152.2 million from 1.29 million attendees. The final date of the tour, one of two Paris shows rescheduled due to the 13 November 2015 attacks in the city, was filmed for the video Innocence + Experience: Live in Paris and broadcast on the American television network HBO. In 2018, U2 reprised the tour's autobiographical narrative and stage setup for its sequel, the Experience + Innocence Tour.
Background U2's previous tour, the U2 360° Tour, visited stadiums in Europe, North America, Asia, Oceania, Africa and South America from 2009 to 2011 and comprised 110 shows. The concerts featured the band playing "in the round" on a circular stage, allowing the audience to surround them on all sides. To accommodate the stage configuration, a large four-legged structure nicknamed "The Claw" was built above the stage, with the sound system and a cylindrical, expanding video screen on top of it. At tall, it was the largest stage ever constructed. U2 360° concluded in July 2011 as the highest-grossing concert tour (grossing $736 million) and the most-attended concert tour (selling 7.3 million tickets).
On 9 September 2014, after a five-and-a-half-year gap between records, U2 announced their thirteenth studio album, Songs of Innocence, at an Apple product launch event. It was released digitally the same day to all iTunes Store customers at no cost. The release made the album available to over 500 million iTunes customers in what Apple CEO Tim Cook called "the largest album release of all time." Songs of Innocence revisits the group members' youth in Ireland in the 1970s, touching on childhood memories, loves, and losses, while paying tribute to their musical inspirations. Lead vocalist Bono described it as "the most personal album we've written." It received mixed reviews, and some critics and consumers were critical of the digital release strategy; the album was automatically added to users' iTunes accounts without their consent, which for many, triggered an unprompted download to their devices.
Development
As early as opening night of the U2 360° Tour in June 2009, Bono told his friend/band consultant Gavin Friday that their next tour would have to be more intimate. During U2 360°, Bono and long-time tour designer Willie Williams first discussed ideas for their next live venture. One of Bono's suggestions was to begin future shows with the band performing underneath a single light bulb, in contrast to the massive stage structure underneath which they played during the 360° Tour.
Williams was aware that U2's long-time stage designer Mark Fisher was battling an illness and did not have long to live. As a result, Williams invited stage designer Es Devlin to the band's creative team in February 2013. The two previously collaborated in 2009 for the American theatre leg of Lady Gaga's Monster Ball Tour and in 2012 for Complicite's production of The Master and Margarita. Williams also invited Ric Lipson, Fisher's colleague at the design firm Stufish Entertainment Architects, based on positive experiences with him on past projects.
The first production meeting between U2 and their creative team for the Innocence + Experience Tour was held in March 2013 in the South of France, over what Williams called a "mad weekend". During this first meeting, Williams, Devlin, and Lipson created a scrapbook that served as the "style guide" for the tour's presentation, consisting of cut-outs, drawings, and paintings. Although Songs of Innocence was still in progress at the time and did not yet have a title, the autobiographical narrative that would characterise the album was already a driving idea for their tour. The band wanted to tell the story of their adolescence in Dublin in the 1970s and how they were "trying to figure out how they fit into the often violent and disrupted world outside" their homes. The manifesto for the tour was summarised by two phrases: "I can't change the world, but I can change the world in me", and "I can change the world, but I can't change the world in me." The first is a lyric from the band's 1981 song "Rejoice" and represents the mindset of a teenage Bono feeling powerless to make a difference in a world plagued by the Troubles, who instead views personal psychological changes as a possibility; the second phrase represents the modern-day realisation that the same person could make a difference in the world through philanthropic efforts but still struggle with the complexities of internal change. Devlin said, "The space between these two statements is the territory of the album and of the show." The band intended to stage shows in pairs and alternate the setlist between "innocence" and "experience" motifs night to night. Williams said, "The artfulness in this tour is in the ideas, not the hardware".
The band and their creative team focused initial meetings on what they wanted to communicate to the audience and how to make them feel. After defining the thematic arc of the show, the stage design began to take shape. Devlin explained the creative team's approach in designing the multifaceted stage: "We wanted to respond to the geometry of an arena: all that oval air, how to energize the whole mass of air in those spaces so that the atmosphere reaches everyone in the room equally." Williams found it beneficial to collaborate with two separate firms, Devlin's company and Stufish, on the stage because of their contrasting work methods. Devlin's team created physical models, while Lipson's team made animations and collaborated with Tait on construction drawings. Fisher was unable to physically attend any meetings after the first one, but did occasionally videoconference with the creative team via Skype. In the final meeting he attended before his death in June 2013, Bono asked the team to think of an object that could symbolise U2 and be incorporated into the stage design. Fisher suggested a cross, an idea that would be implemented into some of the stage's lighting fixtures.
Many of the band's original ideas were too costly to realise. One such proposal was to have four "flying rooms" that would move around the arena and feature internal projections of the band members; the idea was instead re-imagined as the video imagery of a young Bono attempting to write a song in his bedroom. Another discarded idea was to explode a giant light bulb over the B-stage to release junk and furniture from the 1970s; this was also re-imagined through video imagery, with a digital depiction of a light bulb smashing to release a tsunami. Williams and other staff had wanted to remove the backline bunkers concealing crew and equipment on stage, but eventually conceded to keep them for aesthetic reasons. Unable to shrink the bunkers any further due to the amount of resources needed to produce U2's concerts, Williams took a thematic approach to the problem by selecting a main stage that would harken back to band's "innocent" years; it is the same main stage that was used on their 1987 Joshua Tree Tour. The creative brief for the Innocence + Experience Tour was signed off in December 2013, with the intent to begin the tour in early 2014, but it was ultimately delayed until the following year, leading to an extended design period of two years. The creative team regrouped in July 2014 to resume development of the tour.
When U2's creative team assembled on 8 February 2015 in Lititz, Pennsylvania, they discovered the production as designed at that point would require of equipment to be hung from venue ceilings, surpassing their limit. At that time, the sound system was based on Clair Global's i-5 loudspeaker model and weighed in total. U2's long-time sound designer Joe O'Herlihy produced a revised design using the company's Cohesion CO-12 speaker model, bringing the weight of the sound system down to . Although production on the CO-12 had not been scheduled to start until September 2015, Clair was able to produce the speaker model in time for the tour's launch in May.
Set design and show production
The set was designed by Ric Lipson and Es Devlin under the creative direction of Willie Williams. The stage spanned the length of the venue floor and comprised multiple sections. At one end of the venue was the rectangular main stage, which illuminated as an "I" to represent "innocence" and measured wide by deep, with the performance area wide by deep. At the other end was a smaller circular B-stage, which illuminated as an "e" to represent "experience" and measured diametrically. Connecting the two stages was a walkway intended to represent the transition between their two themes. A flip-up piano was built into the B-stage, with the lift designed to unfold the instrument 90 degrees like a book opening, rather than raise it directly upwards.
A long, rectangular "video cage" was suspended above and parallel to the walkway. The structure, provided by SACO Technologies in conjunction with PRG Nocturne, featured LED video screens on the two largest faces measuring wide by tall, each one comprising 240 SACO V-Thru semi-transparent video panels. The panels' cabling was contained within the support rails, which were placed apart. An interior catwalk between the video screens, accessible by a kinetic staircase, allowed the band members to perform amidst the video projections. The entire structure was supported by eight Tait Nav Hoists that could vertically move it by in 30 seconds. The walkway and video screen were collectively referred to by U2 and their creative team as the "divide", as they bisected the venue. When lowered to the walkway, it acted as a barrier separating audience members on opposing halves of the venue. The band saw the "divide" as a metaphor for the tribal lines separating cities and for how the band's own actions were occasionally divisive amongst their fans. The video screen was originally supposed to be 24 feet longer to match the length of the catwalk, but combined with the already-extensive weight of the other equipment, it would have made touring impractical. In total, of equipment was rigged from the venue ceilings, making it, in Lipson's words, "one of the heaviest arena shows ever".