Some things can be certain when you're off to a U2 show. Number one is that you will be experiencing astonishing music and performance. Closely following this is the shape and form of the show itself. This shape shares the fiber of the music and combines to make that most sought after, magical whole. Like the music, the design is spare yet huge, iconic and simple, yet satisfyingly multilayered.

The latest foray by U2, The Vertigo Tour, sees the band exploring and extending raw rock-and-roll roots. The album it supports, How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, is an exploration of birth and death, God, war, peace, and, as with them all, love. It is musically a reversion to what has always been U2's greatest strength: rocking hard — epically, simply, reverbratingly hard.

The design of the show plays to the strengths of simplicity, but this is simplicity executed on a very complex scale. There are things you would expect to see on a big concert: Martin MAC 2000 wash units in large numbers, VARI*LITE VL3000^™ profiles upstage, Martin Atomic 3000 strobes. Then, there were the surprises: the single Arri 18kW, copiously gelled in dark blue; the four vertical sticks that fly in with a simple array of no color ETC Source Fours®; the shockingly cool Barco MiSPHERE video arrays. But all of this is deployed with a disciplined approach driven by strong choices. Each song has its signature look, and no look is repeated.

The tour is still in its early days, and it proved to be an excellent time to see an amazing piece in the first throes of finding its core. The day after the show, we sat down with U2's show designer, Willie Williams. Williams has long plied his craft with U2, and in our discussion, we got a rare look behind the surface of designing a rock show, glimpsing a collaboration of personalities and technologies.

LD: So where does it begin?

Willie Williams: I've worked with U2 for a very long time, so it is an ongoing collaboration. Given their status in the industry, it's not like any other kind of design job, because it's so personal and because we know each other so well.

It's a much more comfortable collaboration than working with a new artist where you have to learn about them and find out where they are coming from. We know each other inside out, so there's an opportunity to stretch myself. But at the same time, they have the resources and the balls to do something groundbreaking. In fact, that's a given now. We don't even talk about it. If they're going to go out, it has to be extraordinary.

LD: So, the early meetings?

WW: Generally, the way it happens is I go in by myself first, probably about a year ahead of time, and we just catch up, because I tend not to see the band very much between tours. It is helpful when we get back together again, because it's very easy to see where the changes are and what's going on. Plus, they're in the studio, so the most informative thing is what the music sounds like. The album is only ever half finished when I first hear it. But this time, it was very clear that they were absolutely on a roll.

I started the process by making a book of sketches of everything that you could possibly do with a generic stage in an arena: at one end, in the center, with B-stage, without B-stage, loops, ramps, in sections, and so on. I wanted to show them that these aren't necessarily aesthetic choices. They are often simply practical decisions based on the parameters of the show, seat kills, etc.

It helped us cut to the chase and focus on what the stance should be — what the show was about — rather than getting sidetracked by the position of the drum riser.

That first meeting cleared up a lot of things for me. When presented with an album title like How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, there's a temptation to take it literally, and I had several “bomb” ideas which I liked. It became clear, however, that the title is metaphorical; the atomic bomb is your relationship, or Bono's father dying, or any of the huge things which we have to deal with in life. As always with U2, the songs are really about relationships.

I took this on board and for a while thought we could do something really minimal but a lot more aggressive than the Elevation tour had been. The Edge was really keen to not even have a B-stage. He said, “Let's contain the energy. Let's just have a stage, no ramps, no anything. Let's just go out there and play.” That's easy for the guitar player to say.

In a way, this tour is the culmination of where they have been coming from for a while, including the last album. Given that we are playing in the same buildings as on the Elevation tour, clearly this was not going to be a radical departure in terms of the touring format

LD: It seems as though, physically, this tour was an evolution of Elevation, if you will.

WW: Yes, exactly. But the key thing was that what comes out of this box is very different from what came out of Elevation in terms of mood, because the world is different. The show needed to be a lot less cuddly and a lot more aggressive.

LD: The show has a certain exploded look in terms of pixels, though. How did the LEDs come into the picture?

WW: At the start of the process, I had assumed that I wouldn't go anywhere near LEDs now that it has become so ubiquitous in rock shows. However, I am in touch with a lot of LED manufacturers and could see that there was still potential to develop some new and interesting ideas. We started talking and a lot of fun ideas emerged. What became the Barco MiSPHERE panels are obviously the showiest element, but there's also the LEDs built into the stage and the SACO Factory Lights.

LD: Were those MiPIX around the edge?

WW: No, they are custom LED lighting fixtures built for us by SACO in Montreal. I don't think they even have a name yet.

The MiSPHEREs came out of a discussion between Mark Fisher and I. [Fisher, a renowned show designer in his own right, is a frequent collaborator with Williams.] We had been talking about various ways to fill the area above the stage — that's the key to making a rock show work. When you're selling 360°, you can't have large physical objects as they'll block sightlines. Originally, we started talking about these tiny little LED pixels which would hang on infinitely thin filaments. Oddly, we both had the same idea independent of each other; Mark started talking along these lines, and I already had a little picture of something similar.

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