The U2 360° Tour was a worldwide concert tour by rock band U2. Staged in support of the group's 2009 album No Line on the Horizon, the tour visited stadiums from 2009 through 2011. 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 claimed that the tour would be "the first time a band has toured in stadiums with such a unique and original structure."
In an era of declining music sales, analysts expected U2 360° to be a major source of income for the band. Every date of the tour sold out, many within minutes of tickets going on sale. To accommodate the time required to assemble and transport "The Claw" between tour dates, three separate stage structures were required on tour. The 360-degree production increased the capacity of venues by up to 25%, leading to attendance records at over 60 venues. Various themes were incorporated into the shows; portions of the concerts featured outer space themes, due to "The Claw's" resemblance to a spaceship. Pre-recorded messages from the International Space Station were displayed during the shows, as were sociopolitical statements from Desmond Tutu and Aung San Suu Kyi. The setlists were adjusted for each year of the tour; for the 2010 shows, unreleased songs were debuted live, while for 2011 legs, the group performed more 1990s songs to mark the 20th anniversary of the release of Achtung Baby.
Comprising three legs and 110 shows, the tour began on 30 June 2009 in Barcelona, Spain, and concluded on 30 July 2011 in Moncton, New Brunswick. It twice visited Europe and North America, while making stops in South America, Africa, and Oceania. The 2010 North American leg of the tour was postponed until the following year after lead vocalist Bono suffered a serious back injury. U2 won Billboard Touring Awards for Top Tour and Top Draw of 2010 and 2011, and for Top Boxscore at a single venue in 2009 for shows at Croke Park in Dublin. A 2009 show at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California was filmed for the concert video U2360° at the Rose Bowl and was streamed live over YouTube; the concert set a new US attendance record for a single headlining act. The tour was generally well received by critics and fans. By its conclusion, U2 360° had set records for one of the highest-grossing concert tours at the time with $736 million in ticket sales, and for the highest-attended tour with over 7.2 million tickets sold.
Conception and stage design
Willie Williams, who has worked on every U2 tour since the 1982–1983 War Tour, was again a designer for this tour; Mark Fisher served as the architect. Williams had been toying with ideas for 360-degree stadium staging for U2 for a number of years, and presented sketches of a four-legged design to the group near the end of their Vertigo Tour in 2006. The inspiration for the "spaceship-on-four-legs" design, nicknamed "the Claw", came from the landmark Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport. Early reports referred to it as the Kiss the Future Tour, though the name was later changed.
The tour featured a 360-degree configuration, with the stage being placed closer to the center of the stadium's field than usual. The stage design featured a large four-legged steel structure that held the speaker system and cylindrical video screen and hovered above the performance area. The stage was surrounded by a circular ramp, which connected to the stage by rotating bridges. Fans with general admission tickets could be placed both outside the ramp as well as between the ramp and stage. The stage had no defined front or back and was surrounded by the audience. The stage design was able to increase the venues' capacities by about 15–20%. Tiered football stadiums were preferred venues in this scheme, compared to flat fields or baseball stadiums, although a few of the latter added to the routing. As with many large-scale tours of its era, the U2 360° Tour had both the workforce and the revenues associated with a medium-sized company.
The stages were built by the Belgian company Stageco along with the U.S.-based company Enerpac. Each stage deployed high-pressure, state-of-the-art hydraulic systems. These were used for the first time ever to assemble and dismantle the high tonnage structure. Stageco designed a unique system, based on Enerpac's Synchronous Lift System, to raise the modular construction to a height of 30 metres in an efficient and effective manner.