How U2 Wrapped Its 'Experience + Innocence' Tour

Chris Pizzello / Invision / AP – U2
U2 brings its “Experience + Innocence Tour” to the Forum in Inglewood, Calif., May 15.

“Trains, planes and automobiles!” is how Jake Berry, U2’s longtime head of production, described the daunting prospect of wrapping the band’s “Experience + Innocence: tour,” which ended Nov. 13 after six months grossing some $126 million over 59 sold-out performances in 30 arenas in the U.S. and Europe, according to Pollstar Boxoffice reports. And he’s not exactly kidding.

Because U2’s last stop was in Berlin, a make-up show after Bono lost his voice in early September, the tour’s 31 rigs carrying the band’s massive stage set-up had to driven to the Belgian port city of Antwerp where the team rented a warehouse before the gear was shipped back to its place of origin.

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“Fourteen or so of us are going to Antwerp and we’ll transfer everything into containers,“ Berry explained. From there the containers are shipped to New Jersey, Nashville, Vegas and Los Angeles as well as Basel, Switzerland, Dublin and London. “We just have to make sure it goes in the right one,” he says, which is no easy feat.

“I remember in Brazil once they didn’t offload one pallet and our amp racks went to another city,” says Berry, who seemingly has a story at the ready in any given situation. “We realized it when we were on our way to Sao Paulo so we stopped the plane in Rio and got it off the plane and trucked it back. We had a load-in day and only got them on show day so we didn’t lose a show, but that was the most harrowing experience.”

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Jake Berry would know, from having run tour productions for some of the biggest tours over the last 40 years, including the Rolling Stones, Beyonce, AC/DC, Mötley Crüe, Madonna and others. He’s run U2’s tours since 2001 and the Stones from the mid-’90s until 2008. (Which helps explain why Pollstar yesterday announced Berry would lead the programming of Production Live!, the production component of the 2019 Pollstar Live! conference and awards which runs Feb. 11-13 at Los Angeles’ Beverly Hilton – get your early-bird registration rate now).

– Jake Berry

U2’s Experience + Innocence tour, which corresponded with the bands Songs of Experience (2017) album, was part of a a three-year three-tour cycle which included 2015’s Innocence + Experience tour, which corresponded with the Songs of Innocence album (2014) and in between the Joshua Tree 30th anniversary tour, a smaller production that ran May-Oct. of 2017. Much of the gear’s been on the road since 2015.

When asked if there’s some sort of software program to help with tracking, returning and storing inventory, Berry laughs. “I think they call it the brain, actually,” he says. “It might sound difficult to the onlooker what we do, but we’ve nurtured this equipment through for three years so we know there’s 50 lighting trusses. All we do is work with our freight agent to make sure we put it into the right container. And my crew chiefs work out their container packs and they know the measurements for their equipment. So it’s not by the seat of the pants when we get to Antwerp.”

The reason U2’s production is being freighted by cargo ship, Berry explains, is only because the heavy touring season has passed and there’s little need to rush it by air. “If it were like June or July, then some people would want their equipment back, so we would do a deal where we air freighted it; but, because it’s the end of November and the end of the touring season, nobody’s in a rush so we can afford to spend the extra time by ocean.”

As far as the cost of breaking down a tour and returning it, which can easily run into the millions, Berry, as with everything on this tour, is well prepared. “We factor it in to our budgets at the start of the tour. We know for instance we did the “Innocence and Experience” tour which went from ‘15 and into ’16 and in the budget. We have an end of tour budget which allows the freight to go from Europe to America, America to Europe and then home at the end.”

All of which brings us to the Experience + Innocence tour wrap party, which happened in Dublin, which was originally slated as the trek’s last date before Berlin was tacked on at the end. “We did it in Dublin so that everyone could let their hair down and there’s a day off the next day, so if you have too much to drink you don’t have to go to work the next day,” Berry says.

He and his colleagues tend not to think of these parties as final farewells. “We always say on the road that you never say goodbyes,” Berry says, “it’s more see you later down the road because we always tend to bump into each other again. Our business is fantastic, the people in it are fantastic, the camaraderie is unbelievable. So you might see somebody three years later and you walk in and you’ll start talking to them like you were with them yesterday.”