Setting up the stage/ a journey into the eastern bloc/ U2 makes their own clothes/ the woman's perspective: tying his testicles and tugging/ shaking down philips

THE FIRST single from Achtung Baby will be "The Fly," a track chosen because it sounds nothing like U2. The band figures that after not having a new U2 single for a couple of years, radio will play whatever they give them—so why not give them some­thing weird. When they go in to do a video for the track, Bono looks like a human fly in a black leather suit and big, bubble-eyed sunglasses. He decides that he should dress like this for the tour. The fly shades are almost a mask—he goes into character as soon as he puts them on. The black leather suit conjures up a pantheon of rock legends—from Jim Morrison to Iggy Pop—but is most clearly the suit Elvis Presley wore in his 1968 TV comeback special. Like Elvis, Bono dyes his brown hair black to turn himself into the personification of a rockin' cat.

Bono's ideas for staging the concerts are ambitious enough to make grown accountants weep. He wants giant TV screens across the stage, broadcasting not just U2 but commercials, CNN, whatever's in the air. He still has the televised juxtapositions of the Gulf War flipping through his head. Stage designer Willie Williams sees a chance to really go to Designer Valhalla. He wants to erect the illusion of a whole futuristic city, with the big TVs flashing and towers shooting up toward the sky. Bono will be the Fly crawling up the face of this Blade Runner landscape. Larry and Adam, it is agreed, should look like cops or soldiers—the future-shock troops. Edge has a different job. He's the guitarist, so he has to look flashy. The white shirts and black jeans he used to wear onstage have no place in future world. Fintan Fitzgerald, U2's wardrobe man, starts working out ways to tart up Edge like a

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Guitar hero from the Hendrix era, with oversize knucklebuster rings, pants covered with elaborate studded patterns, and a wool stevedore's cap instead of the hats and do-rags that usually cover his receding hairline. An evil-looking thin mustache and goatee complete Edge's transformation to psychedelic thug.

The band and the inner circle of Principle, their management com­pany, have started referring to the proposed show as "Zoo TV." It's an outgrowth of the song "Zoo Station" and in U2's imagination a visual extension of the "Morning Zoo" radio programs popular in America on which, between spinning records, wiseass disc jockeys make rude jokes, take phone calls, and play tapes of celebrities embarrassing themselves.

U2 has never accepted corporate sponsorship—the dubious institu­tion whereby a big advertiser picks up a lot of the money for a tour in exchange for being allowed to run ads (even on the tickets) that say, "Jovan presents the Rolling Stones" or "Budweiser presents the Who." Like R.E.M., Springsteen, and some other high-class rockers, U2 has always figured that—like selling songs to be used in commercials— sponsorship takes a bite out of the music's integrity and degrades the relationship between the artist and the audience. It's like inviting some­one over to your home and then trying to sell them Tupperware.

But in the spirit of irony and contradiction-kissing that they want to cook up for this tour, U2 plays with the idea of covering the whole stage with logos like the billboards on a crowded highway. Willie Wil­liams draws sketches for a stage design splattered with the logos of Burger King, Shell, Sony, Heinz, Singer, Betty Crocker, Fruit of the Loom, and a dozen other corporations, with three house-size TVs in the middle. One shows Bono singing, one shows a man selling beer, and the third is a close-up of Edge's guitar with a potato chip slogan nudging into it. Willie labels this design "Motorway Madness." It raises a big question: if they decorate the stage with all these corporate emblems anyway, why not let the corporations pay for them? Why not just sell the whole stage to advertisers, taking their money and mocking them at the same time? U2 plays with the notion for a while and then decides that if they ironically put up the logos, and then ironically take the money, it's not ironic anymore. At that point they have sold out, and no semantic somersaults can justify it. So they scrap "Motorway Mad­ness."

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