Soundchecks and add them in as the tour progresses, but the Zooropa tour will begin without any songs from the new album they have decided to call Zooropa.

The extramusical aspects of the show will be quite different from last year's tour. Just as Ned and Maurice have updated the on-screen videos to reflect the current confused situation in Europe, Bono is constructing a new character to play on-stage during the encores. The Mirrorball Man who closed the 1992 shows was an American TV evangelist/used car salesman/game show host in a cowboy hat throwing dollars around. There is no sense using that character in Europe. So Bono sets about trying to construct a European equivalent and starts singing "Desire" in a voice that sounds like an aging British music hall entertainer, or a faded Shakespearean actor touring the provinces.

Fintan Fitzgerald has been looking for the right costume for this old ham and comes in one day with a hilarious pair of 1970s platform boots, spray-painted glittering gold. Bono starts free-associating. Maybe this old guy is the last rock star, dragging himself around some years in the future, re-creating the joys of that great music of the twentieth century for other senior citizens. But of course, that's not all he is. Bono remembers how knocked out he was by Steven Burkoff's performance of Oscar Wilde's Salome, in which the actor slowed all the speeches down to half-speed. Bono tries talking like Quentin Crisp with his batteries running out and it creates a weird poignancy. "Oooh. lii've boughhht sommmme newwww shoesssss. Doooo youuuu like them?" It feels like an old man trying to hold himself together.

But it's Gavin Friday who comes in and supplies the unifying meta­phor. He demands to know—all allegory aside—who is this character really representing? Who was the Mirrorball Man really supposed to be? Bono says, "Well, the devil."

"Then," Gavin says, "he should wear horns."

Bono thinks that's ridiculous, it's too blatant. But Fintan secures some red horns and when Bono tries them on with whiteface and lipstick and platform shoes and aged British voice, he likes what he sees:

He sees Mr. Macphisto—the devil as the last rock star.

Bono pulls in all sorts of orbiting signals to finish creating Macphisto's character. He takes from a magician he saw in Madrid abrupt, almost comical movements—like a senile karate expert suddenly trying to snap into his old positions. He takes from the devil character

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In The Black Rider a ringmaster's demeanor and the stiff-shinned walk of someone hiding a cloven hoof. He uses Joel Grey's character in Cabaret as a touchstone for the decadence from which European fascism bloomed. Macphisto is Satan as a cross between Elvis, Sinatra, and a thirties Berlin cabaret star. He is, of course, also Goethe's Mephistopheles, that proto-European symbol of great art and temptation. Like Bloom in Nighttown (or for that matter Eve in the garden) Goethe's Faust risked his immortal soul for knowledge. That's a trade-off that fascinates U2.

Macphisto's public debut is at the first concert of the European tour, in Rotterdam. Backstage Bono looks through several suits Fintan brought for his selection and chooses a gold one, to match the shoes. He paints his face, puts on the lipstick, and then goes into the band's dressing room to see Adam, Edge, and Larry's reaction. They are star­tled. This is a lot creepier than they expected.

Macphisto lurches out at the encore to sing "Desire" and then in­troduces himself to the audience, crying, "Look what you've done to me!" The crowd hoots and cheers at this satanic Bono. "You've made me very famous." They laugh. "And I thank you for it. I know you like your pop stars to be exciting, so I've bought these." He hoists up one leg and displays his platform shoes. Big footwear close-ups on the Zoo TV screens. The audience loves it. During the rest of the encore (which is in effect the fourth set, after the Achtung/Fly set, the B stage acoustic set, and the U2 greatest hits set) Macphisto loses his horns ("Off with the horns, on with the show!") but not his diabolical persona. Though by the time he performs "Love Is Blindness" from the lip of the B stage with the white makeup running down his face, the line between Macphisto and Bono has become blurred. He ends by singing "I Can't Help Falling in Love with You" alone, after the other members of U2 have gone. Then Elvis Presley's original version of that song comes out of the loudspeakers, drowning out the last rock star with the first, and Macphisto walks slowly down the long ramp through the audience, back to the main stage, and disappears.

"From the introduction of Macphisto on, it's all cabaret," Bono says. "Macphisto is the Fly down the line. When he goes into falsetto on 'Can't Help Falling in Love,' it's the little boy inside the corrupt man breaking through for a moment. Just like in that awful tape of fat Elvis slurring that song, there's a moment when he sings a bit of it right, and you hear Elvis's spirit coming through. That's what I'm shooting for."

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"It was really a bizarre, kind of chilling feeling seeing him," Edge says. "It was everything we discussed. It was very disturbing, very unrea­sonable, and nothing to do with entertainment. It was something much heavier. I thought the idea of the horns was over the top, I thought it was spelling it all out, but in fact it really works."

U2 doesn't have much chance to appreciate how well Macphisto comes off. They are still commuting by their private Zoo plane back to Dublin to finish the album. Flood and Eno are working away, mixing and editing so that the band's work when they drag themselves back into the studio is minimized. They finally make a decision that confers an unexpected unity on the whole project: They throw off all the rock songs, all the guitar-based tracks like "Wake Up, Dead Man" and "If God Will Send His Angels" and make Zooropa entirely an album of disjointed, experimental pop. Now the whole enterprise is of one piece. Sonically, ironically, the finished album is much closer to the work Eno and Bowie did at Hansa in Berlin in the late seventies than Achtung Baby turned out to be.

"Realizing, 'Oh, this is not a rock album,' is a big relief," Bono says. "The world is sick of macho, sick of grunge. We need to get a female perspective in."

Edge shares the producer credit with Eno and Flood, not only be­cause he earned it with all the extra work he put in, but because, Bono rationalizes, with the conspicuous lack of rock guitar people will other­wise wonder where Edge went.

When final mixes are complete and cassettes are run off, Des Broadbery, the keyboard tech, is delighted to hear some ideas he threw in—a little chant loop on "Baby Face," some samples on "Numb"— have made it to the finished album. Larry Mullen takes a certain subtle pride in the fact that a bass part he came up with one night when Edge was working on guitar ideas has remained on the title song; Larry is the bassist on the intro to "Zooropa."

I suggest that Zooropa conjures up the madness and disorientation of touring in a way that will make a special impact on musicians. "I suppose that's true," Adam says with a half-hidden smile. "It does seem to have a lot of songs musicians will identify with. But I'd hate to think we've made a nineties Running on Empty."

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