Over 2.5 million people will experience Macnas in action in 12 different European countries.
(Páraic Breathnach, Sunday Independent, 1993)
In 1993, Macnas was approached by a member of the U2 production team, John (Jake) Kennedy, asking them to submit an idea for the U2 Zooropa Tour in 1993. The concern for Turkish immigrants in Germany,
the onset of ethnic wars in former Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda prompted U2 to address some of these issues in their U2 Zooropa ’93 Zoo TV Tour.
Bono had seen some of the work we’d done with the Saw Doctors, whose manager Ollie Jennings was a co-founder of Macnas. He was interested in having some kind of circus carnival idea in the Zooropa show.
(Páraic Breathnach, Sunday Independent, 1993)
U2 wanted the pre-show to highlight the rise of fascism in Europe and have a degree of community engagement. The storyboard put together by Macnas appealed to U2 management, and Macnas representatives Rod Goodall and Páraic Breathnach travelled to Dublin to meet the band at the end of 1992.
Bono came in strumming this steel guitar, then he put it down. Both Páraic and I were suffering from the flu. Then Bono got Jake to call in the band. So they came in, all of them, and he said “Look lads just showing you this.” “Yeah, Bono, that’s great, nice to meet you.” Then he turned to Jake, “We’ll run with that, you sort it out.” We were still in the room, but we just weren’t there anymore, it was amazing. It wasn’t even bye-bye or anything. That was it he was back to what he was strumming before.
(Rod Goodall, March 2007)
After much humming and hawing regarding the cost and conditions of the four-month tour, a contract was finally signed. Padraig Boran, a Macnas associate, agreed to act as chief negotiator with Principle Management on behalf of the company. Macnas would prepare a 30- minute pre-show on the theme of ethnic cleansing that involved 80 to 100 volunteers in each concert location.
It’s never been done before and it’s quite a daunting task to let yourself loose surrounded by 72,000 people at a rock concert in the middle of a stadium. It’s imaginative of U2 to come up with this idea, to feel that this is the direction rock ‘n’ roll should be going. We feel fit for the challenge.
( Páraic Breathnach, Sunday Independent, 1993)
Taking on a tour of this scale had its share of headaches and reservations. There was a lot involved in the organisational process taken on by Macnas itself; working with local travel agents to book hotels, hire buses and coordinate all aspects of the production. Some people in Macnas believed it was in the interest of the company to take on the challenge, while some others argued against the U2 event saying it was not the true path of Macnas, comparing it to “someone leaving their wife to go live with a model” (Pete Sammon, January 2007).
It would mean huge exposure for the company as well as up to four months’ paid employment for the actors and crew. It would also establish the company’s name in the rock ‘n’ roll world, and give Macnas unprecedented status among the youth population of Ireland and Europe.
Every teenager in the country asked us for our autograph after Zooropa… If anybody met you they would have heard about Macnas for that reason.
(Pete Sammon, January 2007)
Zooropa Tour 1993
Photograph from Macnas Archive
The Zooropa tour began in Rotterdam in April 1993. A large group of Macnas designers and builders were on hand for three to four days before the concert to ensure the equipment and the props were fully functioning and all the problems were ironed out. After some initial problems, everyone settled in and got accustomed to each other.
Zooropa was really, really hard work in a very macho world, I think 14 girls and 300 men, it was like being with an army. In the beginning all the men were chatting us up and trying to make waves on you and after a couple of months, when they weren’t getting anywhere, they would start being your friend, and then it came through they had girlfriends. They called us the hairy bus because we all had really long hair, even the boys, Pete Nelson, Fred and Midie. Most of the U2 crew were British and Australian. I remember there was one of the U2 crew and she was a rigger and she used to sit up on the flies beside the stage doing her knitting to keep in touch with her girlie side.
(Jane Talbot, March 2007)
The logistics proved difficult andmany adjustments had to be made to the existing plan. The initial idea was to have an oversized Hoover move through the stadium audience. This idea was later abandoned in favour of a stage show when it was realised many of the stadium entrances were too low and security were worried about crowd control.
Two massive Hoovers, the Zuurs, were built by Macnas in the Ballybane workshop. These objects were up to 20 feet in height, with a vacuum bag that unzipped to release helium balloons. People were guided into the Hoover and released from inside where they could exit off stage. Other props included the doctors’ and nurses’ uniforms, oversized medical instruments and plinths.
The doctors had these helmets, you know in the old style, doctors had this light on their head for looking into your face; it was made out of a flash gutted from cameras on a band, wired onto a switch and every time we looked at the audience it would go flash; very clever stuff.
(Dick Donoghue, December 2006)
Over one hundred generic large heads were modelled from clay and constructed from paper and resin. The costumes, designed and made by Margaret Linnane, consisted of the doctors’ and nurses’ white coats, baddie costumes for Captain Chickenhead and his side kick, up to one hundred black overalls with a red trim and motifs for the volunteers, and four costumes for the “U2 band” with caricature heads. One large truck was hired for the equipment and a state-of-the-art touring bus for the cast who doubled up as crew.
In another workshop, on the other side of town, all the steel fabrication was being done while carpenters put together other props and created the boxes which the masks are carefully fitted into for travelling by truck from stadium to stadium all over Europe.
(Páraic Breathnach, Sunday Independent, 1993)
Zooropa Tour, 1993
Photograph from Macnas Archive
Zooropa Tour, 1993
Photograph from Macnas Archive
Zooropa Tour, 1993The idea was to recruit all the volunteers through the U2 fanzine. This worked in Rotterdam when Macnas had the time to contact the fanzine beforehand but for the rest of the tour, Macnas performers Hillary Kavanagh and Gary McMahon had to search for volunteers along the tour route.
Before we left Ireland, we hooked up with the U2 fanzine to get volunteers in each city to take part in the ethnic cleansing show as well as contacting friends and friends of friends in Europe and going to Irish bars in the different cities to recruit people for the show. The volunteers, one hundred in all, were split into 50 goodies and 50 baddies – 50 of them wearing the Massive Heads, and the other 50 of them as Captain Chickenhead soldiers.
(Hillary Kavanagh, December 2006)
Volunteers, who received a free ticket to the concert, were required to come to the venue for a one-day rehearsal that started at 10 o’clock in the morning. The rehearsals consisted of a short warm-up, a pre-show rehearsal, costume fitting and lunch with the crew.
The logo got branded on. The volunteers’ costumes were black boiler suits and needed the red trim stitched on. And the Hoover emblem had to be mended, fixed and drycleaned at different locations.
(Margaret Linnane, April 2007)
The stage was set up in the form of a T, with the two Zuurs on either side of the main playing area, one very large and one smaller. The pre-show began when four or five characters would come on stage wearing the generic Big Heads. They charged across the stage and were drawn back to the Zuur by bungee cords attached to their costumes. The suction-like effect pulled off their clothes, which were sucked into the Hoover.
There was also a doctor and some nurses who went into the audience measuring people’s heads and taking notes to see if they matched up to the dimensions of the perfect race. They performed a big theatrical operation to turn the person into “a real man” then they carried him off on a plinth. At one point all these people [the volunteers] started to enter from one side of the stadium all wearing Big Heads.
(Dick Donoghue, December 2006)
The 50 volunteers with the large heads were guided through the crowd and led onto the stage where they met Captain
Chickenhead, leader of the “baddies”, played by Dick Donoghue and his sidekick, Gary McMahon. As soon as the victims entered the Zuur, their heads were removed and placed on the stake at the top of the banner. The 50 volunteers holding the banners took their place in the safety pit surrounding the stage. It was a sinister image that ended with the sporadic release of black helium balloons.
Four people escaped during the incineration process and hid behind one of the Zuurs. They captured Captain
Chickenhead and his sidekick and threw them inside one of the Hoovers, thereby ending the massacre.
Just before the real U2 came onstage, the roadies wheeled out a canvas laundry bag. Inside the bag was “Bono”, played by Midie Corcoran, wearing the Big Head. Midie remembers feeling that the “adulation was wonderful” as music from 2001 Space Odyssey started up, and smoke billowed out of the box. “Bono” stuck out a gloved hand and waved to the audience as U2 music blared from the speakers in a virtual wall of sound. The audience went wild. The excitement reached fever pitch when the rest of the “band” came onstage in the big heads.
After strutting around the stage for a few moments to the strains of U2 over the PA system, the “roadies” returned, put the performers back in their boxes and wheeled them offstage.
Early Macnas ideas for the show were revived for the Irish section of the tour when U2 generously allowed the group extra time in between the warm-up bands for added entertainment. One of the acts added was an image of “Bono” surfing over the audience’s heads under the angel fish that were hung over the stadium.
There were 180 crew involved in the Zooropa Tour, consisting of riggers, roadies, costume people and technicians. Extra crew were hired locally for each concert and three stages were in operation at all times; one was being dismantled from the night before, one was in use for the concert that day, and the third was being assembled for the concert on the following night. Rocco, a U2 roadie, was in liaison with Macnas Tour Manager John Ashton at all times. Rod Goodall and Páraic Breathnach were on hand during the preliminary engagements, returning to Ireland to make preparations for the Galway Arts Festival summer parade, Noah’s Ark, leaving the art direction to Keith Payne.
A big bus costing half a million pounds with twelve beds and a TV lounge was our home for the four months. Every second night we slept in a hotel. One night in the bus on the road, and if you had two shows or more in the same place then we had a hotel. When U2 would go on stage, we would pack up and go because you had to get off the site in a specific order so we were always the first out…
(Dick Donoghue, December 2006)
Zooropa Tour, 1993
Photograph from Macnas Archive
Zooropa Tour, 1993
Photograph from Macnas Archive
The U2 Zooropa Tour was a high point for all those present. There were countless stories of what happened on the road. Hilary Kavanagh remembered the high life:
A brilliant afternoon, on the boat on Lake Geneva… that was amazing; jumping off the deck, swimming in the lake, and drinking champagne with U2, the Velvet Underground, Stereo MCs and Naomi Campbell.
(Hilary Kavanagh, December 2006)
Dick Donoghue took advantage of one week’s break in Germany by joining his partner in Berlin to see the sights:
We’d have mornings off and then we’d have the odd day off. We worked our asses off, but we did have days off. We had a one-hour rehearsal in the morning, and that was the only time during the day when we could rehearse. It was about tightening up the show. Doing the same show you get lazy. It was good work.
(Dick Donoghue, December 2006)
The tour was not without moments of panic and chaos when things went wrong, like the bus breaking down on the way to Portugal and not knowing if they would make it to the gig on time.
We had to get taxis from Paris to Lisbon. We had breakfast in France, lunch in Spain and dinner in Portugal. We played Doris Day all the way. The gear went on the trucks. As far as I remember there was 14 tons of gear in the truck and we all helped lift it in and out of the truck every day.
(Jane Talbot, March 2007)
Gary McMahon, Captain Chickenhead’s sidekick, talked of a particularly distressing show in Germany:
Another job for me was to find the volunteers. We went to the Irish pubs in Bremen, and Munich, but it was a big mistake because they all knew each other from the pub and they went on the piss so they all turned up with six packs and it was a scorching day; there was no shelter and they had come very early. They sat outside drinking beer and we had to run through getting them into costume, dividing them up into two halves and with the Big Heads and the banners they were carrying and this was in the Olympic stadium in Munich. The stadium was kind of built in a bowl, like it was scooped out of the earth, and there were these steps and they had to march down these steps from the very top. The steps are very steep and they are carrying these poles and they’re all pissed. I was freaking out, because if one person fell it would be a domino effect. They got down anyway. By the time they got down to the bottom – and it took a long time, longer than normal – the audience had twigged what this was about – fascism, Nazism – and then the bottles came… The beginning went very slow but what we did on stage went very, very quickly.
(Gary McMahon, January 2007)
Going on tour with U2 was a memorable occasion for all those involved. There was plenty of partying, hard work and the thrill of playing before audiences of up to 80,000. It was also a busy time for Macnas, and one that stretched the company in terms of resources and logistics, but it was an exciting time also. Margaret (Mags) Linnane, who was in charge of costumes, remembers being brought back to reality when Páraic Breathnach arrived in the beat-up Macnas van to take everyone home.
The U2 Big Heads created for the Zooropa Tour were later re-named the Massive Heads as they became as iconic as the characters themselves; appearing in a variety of shows, events and promotions in towns and cities all over the world. More caricature heads followed in the rock ‘n’ roll vein, including two Robbie Williams’ heads, the Gallagher brothers and Boyzone. At the opening of the Eurovision Song contest in 1994, Macnas performed a number that included more Massive Heads, this time in the guise of Irish literary figures and prominent Irish public personalities. A prestigious MTV Awards ceremony, also in 1994, saw the appearance of five Jean Paul Gaultier heads.
For Dick Donoghue, the Zooropa Tour was one of the highlights of his time working with Macnas in the early years and a memory he will always treasure.
I was paid by the week; that was the best gig of the lot of course, because we got to tour for four months to 42 cities in Europe… free accommodation, free travel, free food, and we were paid at the end of every week. There, where would you get a gig like that? Of course it was the best gig!
(Dick Donoghue, December 2006)
Zooropa Tour , 1993
Photograph from Macnas Archive
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