'There were people who took their clothes off!'

21 Sep 2006
'People would be saying to me, 'It's too much to take in - there's far too much going on to absorb!' And that kind of overload was absolutely the intention behind the show.' Paul McGuinness on the DVD release of 'Zoo TV Live From Sydney'.

Paul McGuinness has been talking to Hot Press about the Zoo TV Tour and the release this week of the live DVD debut of the Sydney show from 1993.

Here's a few choice extracts.

BIG SCREENS AND CARS TRABANTS IN THE ROOF

'We had designers who were thinking big. Willie Williams, who had been with the band since the '80's as a lighting designer.... when he wasn't working for U2 he had worked in ballet and theatre presentations ... and we put him together with Mark Fisher, an English architect who had been involved in the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd shows. And he had a great mixture of artistic sensibility and architectural know-how. So the ideas could be translated into something that was not just visually appealing but also could be put up in the very short periods of time that we had available...'

ON THE VIDEO CONFESSIONAL

There were people who proposed to each other. There were people who confessed to adulterous liasons. There were people who took their clothes off - that was quite common. Yeah, and there were people who made serious points. We used to edit them together in the afternoon before the show.... there's a good sample of those on the DVD.'

MICK JAGGER ON THE ZOO

'I remember when Mick Jagger saw the show in Dublin, I was standing with him and he said to me, 'This is unbelievable. Wow! This is going to be like Star Wars. If you do something as big as this, we have to do something even bigger!' So it's a little like an arms race.'

Read the whole interview in the new Hot Press

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