Credit: Far Out / YouTube Stills
It’s not just the greatest albums and messiest nights that get written into rock and roll history, but the meeting point of music and mayhem that comes with spending night after night on the road, out on tour, that can become the stuff of legend, as well.
And tours can even define entire cultural eras, like The Beatles’ tours of America that sparked the British invasion, or the rock and roll package tours of Britain and Europe, which inspired those early Beatles performances in the first place. Subsequently, the jump to stadium-sized shows in the 1970s, from groups like Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, took rock and roll out of dingy bars and clubs and into cavernous (read: soulless, atmospherically flat, oversold and overblown) arenas.
Then there were tours from people like David Bowie, Pink Floyd (the first group to start bringing their own light show around with them from gig to gig) and Kiss, which added aspects of theatricality and grand, choreographed staging, characters and storylines to their nightly offering, giving way to spectacular displays from artists like The Flaming Lips or Gorillaz, in more recent times. Moving into the then-futuristic 1990s, groups like U2 equally captured and satirised the MTV zeitgeist by incorporating a staggering amount of screens, cameras and video footage into their shows. Each tour had to outdo the last, and bigger always meant better. Rock and roll is nothing, after all, if not an exercise in excess.
We’ve reached a point in time where every tour seems to need to come with a built-in concept. Sinatra and The Beatles might have popularised the idea of concept albums, but it was Bowie, the Stones and Pink Floyd who expanded that into concept tours (and who could forget Spinal Tap taking Smell the Glove around North America in 1982). Beyond a certain point in time, it seemed that standing in line to see your favourite band play your favourite songs was no longer enough. Each new tour needed a name, a theme, an elaborate and changing stage set-up, pyrotechnics, dancers, actors and extras, a light show, and just about anything you could dream of.
Harry Styles is back on tour now, although the schedule looks to me more like a series of residencies, with a new production he’s calling the Together Together tour. From the outside, it all looks just like the last production, Harry’s House, where the stage set up felt like an underfunded and underloved version of the mansion-esque staging with the ’60s sleepover-themed Short n Sweet tour from America’s sweetheart, Sabrina Carpenter.
Hayley Williams has just wrapped up the Hayley Williams at a Bachelorette Party, and Bob Dylan is now calling his Never Ending Tour schedule the Long Hot Summer Tour and taking it around America at the minute (playing much the same setlist as he did with his long-running Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour). Also going round the world in recent times was Taylor Swift, whose Eras Tour set attendance and financial records everywhere it went, and gave a boost to the local economies of any city it came to over the course of its 149-date jaunt.
But though the Eras Tour might be one of the highest attended and highest grossing of all time, I don’t think it’s going to have as much of a lasting cultural and musical legacy as some of the more seminal series of shows from acts like Elvis Presley, the Stones, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Talking Heads, Bruce Springsteen or Prince. Sure, the memories will last a lifetime for all those who were there in attendance, but Swift didn’t innovate any new concepts out on the road, nor did she introduce any radically reinvented ideas of what a show could be expected to look like on the Eras Tour.
Other concerts and tours have been as long in duration, as dramatically choreographed (and more!), and drawing from as wide a repertoire from across an artist’s career before Swift, but none ever generated as much revenue. Who needs innovation, anyway, when you’re worth over $2billion? However, below we have five tours from history that genuinely broke new ground in terms of stagecraft.
Five historic tours that were genuinely innovative
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.
