U2 announces two Cdn. tour dates
U2 is scheduled to play two Canadian dates – in Toronto and Vancouver – on its 2009 fall tour of North America.
It will be announced today that the veteran Irish rockers will perform at Toronto’s Rogers Centre on Sept. 16 and at Vancouver’s B.C. Place on Oct. 28, as part of their 2009/2010 tour of stadiums throughout the world.
Other Canadian stops are a possibility for either fall 2009 or summer/fall 2010.
Arthur Fogel, the CEO global touring and chairman of global music at Live Nation, revealed these details and more to Sun Media in advance of today’s global announcement by U2.
Fogel said the “U2 360 Degree Tour,” as it will be called, begins June 30 in Barcelona, Spain, at Noucamp Stadium and will play throughout Europe until the third week of August, before beginning the North American leg on Sept. 12 at Soldier Field Stadium in Chicago.
The opening act for the Toronto show will be Snow Patrol, and Black Eyed Peas will open in Vancouver. Rotating opening acts in Europe will include Snow Patrol, Glasvegas, Elbow, and The Kaiser Chiefs.
Tickets, $30, $55, $95 and $250, will go on sale this coming weekend for the European shows, and at the end of March for the North American shows. Multiple shows in some cities are possible.
“My philosophy has always been tiered pricing,” Fogel said. “Given the (economic realities) in our world, I think it’s more important than ever. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to have 10,000 tickets for every show at $30, the GA price on the (floor for standing only) is $55, and then most of the tickets are in the $95 range and then maybe 10 percent of the house at $250.”
Forgel says he is confident that when U2 tickets go on sale, there will not be a repeat of the Bruce Springsteen mess in January, when anxious buyers who went to Ticketmaster were incorrectly told shows were sold out already, and then were redirected to other sites where tickets were priced much higher, including Ticketmaster’s own TicketsNow.
Springsteen and his camp expressed their outrage publicly.
“I think it’s abundantly clear that whatever happened on that Springsteen fiasco … that Ticketmaster’s sensitivity has heightened dramatically to managing the process, to not allow that to happen,” said Fogel. “The reality is that generally how tickets end up on the secondary market, like StubHub and all these sites, is people sell them. It’s people selling to people. Whatever happened on Springsteen, I don’t know. Suffice to say I’m absolutely confident that the system will in no way be feeding the secondary market. Individuals, like if somebody buys four tickets and decides they want to resell two of them, I don’t see anyway humanly possible to stop that. It’s certainly not something that we’re endorsing or facilitating.”
Fogel said the 2009 portion of U2’s tour will wrap up at the end of October before resuming in the summer/fall of 2010 in Europe and North America again, and hopefully South America.
U2 released No Line On The Horizon on March 3, and celebrated with a week-long residency on David Letterman that wrapped up last Friday night.
They also performed their first single, Get On Your Boots, on both the Brit Awards and the Grammys.
Fogel said the band had been rehearsing leading up to those promotional TV appearances but will really get down to work somewhere in Europe later this month or early in May for their world tour.
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