most spectacular rock tour staged by any band". Background U2's 1987 album The Joshua Tree and the supporting Joshua Tree Tour brought them to a new level of commercial and critical success, particularly in the United States. Like their previous tours, the Joshua Tree Tour was a minimalistic, austere production, and they used this outlet for addressing political and social concerns. As a result, the band earned a reputation for being earnest and serious, an image that became a target for derision after their much-maligned 1988 motion picture and companion album Rattle and Hum, which documented their exploration of American roots music. The project was criticised as being "pretentious", and "misguided and bombastic", and U2 were accused of being grandiose and self-righteous. Their 1989 Lovetown Tour did not visit the United States, and at the end of the tour, lead vocalist Bono announced on-stage that it was "the end of something for U2" and that "we have to go away and ... just dream it all up again", foreshadowing changes for the group. Conception One of U2's inspirations for Zoo TV was a 1989 concert in Dublin that reached a radio audience of 500 million people and was widely bootlegged. Bono said the group were fascinated with the possibilities of radio and how they could be expanded using video to "beam concerts into Peking or Prague for free" or spawn "video bootlegs in cultures where it's hard to get [U2's] music". The wild antics of "morning zoo" radio programmes inspired the band with the notion of taking a pirate television station on tour. They were also interested in using video as a way of making themselves less accessible to their audiences. The band developed these ideas while recording Achtung Baby in Berlin at Hansa Studios. While in Germany, they watched television coverage of the Gulf War on Sky News, which was the only English programming available at their hotel. When they were tired of hearing about the conflict, they tuned into local programming to see "bad German soap operas" and automobile advertisements. The band believed that cable television had blurred the lines between news, entertainment, and home shopping over the previous decade, and they wanted to represent this on their next tour. The juxtaposition of such disparate programming inspired U2 and Achtung Baby co-producer Brian Eno to conceive an "audio-visual show" that would display a rapidly changing mix of live