U2 PopMart album Tour ticket for the sold-out Roundhay Park concert, Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, UK, Thursday 28 August 1997

A surviving admission ticket for U2’s PopMart Tour concert at Roundhay Park, Leeds, West Yorkshire, on Thursday 28 August 1997. The colourful ticket carries the oversized U2 PopMart Tour ’97 branding, a stylised globe and supermarket-inspired graphics that reflected the visual language of the band’s ambitious 1997–98 stadium tour. It records the Roundhay Park venue, a £29.50 ticket price, gates opening at 5pm and a 7pm showtime. PopMart was mounted in support of U2’s ninth studio album, Pop, released in March 1997, and deliberately played with themes of mass marketing, consumerism and pop culture. Its famously extravagant production used a huge LED video screen, a towering yellow arch, a giant olive and a mirrorball lemon, turning the stadium concert into a deliberately kitsch multimedia spectacle. U2’s official tour archive confirms the Leeds show as part of the European leg, between Belfast on 26 August and Dublin on 30 August. The Roundhay performance opened with Mofo and included I Will Follow, New Year’s Day, Pride (In the Name of Love), I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, Where the Streets Have No Name, Discothèque, With or Without You, Mysterious Ways and One. Liverpool indie rock band Cast were the opening act. Contemporary tour records give the Leeds concert an attendance of about 53, 917 and describe it as sold out. Roundhay Park, one of Leeds’s best-known public parks, has a long history as a venue for major outdoor concerts; Leeds City Council describes the park as covering more than 700 acres around three miles north of the city centre. This retained paper ticket is now a piece of late-1990s music memorabilia, documenting an era before smartphone tickets and QR-code entry became normal and recalling U2 at the height of large-scale stadium touring, as well as the graphic design and pricing of British live music in 1997. The ticket also preserves the physical, collectible character of pre-digital concert admission.