Staged in support of the group's 2000 album All That You Can't Leave Behind, the tour visited arenas across North America and Europe in 2001.

The stage featured a heart-shaped catwalk that encircled many audience members, and festival seating was offered in the United States for the first time in the group's history.

The Elevation Tour show was designed by Willie Williams, with Mark Fisher serving as the architect.

[3] Extending from the wings of the main stage were curved ramps shaped like the bottom of a heart, which joined together at the center of the venue floor.

[4] The heart shape was inspired by the video graphics being produced for the tour, and it was chosen by the creative team early in the design process.

[4] Williams was amused that the catwalks were the same shape as the vertical golden arch from the PopMart Tour stage when laid horizontally.

The setup was Williams's response to what he saw as a growing trend with rock shows having "big video screens on either side running something that looks like an HBO special".

He believed such a trend instilled a mindset into the audience that the most interesting thing happening at a given moment was what the video screens were displaying, thus diverting attention away from the actual live performance.

According to him, the easiest solution would have been to eliminate IMAG altogether, but it was "deemed necessary" because of the size of some indoor venues and the high cost of tickets.

[3] Each projector was positioned on its back and aimed upwards at a mirror that was operated by a crew member to direct the reflection around the venue.

During that time, the artists were given access to one of Media 100's editing suites in London, where they created images on a PowerBook G3 laptop and could instantly view them on the videowall.

The process allowed Owens's team to solicit artistic ideas from the band and turn them around within a single afternoon.

[3] The primary front-facing speaker arrays at stage left and right each featured 14 of Clair Brothers' i4 cabinets, variously angled at 2°, 5°, and 10°.

[6] Early in the tour, the lighting system featured 24 Fresnel fixtures with gold-painted barn doors for a "pleasantly stylish, Gucci feel".

These fixtures dominated the first part of the show, illuminating at about 50 percent to produce what Williams called a "wonderful brown, low color temperature light which the band loved".

As the tour progressed, Bono felt they were too nostalgic among the more contemporary elements of the show, while Williams thought they were being underused.

Among several unconventional fixtures in the lighting system were 30 modified police beacons, which were placed sideways in groups and whose movements were staggered with each other to create a "rain effect" during "Where the Streets Have No Name" to stun the audience.

At the corners of the stage were four custom-built "ripple drums" by LSD; Williams described the pieces as slowly rotating black trash cans with holes in them and "a naked 5kW fixture" inside.

The Turin show was played in a football stadium, with a black U-shaped semicircle extending out into the crowd instead of the heart.

The Berlin show was performed in a natural outdoor arena with a tent-like structure supporting all the band's flown gear such as speaker stacks and lighting rigs.

The tenor of the times dramatically affected the temperament of the shows, with Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" appearing frequently in the setlist and the band's "Walk On" taking on added emotional weight.

Shows would traditionally open under the venue house lights with the Influx mix of "Elevation" playing as the band's intro music.

The acoustic song would then normally be followed by the live favourite "Bad", which had appeared few times on the previous PopMart Tour.

The third leg saw some alterations to the setlist to reflect the much more emotionally poignant times that existed within America in the wake of the September 11th attacks.

"Please" also made one appearance in its electric form, in a similar style to its PopMart performance when it segued into "Where the Streets Have No Name".

Three tracks ("Bullet the Blue Sky", "Until the End of the World", and "Walk On") were played at all but one show apiece on the tour.

At the end of the performance, Bono opened his jacket, which he had worn throughout the Elevation Tour, to reveal an American flag in the lining, an image that was widely reproduced in the media.

Filmed on 1 September 2001, it captured the outdoor variant of the Elevation Tour at the band's Slane Concert.

[22] Willie Williams won a 2001 EDDY Award from Entertainment Design magazine for his work as the tour's show director;[23][24] the magazine said, "While U2's current Elevation tour is striking in its simplicity, Williams created an almost complete amalgamation of lighting and video by using the entire space of each arena as a projection surface.