The Fragility Tour was a concert tour in support of industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile album, which took place in late 1999, running until mid-2000, and was broken into two major legs, Fragility v1.0 and Fragility v2.0 respectively. Destinations included Europe, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and North America.[1]
The tour featured increasingly large production values, including a triptych video display created by contemporary video artist Bill Viola.[2] The images displayed on the triptych focused on storm and water imagery. "I don't want to do the standard 'rock band in a hockey arena' show", said Trent Reznor. "I want to up the par a little bit. I think our stage show has had a lot of thought put into it. It's not like a Korn or Rob Zombie show where they just go into the prop cupboard and pull out as much shit as they can. I hope, when people see our shows, they go, 'Fuck, that was smarter than that Korn tour I saw, but not in a pretentious way – it kicked ass.' On our previous tour the audience was our enemy but, this time around, we're best friends with the audience at the end of shows. Everyone's connected."[3]
Rolling Stone magazine named Fragility v2.0 the best tour of 2000.[4]
The Fragility v2.0 North American leg was filmed and recorded for the live album and double DVD tour documentary And All that Could Have Been, which was released in 2002.
Before several of the later performances, Recoil's 2000 album Liquid was played over the PA system.
On July 9, 2000, the rest of the tour was cancelled due to "band illness". The most notable "illness" was eight days earlier when the band went to London for a concert, and Reznor almost died from a heroin overdose, mistaking the heroin for cocaine, which he was addicted to at the time. He went into and completed rehab in 2001.