U2 debuts eye-popping, jaw-dropping, brain-breaking Vegas Sphere residency in the atomic city of blinding lights
"I'm ready for what's next," Bono declared during opening number "Zoo Station," but the audience could in no way be fully prepared for what would unfold over the next 120 minutes.
“Take me to that other place,” Bono crooned Friday during “Beautiful Day,” the final song of U2’s epic, historic first night of their 25-show residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas. And that is exactly what the iconic Irish band did during their transporting, immersive, sensory-overloading revue at the much-hyped supersized entertainment arena. “All the colors came out,” indeed.
U2 have never shied away from grand-scale concerts — three decades ago, they reimagined the live music experience with their wildly ambitious Zoo TV and PopMart tours — so there was perhaps no better act to christen the Sphere, a new five-years-in-the-making, $2.3 billion venue taking up two whole city blocks on the Vegas Strip. The world’s largest spherical structure, measuring 516 feet wide by 366 feet tall and encompassing 5.7 million cubic feet, the 18,600-capacity Sphere features a 160,000-square-foot wraparound LED screen (the highest-resolution LED screen in existence, comprising more than 268 million video pixels — the equivalent of 72 HD televisions combined) and a 580,000-square foot, 2K-resolution LED exosphere that can literally be seen from space. Due to the venue still being under construction during U2's planning process, the entire “U2:UV: Achtung Baby Live at Sphere” show was actually created in VR before finally becoming a glorious (sur)reality on Sept. 29.
And yet, U2 remained in complete command and control of this planetarium-like dome throughout their two-hour set; they were never swallowed up by the cavernous space or upstaged by all of the Sphere’s high-tech bells and whistles and smoke and mirrors. In this atomic city of blinding LED lights, the band may have brought their elated audience — which included superstar fans like Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom, Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King, Snoop Dogg, Chelsea Clinton, Lars Ulrich, Dr. Dre, Jimmy Kimmel, Matt Damon, Neil Patrick Harris, Diplo, Jane Seymour, Jason Bateman, Lebron James, Jon Bon Jovi, and even Sir Paul McCartney — to the brink of overstimulation, over and over again. But Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton, and fill-in drummer Bram van den Berg were the night’s true superstars, ensuring that there was always a human element at the heart of Friday’s vertigo-inducing extravaganza.
“Look at all this stuff!” Bono marveled, seeming as amazed as anyone by the Sphere’s scope. “Elvis has definitely not left this building. It’s an Elvis cathedral, and tonight there is a password to enter: ‘flirtation.’”
Focusing on material from Achtung Baby (the shapeshifting quartet’s electronic-leaning, rip-it-up-and-start-again 1991 album that inspired the above-mentioned groundbreaking Zoo TV trek), U2 kicked off their first live performance in four years on a color-changing, algorithmically controlled stage designed by longtime collaborator Brian Eno to resemble a giant neon turntable. And the peacocking, Presley-esque Bono was in full, flirty “The Fly” mode, dramatically donning his signature bug-eye shades and throwing arched-back sexy shapes as he dangled from his stripper-pole-like microphone stand at the stage’s molten, rotating core.
"I'm ready for what's next," Bono declared during opening number "Zoo Station," but the audience could in no way be fully prepared for what would unfold over the next 120 minutes.
Above the band, on the Sphere’s vaulted, curved ceiling — imagine an IMAX screen projected inside the Sistine Chapel — ran exclusively commissioned art installations, kinetic murals, and optical illusions by Eno, Marco Brambilla, Es Devlin, John Gerrard, and Industrial Light & Magic. Among the eye-popping, jaw-dropping, sometimes brain-breaking highlights were Devlin’s Nevada Ark (featuring digital sculptures of 26 endangered species specific to the state); Gerrard’s vapor-waved Surrender flag; and especially Brambilla’s “Even Better Than the Real Thing” sequence, titled “King Size,” starring a troupe of AI-generated Elvises. The latter’s constant looped motion evoked the woozy, seasick feeling of both the Habitrail-like, Kevin Godley-directed “Even Better” music video and Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion elastic elevator.
At other key concert moments, the seemingly endless Sphere “sky” lit up with a thousand points of light and fiery orange embers; silhouetted insects; Grand Canyon landscapes; whirring helicopters; an even-better-than-the-real-thing virtual Vegas panorama for the glammy, swaggering new single “Atomic City”; and a chalk-outline moon-balloon designed by U2 guitarist Edge’s wife, Morleigh Steinberg. That virtual balloon was attached to a real rope fashioned from tied-together bedsheets, from which an invited, delighted audience member gamely swung during U2’s first public performance since 1993 of “Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World.”
“Willie, this is a big one for you!” Bono later grinningly quipped, congratulating Willie Williams — U2’s visionary creative director for 40 years, who has overseen 11 of the band’s world tours — for truly outdoing himself this time around.
While U2’s sphere was as cutting-edge and bar-setting as it gets, it was still a nostalgic affair, as consummate old-school showman Bono paid tribute many of the band’s heroes. Along with multiple Elvis references, including a crooned snippet of “Love Me Tender,” Bono honored Vegas icon Frank Sinatra with a bit of “My Way” (and later wore a white dinner jacket reminiscent of Sid Vicious’s music video for the ex-Pistol’s cover of that song) and sang “Dancing in the Moonlight” by Thin Lizzy. As amusing proof that there truly was an human element to this spectacle, it appeared that Bono had spontaneously asked Clayton to play another lunar cover by another Irish legend, Van Morrison’s “Moondance,” but when the bassist launched into the Lizzy classic instead, Bono just went with it.
Bono seemed especially starstruck by McCartney’s presence Friday — “It’s like having Mozart in the house,” he gasped — interspersing interludes from the Beatles’ “Love Me Do,” “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” and “Blackbird” throughout U2’s Sphere set. (“Just know that we love you and we’ve stolen a lot of your songs,” Bono called out to Macca.) But Bono’s most emotional dedication came when he dedicated “Love Rescue Me” (the song U2 “stole from Bob Dylan”) to his recently departed friend, Jimmy Buffett. “It’s hard to say goodbye to someone,” he stated, visibly choked up.
The night’s other most touching dedication was for the non-Achtung track “All I Want Is You,” which Bono explained had been “an attempt to write a wedding song from a woman’s point of view. … There you have it. I never told that to anyone [before].” After performing the ballad, he said, “I’ve just sung that for Larry Mullen [Jr.]” — U2’s drummer who is sitting out the band’s Sphere residency as he recovers from surgery for various drumming-related injuries.
“Not since October 1978 have we played a show without Larry Mullen,” Bono said bittersweetly, as the crowd supportively chanted, “Larry! Larry! Larry!” However, those chants quickly turned into a mass “Happy Birthday” singalong for replacement drummer van den Berg, who was having just about the best birthday ever. “I would like to introduce you to the only man we would ask to stand — well, sit — in [Mullen's] shoes. It’s his birthday!” Bono announced. When the Dutch drummer was asked to say a few words, van den Berg just humbly uttered, “Let there be no mistake: There is only one Larry Mullen Jr.” The audience roared in approval and agreement.
The one technological disappointment of the Sphere’s kickoff was the fact that Aura, an army of humanoid robots, or “spokesbots,” that were supposed to greet and direct concertgoers entering the atrium, were not operational, and were therefore covered up with opaque sheets like sleeping parrots in cages. (“They’re still working out the kinks,” a lobby security guard told Yahoo Entertainment with a shrug.) But ultimately, it was the human element, not the humanoid element, that made “U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere” so special. On Friday, it felt like the ever-ambitious and envelope-pushing band tried to throw their arms around the world — and they succeeded.
U2’s residency will run through Dec. 16. Friday’s full setlist is below:
Zoo Station
The Fly
Even Better Than the Real Thing
Mysterious Ways
One
Until the End of the World
Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses
Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World
All I Want Is You
Desire
Angel of Harlem
Love Rescue Me
Achtung Baby
So Cruel
Acrobat
Ultraviolet (Light My Way)
Love Is Blindness
Elevation
Atomic City
Vertigo
Where the Streets Have No Name
With or Without You
Beautiful Day
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