The biggest pop band in the world looks tiny in the sphere. U2 returned to the stage last Friday after four years for a multi-concert residency to inaugurate this new iconic building in Las Vegas, whose main attraction is a sphere covered with a 54,000 square meter LED screen. There is a prison in the room. At least that’s how it seems when you look at it from below. At the top there is a hole, like the roof of the Roman Pantheon. It is an illusion as this is a closed place. The music starts playing and the walls start to crack. Light comes in from outside. White and shiny. It forms a huge cross. Bono, The Edge and Adam Clayton’s fair has begun.
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At a time when everyone wants to sell experiences, the Irish band have built one on the foundation of memories, taking the memory back to 1991 when they released “Aehrung Baby”, the album they recorded in Germany during all turned their eyes to the future. “It’s our most brutal album, we had to fight hard to get it out. It’s also our most political album,” said Bono at Saturday’s concert, dressed almost always in black, just before performing So Cruel, a song that had not been played on tour since 1992.
U2 has arrived in Las Vegas with respect under their arm for a 25-day residency that ends in mid-December. Many of the artists come to this city with more experiences from the past than visions of the future. Bono, a philanthropist worth around $700 million, also saw an opportunity to preach in this place in the middle of the Nevada desert. In the concert he calls the room the “Cathedral of Elvis,” one of the characters who inspired him as a child on Cedarwood Road in Dublin. This god of youth appears before the 18,000 spectators in a mural called King Size, a work by artist Marco Brambilla. “Even Better Than The Real Thing” plays and hundreds of images of the idol created using artificial intelligence appear on the screen. Edge, wearing his iconic bucket hat, strums his guitar while Bono twirls around on a small platform in the middle of the stage. “Elvis is life when you are dead,” says the messianic singer a few moments later.
Pauli The PSM performs the day before U2’s opening concert at La Esfera on September 29, 2023. Kevin Mazur (Getty Images for Live Nation)
In Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, the memoir the singer released last year, Bono claims he comes from a long line of salesmen on his mother’s side. He sees himself as a salesman. “I sell ideas, I sell songs, and occasionally I sell merchandise,” he writes. From Friday to December 16th, Bono is now selling the impressive ball that is part of the entertainment area of Madison Square Garden in New York. According to organizers, the room offers a glimpse of the future of the music and entertainment industry thanks to a screen with a total resolution equivalent to 72 HD televisions and immersive sound that appears to come from headphones and inputs costing up to $500. Paul McCartney, Oprah Winfrey, Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre as well as other celebrities had already come to see the show.
“I can hear the murmuring of the people up there,” Bono said Saturday, pointing to the third floor. “It cost $2.3 billion to be able to hear them,” joked the group’s leader. U2 appeared weakened but rejuvenated. On drums, Dutchman Bram van den Berg replaces Larry Mullen Jr., who is recovering after surgery for elbow and knee injuries. Van den Berg, 41, is the drummer for the group Krezip. “The first album of ours he heard was Pop from 1998,” Bono explained, aware that there were only a handful of people in the audience born after the ’90s. “My first reaction after I saw it was to say, ‘It’s too much.’ Tall, too handsome. “This won’t work,” he added. And yet it works. The group was rejuvenated with the first millennium in its ranks.
U2 is dedicated to Mullen Jr. All I Want is You, the song Bono wrote for his wife Ali and which closes Rattle and Hum (1988), an album that sold 14 million copies. The group appears on a record player, a device that seemed anachronistic when Aktuell Baby was released in 1992 and later saw a rebirth, serving as a metaphor for the band itself. The stage is a copy inspired by a work of art created by Brian Eno for the London gallery Paul Stolper. During the two-hour concert, which began half an hour late due to “technical problems,” the group nodded several times to those who have accompanied them in their career.
From “zapping” to virtual reality
Featured is the Baby Sphere from Zoo TV, the Irish band’s groundbreaking multimedia tour between 1992 and 1993. The show’s director, a feast for the eyes and ears, is Willie Williams, who began working with the group in 1983 at the War -Album tour as a lighting designer. It was he who developed the influential concept in 1992 that used signals from antennas, television broadcasts and zapping. However, he has now designed the new show at the same time as he is building the Sphere using virtual reality in London. The team that invented it comes from a generation that knows that screens should be turned off too. This occurs at various points in the four acts into which the concerto is divided.
A moment from U2’s performance at La Esfera, September 30, 2023. Kevin Mazur (Getty Images for Live Nation)
U2 has always had a special relationship with the western United States. A national park in California gave his name to his legendary 1987 album “Joshua Tree.” They chose the corner of Seventh Avenue and Main in downtown Los Angeles to pay tribute to The Beatles when recording the video for “Where The Streets Have No Name.” In 1983 they recorded Under a Blood Red Sky, a live album at Red Rocks, an amphitheater outside of Denver, Colorado. The Sphere is the opposite of Red Rocks, a forum where the stars serve as a ceiling. The stars are now aligned: it’s the cell phones that won’t stop shining in a concert that’s set to flood social networks. “Don’t believe what you hear, don’t believe what you see,” Bono sang in the song “Acrobat.” Small white dots appeared on the screen on a black background. It seemed like thousands of lightning bolts.
This Saturday Love is Blindness was played live for the first time in 17 years. It is the last song the group played in the session at Hansa Studios in Berlin, a session in which Edge stripped off his clothes to use his guitar to convey the difficult divorce he was going through. The guitarist, whose real name is Dave Evans (62), gave his solo the final blow without even moving his face. At the other end stood the equally impassive and elegant Adam Clayton.
Nuclear city
But not everything is in the past. The group, which has had a hard time staying current in recent years, is adding a new song to the show: Atomic City. The guitar riffs sound like an homage to The Clash, another Irish influence. The theme does not surprise the audience too much, who prefer to be carried away by the images designed by Industrial Light & Magic, the company founded by George Lucas. The screen shows an image of Las Vegas and how the vice capital begins to crumble as a series of cranes demolish the buildings until nothing remains but sand.
In the evening they also play some hits, including All That You Can’t Leave Behind (2000) and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004). U2 dedicates the last minutes of the concert to the first years of the 21st century. “Beautiful Day” plays and the sphere begins to fill with bats, bats, beetles and birds. It is a mural by artist Es Devlin about the 26 endangered species in Nevada. It’s Bono’s Ark. The fair is about to end. After the show, a question comes to mind: Who can fill the infinite space of the sphere after U2?
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