U2 at the high church of screen time – but who’s the real star?
Irish band U2 is midway through its series of shows in front of the world’s biggest, most immersive video display – what are you really there to see?
Las Vegas is a different dream than it was a half century ago, when a jumpsuited Elvis Presley took residency at the Hilton, nee International Hotel, playing a string of 636 sold-out shows, retiring at night to a penthouse to order his peanut butter, banana & bacon sandwiches – and, legend has it, shooting holes in the ceiling after picking fights with the chandeliers.
That rogue Vegas charm long ago left the building. This Nevada city has been corporatised and sanitised several times over, becoming a playpen for conglomerates, foreign investors and private equity. It is a town where young families monorail among the bachelorette parties and conventioneers, where the has-been acts have been upstaged by pop stars and the 99-cent buffets have given way to Paris chefs. You can still lose your children’s school fees on roulette and marry a stranger you met 45 minutes ago, but in today’s Vegas, you can also see a Picasso, and Adele.
And now, the Sphere.
Or, I guess, “Sphere”. They’re formally saying it without the article, like Cher, which saves a few bucks on lettering, but makes you sound like a caveman when you tell your buddies you flew to Vegas and “went to Sphere”. A conspicuous steel globe just off the Strip, wrapped in an LED exoskeleton changing colours and patterns, Sphere resembles a beach ball peaking on acid. Owned by Madison Square Garden Entertainment, stewards of wonders such as Radio City Music Hall and sister to MSG Sports agonies such as the New York Knicks, the interior performance space is a 17,385-seat theatre hugged by a staggering 49,000 sqm interior video screen. It is reported to have cost north of $3bn. A few weeks ago, it opened with its debut resident: U2.
If your rock concert memories involve guitar solos bouncing off 1970s-issue concrete – hoping a football arena could channel the glory of Blue Oyster Cult – Sphere will feel like a radical upgrade. The theatre’s design upends the standard geography of concert ticketing – right up close is not necessarily where you want to be, because it limits your view of the screen, and Sphere is about The Screen. I’d say the optimal eyrie is somewhere in the first mezzanine, where the screen is unobstructed and the band remains close enough to not look like sand fleas playing guitars. Tickets range from $200 to $900, and much more on the secondary market. My seat in Sphere’s nosebleeds cost a hearty $820.
No matter where you sit, a walk into Sphere is a stunner: a spare stage centred at the bottom, and a screen with 16K resolution launching heavenward like the side of a reactor. It’s so vast it’s impossible to absorb all at once. New buildings often claim unprecedented features, usually nonsense, but Sphere’s Wonka interior made me giggle. I felt inside a wonder: the biggest, most immersive planetarium-slash-TV on Earth. As a middle-aged male, I was immediately seized by a desire to watch the entire third season of Succession.
Instead: U2. A sturdy if careful choice, the Irish band closing in on 50 years together, the original membership uniformly sexagenarian. Not the hottest of the hot, but certainly famous. You know who they are, you know some of their names (Bono! Edge!) and you definitely know a few of their hits, which they play around a two-hour-plus set anchored by their gritty, lively 1991 album, Achtung Baby. No strangers to stadium rock, they know the assignment here, which is, in effect, opening for a waterfall of weapons-grade technology.
As if to underline the point, U2: UV Live at Sphere begins with a pair of audience roars, first for the live band, and then for The Screen, which sparks to life with a crack of video sunlight and consumes the room. Dizzying cinematic arrangements follow, paired to songs: a blur of digital characters spiralling skyward during The Fly; a diorama of Vegas cinema from artist Marco Brambilla (Even Better Than the Real Thing); spare flags of smoke and fire from Irish artist John Gerrard (repeated several times, climaxing with Edge’s vicious guitar riff, which kicks off Where the Streets Have No Name.)
The visuals, arranged by design maestro Es Devlin, are breathtaking. And credit to the show’s creative director, longtime U2 collaborator Willie Williams, for rationing the tech. They were shrewd enough to recognise Sphere’s hazard, which is sensory overload, to the point where the musical performance on stage is a sideshow. No act – not even one with a catalogue like U2’s – can compete with a 111m-by-157m screen, and it would have been easy to pummel the audience with a sugar rush of high-definition pixels.
Sphere’s a strange vibe, though. This is, putatively, a rock concert with a proper rock act but, in practice, it often felt passive, another extension of our modern screen-tethered lives. Society now has a hard time being present, and there was endless screen-on-screen action as ticketholders filmed with their phones, an ouroboros of digital technology. The audience near me mostly stayed seat-bound, as still as during an IMAX matinee. A proper rock show should be active, sweaty, rollicking. This felt worshipful, a little cult-like.
“This is not an Elvis chapel,” Bono announced. “This is an Elvis cathedral.”
If it’s a cathedral, it’s a cathedral that serves lobster guacamole and a $45 cocktail with whiskey, peach and ginger called the Quantum Root. (It also sells Funyuns and Orange Crush, which made me wonder if my 10-year-old son and his buddies were coming over to play Minecraft.) Given the mind-bending nature of the entertainment, I presume stronger snacks are ingested prior. Cannabis is now legal in Nevada, but I regret to inform you I watched the entire spectacle under the influence of a single $20 margarita, which truthfully was quite good.
As were U2. I hadn’t seen the group perform live since (gulp) the 1987 Joshua Tree tour, and they have transformed themselves many times since, morphing from rebel antagonists to world-weary polemicists to impish pop stars to the silver-haired statesmen they are today. This is a group that noisily sought to change the world, confiding with presidents, so it’s jarring to see it in a shame-free Vegas residency. But U2 members are also admitted Americanophiles, with a taste for grandeur and Silicon Valley tech. This is a band whose original tour for Achtung Baby was a multimedia commentary called the Zoo TV Tour. This is a band that thought it was a great idea to put its new album on everybody’s iPhone.
That 2014 stunt (for Songs of Innocence) was too much, provoking a rage against the machines. It’s telling that the highlight of U2: UV is a string of songs in the middle, when The Screen is turned all the way down and you get to see the band play, chat and be, well, human. Standing atop a jumbo-sized replica of producer and friend Brian Eno’s LED/acrylic art installation Turntable, Bono, Edge, Adam Clayton and new drummer Bram van den Berg strip the music down: their hits, a tender lick of Van Morrison’s Into the Mystic. They perform the trick deft acts can do, which is to make a big room play small.
Bono clearly adores old Vegas, of which there are still traces – Barry Manilow is in residence at the Elvis Hilton, now the Westgate. Mostly, the city has moved on to sleeker, younger, pricier experiences, ones that fit nicely into social media clips. Gambling isn’t the only lure now – visitors want to swim, nightclub, “dayclub”, drink elaborate cocktails and post a couple of TikToks to make their friends back home jealous. Last weekend, Formula 1 arrived. In February, Vegas gets a Super Bowl.
It’s unclear what sort of business Sphere will be. Does it become a sustained part of the Vegas experience, or is it more of a faddish one-off – see The Screen do its thing once, and you’re good? The theatre reported a nearly $150m loss for the quarter ending September 30, just as shows began. MSG boss James Dolan was bullish in a recent call with investors and plans continue for future Spheres, including one in London. New acts are said to be on the way. (Rumoured Sphere candidate Harry Styles was in attendance at the show I saw.)
As for U2, the band just extended its residency through the beginning of next year. It would take years for U2 to catch Elvis’s legendary run, but that’s not the objective here. This is a new Las Vegas, and the old holes in the ceiling have given way to a bright ball of tech, rolling expensively toward the future.