From Boston to Sin City 🎸🤑 My Front-Row Experience at U2's Revolutionary Sphere Show!
One could make the argument that WBCN 104.1 FM “The Rock of Boston” brought the sounds of U2 from Ireland to America back in the 80s. One of their first 8 shows in America was in Boston at the Paradise Rock Club in 1980 where they were the opening band that fans couldn’t get enough of. Nearly forty-three years after (whoa!) that first American tour. Fast forward to Super Bowl 2023, there was an announcement that a new venue in Las Vegas called Sphere was opening and the first band to be playing was U2 for their first live performances in 4 years.
Sphere was 7 years in the making. It’s made up of 1.2 million LED pucks and 64,000 circuit boards. It is a modern engineering marvel. After seeing the commercials I knew that the trip from Boston to Las Vegas would be in the books to be one of the firsts to see and experience it in person. It has only been open a few weeks and a few other friends from Boston had already seen it, but no matter how much you have seen online, it’s a totally different experience in person.
To put it bluntly, as a whole, U2 at the new Sphere venue in Las Vegas was spectacular. It is a show that was made for Sin City. We lined up at 6:30am on show day to get the closest spot we could. We ended up being about 3-4 people back from the stage rail and even being that close, the screens were fully visible and successfully engulfed everyone. Being in Sphere is like an imax concert. U2’s somewhat small stage is in the form of a turntable with a revolving plate that the band would slowly spin around on, but that was barely noticeable.
The theme of the show was celebrating their 7th studio album 1991’s Achtung Baby. They played all of Achtung Baby with various other hits surrounding it. I only felt nauseated from the screen once during the third song they played, “Even Better than the Real Thing.” The movement behind the band gave the illusion that the stage was moving up and down. The visuals were stunning but I had to turn around and look at the audience. Everyone I talked to no matter where they were viewing felt the same way. It was pretty surreal to be watching a rock band and also looking around the room in amazement with people also doing and experiencing the same thing.
Of course there were people who cared a little less about watching the screen material and just cared about connecting with the band. In an interview I had seen before, one of their creative people said that if people got bored from the screen they could watch the band. Or maybe it was vice versa. Ha.
At the end of the first Achtung Baby set, “Tryin’ to throw your Arms around the World,” a balloon was displayed on the sphere's ceiling. Tied together, roped sheets came down to form a string, this was the point of the show where Bono brought a fan on stage, someone on stage to walk around the stage holding the balloon string. October 18th happens to be Morleigh Steinberg-Evans birthday, she’s one of U2’s creative directors and has been working with the band since 1987, she’s also married to The Edge. She came up on stage and showed the crowd, and Bono, how the rope balloon string was intended to be used by swinging over the crowd. As the song ended she exited the stage with The Edge, before she returned and Bono gave her hand a kiss goodbye.
I thought the band sounded incredible, Bono’s voice was spot on. The fill-in drummer Bram van den Berg was great, and had a great sense of humor, being the youngest at 41. (U2 Co-founder Larry Mullen Jr is recovering from surgery.) The Edge and Adam Clayton were also in fine form. They used the screens to their advantage, sometimes only displaying band members but other times full landscapes. During “Atomic City”, their newest song about Sin City, they simulated Vegas being dismantled. My favorite song was “Where the Streets Have No Name.”
For the novice U2 fan, it was totally worth it and I would go again with a different view in the audience. Bottom line, if you love seeing U2, definitely go see this show. If you are more interested in technology, engineering and maybe U2 isn’t your favorite band, you still may want to go. I hope other bands can play and come up with other unique experiences for this spot. This is the wave of the future of live music. I’m fortunate that I could experience it in its first weeks of opening.
Before U2 took the stage, London, UK born, Pauli "The PSM" Lovejoy played a DJ set while he got pushed around in a car throughout the general admission area. It was a full on dance party full of UK centric mostly 80s music, from Human League to Amy Winehouse, he was a good hype man for what was to come.