Are you ready? Ready for what’s next?
In our last issue (the first of this two part series), we shared the experience of The Sphere. If you haven’t read it yet, we encourage you to do so before reading this issue.
Now, it’s U2 concert time!
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First impressions
When you first walk in to find your seats, you’re immediately reminded by the huge wall in front of you that you are inside a sphere. The concert venue is not configured in the round. Rather, the stage is up against one wall and the audience fans out in concentric rings from there.
Is it concrete you may wonder? It’s not particularly attractive you think. Interesting.
You find your seats. You look up. Wait, what? Is there a hole in the ceiling? Is this an open-air venue?
You turn your attention to the front.
There’s a DJ opening for U2. He’s in a car on the floor amongst the standing room only fans. He’s playing a wide-ranging and fun mix that seems centered in the late 70s and 80s - the BeeGees, Rick Astley, Chumbawumba (that “I get knocked down, but I get up again” song named Tubthumping from 1997), INXS, Blondie, Madonna (Into the Grove), Cyndi Lauper, Eurythmics, the Rolling Stones and more. He seems to know his audience. Looking around, it spans generations. People are enjoying the music, especially the woman in front of us.
As people arrive and settle in, the atmosphere is electric. You can sense people’s excitement for the night ahead.
The stage itself is understated. Cleverly, it looks like a record player.
It seems in stark contrast to the first U2 concert I saw: PopMart in 1998, with its over-the-top large golden arches, mirror ball lemon, and satire of consumerism and U2’s global fame. As Allison Rapp wrote earlier this year in a retrospective on the PopMart tour, “U2 has developed a reputation for risk over the decades.”
What's so fantastic about U2 is that they're willing to take these gambles.
-Catherine Owens, PopMart's screen imagery curator (source)
Indeed. Being the opening act for The Sphere seems appropriate for U2: always setting the bar for what’s possible.
The DJ car drives across the floor and the house lights dim.
U2
How will U2 come out? Here is how the concert begins (5m56s video by the author).
It’s surprisingly slow and subtle. And then — it builds. That concrete wall? It’s not really concrete. It begins to open up in a cross (perhaps a nod to Bono’s faith?) — and then transforms into a series of screens reminiscent of U2’s stadium tours. Bono is twirling around and around on the center of the record player. The music sounds different than the 1991 Actung Baby album. Bono’s voice has aged and the pace has mellowed but this is still undeniably U2.
I’m going to pause and embed the concert setlist here and encourage you to listen as you read this issue.
The concert is an immersive experience. It’s impossible to convey the full experience of what it’s like to see it live in words and images. Still, I’m going to try and give you a flavor.
At one point early in the concert, a series of neon words and phrases flash behind the stage.
They come fast and furious. They also trick your eye — is this really a sphere or a cube?
The messages themselves are all over the map. And, they do a nice job of making you question. “Believe everything” becomes “lie”:
After the barrage of messages in neon, the background starts to be overtaken by digital characters — text, code, it’s not really clear what. It continues up to the ceiling and feels like you’re trapped in a digital world.
The ambition of the show continues to build. Another scene has this surreal backdrop that really demonstrates just how high fidelity this whole place can be. It’s like IMAX on steroids.
The resolution is unbelievable. And wait, is that Elvis behind the stage? Why yes, yes it is.
Note the richness of the imagery. Elvis has not left the building.
As the scene continues, we enter this mixed-reality world where The Edge appears in a bubble floating around the background, but he’s live on the stage, which is a record player…
The show is in Vegas and Bono pays homage to Las Vegas, Elvis and jokes that maybe we’ll get married at a wedding chapel. Here, Bono appears with cheesy wedding bells of a Vegas wedding chapel and the dice of chance.
Later, Bono is on a big billboard. Alongside him is the earth (moments after a spaceship launched), which raises the question: where are we exactly?
Those thousand points of light give way to water, maybe oil. The Edge is playing and the reflections on the water look incredibly real.
In another scene, a flag starts to burn. The fire looks so realistic.
After the fire, all the ash falls down.
And then the band is suddenly playing in the sky.
But they are also on the stage. It’s all so …
The show excels at creating these mixed reality moments. In another scene, there is a giant white balloon in the sky. It looks hand drawn, more like a sketch than anything real. Except that it has a rope attached to it … that Bono is holding on stage. It totally messes with your sense of what’s real and what’s not.
Each member of the band at times appears larger than life above the stage. Here are Bono and The Edge:
At another time, they are the surface of the stage. It’s seriously meta to watch someone play on top of a picture of themselves that is live. Here is Bono on stage:
And The Edge on stage, quite literally:
This concert experience really plays with your senses and what you expect. When the concert started, I honestly (and naively) thought the stage was just a black box. Then a record player. Oh, that’s cute. But it turns out it is really capable of so much more.
Every once in a while your eyes get a moment to rest.
Sometimes the nothingness can be a bit … uncomfortable. Like here. It really feels like if you walked off stage you might fall off the face of the earth — into the abyss.
Slowly, some insects start to appear overhead. A few at first. Then more. More, still.
Eventually it gets dark under the cover of tons of insects. I’m not a fan of insects and this was definitely my least favorite visual of the night.
The next thing you know, they have totally broken the — fourth? — wall and the skyline of Las Vegas begins to appear behind the band. Wait, what?
The lights of the Strip are evident. And the view is what it would be if you could actually see the Strip from inside the Sphere. It’s crazy realistic. The attention to detail is amazing. I watched cars drive through the parking garage you can see to the right.
And then, once your eyes begin to adjust to this now very normal scene of having U2 play a concert on a street corner with the Strip in the background, the Strip starts to get deconstructed. Floor by floor. Building by building. Right before your eyes.
Until there is nothing left but the Nevada desert.
Thoughts of Joshua Tree come to mind. Off in the distance, two drones appear. But first how did they do this?
London-based Treatment Studio, the creative and technical team that created and produced the overall U2:UV show design, executed the first phase of the transformation and created an incremental buildup of insects against a backdrop representing the outer shell of the Sphere. As the entire ‘sky’ becomes blotted out by the insects, they begin to disperse in an intentionally artistic manner revealing ILM’s majestic Las Vegas cityscape. 4 months in the making, a team of 20 ILM visual effects artists crafted an ultra-high-resolution, fully CG version of Las Vegas as seen from the exact point of view of an audience seated within the Sphere utilizing cutting-edge visual effects. Concertgoers witness the city that has reinvented itself decade after decade deconstruct itself in a reverse timelapse beginning in the present and ending in the early 1900s when the territory was nothing but an empty desertscape. ILM leveraged every ounce of its artist’s vast expertise in creating fully CG photoreal environments to generate Terabytes of media at an eye-watering 16K x 16K resolution to fill Sphere’s 580,000 square feet of LEDs. The team also delivered multiple loopable segments at varying lengths that could be sequenced at random to suit U2’s desired performance timing all in service of telling a story like no other and enabling the band to, once again, push the bounds of what a live performance can be. (source)
Indeed. It’s beyond amazing.
The two drones get closer and start to project holographs of Bono and The Edge, live.
After a desert sequence in which U2 played some crowd-favorites from its Joshua Tree album and a sphere — perhaps the very Sphere we’re sitting in? — is floating in water in the desert, the final tour de force ensures.
In a particularly moving visual, a montage of species that have gone extinct appear one by one overhead.
Looking around, you see the combination of the humans — alive — and these other species — extinct.
U2 and Bono have long taken a stand about issues that matter and this concert experience has some powerful moments. There is clearly a commentary about the environment and how humans have been treating it throughout the imagery and Bono’s remarks.
As U2 plays the final song of the encore, Beautiful Day, it gets brighter and the monochrome visuals begin to regain color.
It’s really a beautiful — and reflective — way to end the concert.
For the climax of U2:UV, the acclaimed English stage designer has created “Nevada Ark”. It’s a version of her 2022 Tate Modern piece “Come Home Again”, “which was me drawing 243 endangered species of London”. Bono saw that show, rang her up and said: “Why don’t you do that for the species of Nevada?”
So, she tells me, “the whole Sphere gets filled with these [likenesses] of stone carvings”. In fact, the Crescent Dunes Serican Scarab beetle, Ash Springs Riffle beetle, Devils Hole pupfish, Sand Mountain blue butterfly and 22 other extinction-threatened species have been lovingly crafted out of pixels. “It’s like looking up in the Alhambra, into this cathedral. Then when you come out of the building, they’re all over the outside, too.”
She wasn’t exaggerating. Devlin’s at-risk animal house, carpeting the dome’s vaulting interior, is an astonishing, breathtaking end-point for U2:UV — a powerful moment of celebration and reflection as, appropriately enough, the final song “Beautiful Day” fades away.
All things considered, as gigs go, it’s even better than the real thing. (source)
Indeed.
If you get the chance to see U2:UV live at The Sphere in Las Vegas, do it. It’s unlike anything else you’ve ever experienced.
🎟 As of this writing, there are shows through February 2024. More information.
Go deeper
I’ve tried to share what the U2:UV experience was like based on my personal experience attending one performance in October 2023. If you’d like to see more visuals, videos and professional perspective, here are some links to explore:
Supersized Performance — U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere (American Cinematographer)
Achtung Vegas: The Inside Story of U2 at the Sphere (Esquire)
U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere (Industrial Light & Magic)
Step Inside: The Spectacle of “U2:UV Achtung Baby Live At Sphere” (NAB Amplify)
Better than the real thing: U2 shines in the Sphere (VenuesNOW)
How to conquer the Atomic City: the story behind U2 at the new Las Vegas Sphere (Wallpaper)
💿 U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere
Here is a playlist of the setlist for the concert the night I attended (same one embedded earlier):
Here is the playlist from opening night on Apple Music.
I hope you enjoyed this pair of photo essays. Let me know what you thought.
Be well,
-Bryce
Wow, what an experience! Thanks for sharing. I love the images!
Thanks for the details Bryce, definitely worth the wait. U2:UV at The Sphere was an experience worth sharing.