When U2 launched its Zoo TV tour in 1991, it revolutionized live music. Over the course of 157 shows, the tour—which was in support of their album Achtung Baby—was almost an embarrassment of overwhelming sights and sounds, with cutting-edge visuals (for the time), a lighting system that was encased partially in Soviet-era Trabant cars, and a leather-clad Bono at times portraying a character named MacPhisto. It was a big swing for the group—and it worked. The group reportedly took in more than $151 million in ticket sales, and the tour is still hailed as one of the most artistically successful of all time.
Since then, U2 has consistently pushed the envelope on what its live shows could be, throwing massive mirror-balled lemons and massive LED screens into its late-1990s PopMart tour and creating a massive free-standing “claw” of a stage for its 360-degree tour in the late ’00s. Now, after a four-year hiatus from the road, the group is planning to push its stagecraft even further with a Las Vegas residency this fall.
On September 29, U2 will launch a multi-date residency at the Sphere, a brand-new, perfectly round venue at the Venetian Resort that promises something far grander in a Vegas show than Adele setting fire to the rain. Clad in 580,000 square feet of fully programmable 2K LED screens, the building is the largest spherical structure in the world, holding a multilevel atrium, production spaces, and a 20,000-capacity venue inside.
Setting up shop in the new space is a big undertaking for the band—and for the future of live music. If U2’s Sphere show succeeds, it could help set a precedent for what’s possible. In an era when Beyoncé sells onstage riser seats and Rihanna creates a Super Bowl spectacle using a streamlined floating red stage, fans are clearly clamoring for more and more visual spectacle and access, as well as for a deeper look inside the artists’ creative minds. With a Vegas residency like the one U2 is planning, acts don’t have to worry about moving stages from arena to arena or stress over the middling audio capacities of places designed for sports. Instead, they can focus on what’s new, what’s cool, and what’s never been possible—until now.
“Where U2 really thrives is in this place of pure experimentation and discovery, and where we can do something that we’ve never done before—and in this case, where we can do something that no one else has ever done before,” U2 guitarist The Edge tells WIRED. “I still think that touring is fascinating in its own way and we will definitely still be touring, probably on whatever our next album is, but I think what we’re seeing [with the Sphere show] is the dawn of a new creative genre and a new creative platform.”
Inside the Sphere, a massive 16K-by-16K screen wraps the showroom—even going back and around concertgoers’ heads. The aim is for the venue to be an entirely immersive experience, right down to patrons’ haptic seats, so that guests can “feel” the show. The venue has environmental effect capabilities, too, meaning production staff can blow targeted gusts of wind at visitors who might be watching footage of a car racing by, or even introduce a scent into the room in an effort to heighten the overall experience. (Think Disney’s Soarin’ Around the World but on a much, much larger scale, with fewer dangling feet and potentially much more booze.)
The venue will also have extremely precise audio capabilities, with about 1,800 Holoplot speaker cabinets subtly placed behind the screen to create the world’s largest beamforming audio system. Though the venue’s designers say the array is meant to emulate the headphone experience, it almost feels like you’re taking a bath in the audio, which can seem rich and encompassing in a way that live sound almost never is. The way the system is set up also means that every seat in the room gets precisely the same audio experience, no matter where it is or how much it costs to sit there.
Courtesy of Sphere Entertainment
According to The Edge, Sphere’s impressive audio is a big part of what got the group to commit to being the venue’s first residents. “Concert audio is, generally speaking, a huge compromise, because most venues are designed primarily for sports and so the sonic characteristic of the building is very much an afterthought,” he says. “With the Sphere, the audio quality and precision and resolution and fidelity is designed in from the beginning.”
The Edge adds that the group is equally thrilled with the prospect of the Sphere’s visual capabilities. While the immersive visuals could be likened to something like virtual reality, the Sphere posits that there’s something inherently good and valuable in the live music experience, where fans can express their communal love and joy together. “You can be transported and surrounded by sound and visuals with the people you came with and the people that you didn’t come with,” The Edge says.
Achtung Baby, one of the band’s seminal albums and a central part of the Vegas residency, is full of themes of love, fidelity, betrayal, and heartbreak. “To counterbalance that,” The Edge says “we’re going to make the show a celebration.” The guitarist adds that he spent much of the Covid-19 lockdowns working on the band’s new album of rerecorded tracks, Songs of Surrender, and now he’s “quite ready to have my mind expanded and to deal with a sort of sensory assault of this type. I think that would be true for our audience as well.”
The Edge says the group is well into preparation for the tour with Willie Williams, their longtime collaborator on live shows. First, he says, they have to determine what they’ll play live, and then production can begin on the accompanying visuals. That means the group can’t have absolute fluidity on any given night—they can’t throw a random one-off B-side into the set list unless they’re OK with using equally random visuals—but that’s not all that different from what they might do on a traditional stadium tour. “Even though we’re going to be using this technology to its full extent in the show, we’re also very determined that it’s still a rock-and-roll show, so there has to be spontaneity,” says The Edge. “We don’t want this show to feel like it’s on train tracks.”
Ideally, U2 will be able to get into the Sphere for rehearsals in late August. “It might take weeks to literally just put the data [of the show] into the servers in the building, so it’s a whole set of logistics that we’re still getting our arms around,” says The Edge. The show’s visuals, he adds, will act as immersive cinema capable of transporting people “to other locations both real and fictional,” but also as an extension of the kind of digital video art the group has been dabbling with for decades.
“One of the things that we explored early on was how much we could refer to Zoo TV as a palette of visual ideas,” says The Edge. “We initially thought probably none of it would be relevant, because these days, use of imagery with music is no longer groundbreaking in the concert world, but when we started to investigate, we realized that actually there are completely new ways to use the technology even if we’re borrowing ideas from Zoo TV.” Just think of it as Zoo 3D.
