U2 have never been a band noted for their love of shy understatement, but even by their standards, their arrival in Las Vegas represents a hitherto-unimagined degree of grandiosity.
They unveil not just an entire venue – the 18,000 seat Sphere, its exterior completely covered in LED screens that turn it different colours, flash up QR codes and occasionally transform it into a giant emoji face, leering over the Las Vegas strip – but also a vast overhead walkway that links it to the Venetian Resort (hotels are tireless in their efforts to stop patrons going outside, an activity that carries with it the danger you might spend your money somewhere else). The interior of the concert hall is completely covered in LED screens, too. They stretch out far above the band and over the audience’s heads, the better to provide a sequence of genuinely astonishing visual effects.
Some big, rather arty names have been involved in the visuals, among them Es Devlin and Brian Eno, and there’s a moment early on when the screens flash up a preponderance of aphorisms that recall Jenny Holzer’s text-based installations – WORK IS THE BLACKMAIL OF SURVIVAL, TASTE IS THE ENEMY OF ART, ENJOY THE SURFACE – but ultimately, it’s all about spectacle, which it provides in jaw-dropping spades. During The Fly, the visuals appear to descend from the roof of the auditorium, creating a fake ceiling made of pulsing numbers. During Even Better Than the Real Thing, they give the disorientating impression that the stage and the standing audience around it are slowly moving upwards: an amazing bit of visual sleight of hand that leaves you slightly queasy. “What a fancy pad,” offers Bono, casting his eyes around the venue. “Look at all this … stuff.”
Of course, there are dangers inherent in all this stuff. On the most prosaic level, there’s the section in the show when what appears to be a giant rope made of knotted sheets ascends to the roof and transforms itself into a swing. Bono selects a fan from the front row in an echo of U2’s fabled Live Aid performance, seats them in the swing and pushes them out over the audience: with the best will in the world, this seems less like stagecraft than an injury lawsuit waiting to happen. But there’s also the risk that U2 themselves will be not just literally be dwarfed by the visuals, which they obviously are, but overshadowed by them, the music merely an accompaniment to a vastly expensive and impressive light show.
That this doesn’t happen probably has something to do with smart song selection – billed as a performance of their 1991 album Achtung Baby in full, it’s actually slightly more complicated than that, the album reorganised and split into segments separated by other tracks, which means you’re never that far from a nailed-on hit: Desire, Where the Streets Have No Name, All I Want Is You – and something to do with the appealingly ramshackle nature of their performance.
There’s always the chance that these rough edges are down to first night nerves – this is a show reliant on a lot of technology, which can obviously go wrong – or the fact that, as Bono points out, it’s the first U2 gig in 45 years that doesn’t have Larry Mullen playing the drums. Or, indeed, the fact that U2 are, in effect, playing against type. By their stadium-packing standards, an audience of 18,000 counts as intimate; it doesn’t involve their special skill of projecting their music to row ZZ in a vast outdoor venue.
But it seems more likely that this off-the-cuff performance is an entirely deliberate ploy to disrupt the show’s hi-tech gloss with a degree of unpredictability; to wrestle attention away from the visuals and underline that theirs is not a choreographed, by-numbers performance: at one point, Bono launches them into a slightly chaotic cover of Thin Lizzy’s Dancing in the Moonlight, “for all the Irish in the audience”, to the visible surprise of the bassist, Adam Clayton. It’s one of a number of unexpected diversions, some of which key into the entertainment history of their temporary home, although their brief charge through My Way audibly has more to do with Sid Vicious’s sneery take on the song than the version by the former Vegas stalwart Frank Sinatra.
This cocktail of eye-popping visuals and slightly unruly performances absolutely works, allaying any concerns that a band from the post-punk era and the old showbiz connotations of a residency in Las Vegas constitute a slightly uncomfortable fit, regardless of how many millions of records the band has sold, or how mainstream an audience they’ve attracted in the interim. Indeed, it works so well that, like Abba’s Voyage show, you leave feeling confident this is an idea others are going to copy: clearly other rock bands are going to turn up to the Sphere in the future, bearing performances big on dazzling technology. Whether they’ll be as dazzling, or indeed as charming as this, time will show.
• U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere is at the Venetian Resort until 16 December
