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U2 SETLIST
intro: Achtung Baby: Zoo Station (with "I Couldn't Find You" intro) Turntable Set: City of Blinding Lights (residency debut) Achtung Baby: Acrobat Encore: Elevation (with Claude François' "My Way" snippet) outro: U2 TOUR DATES
JAN 26 Las Vegas, NV Sphere Read More
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Achtung! - thirty some years later, they still demand our collective attention--
Delayed by the pandemic, construction related costs, and a bandmember's injury, Irish legends U2 finally got on with their 30th Anniversary celebration of their landmark 1991 album ‘Achtung Baby’, beginning in late September, but not without a few road bumps.
'U2: UV Achtung Baby Live At The Sphere' was a just-wrapped run of twenty-five Fall 2023 shows marking the band's first live outing in four years, and christened an all-new state-of-the-art venue, The Sphere in Las Vegas. The band announced another residency starting in late January, which will bring their total up to their special number of “40”, when all concludes in early March.
For the first time ever, they have carried on without their founding member, drummer Larry Mullen, Jr, still recuperating from surgery, with Dutch drummer Bram van den Berg sitting in his place; but undeterred, the band has again made its strong case to continue being the best live rock act in the world.
The $2.3 billion-dollar structure is the largest spherical object in the world, reaching 366ft high and 513 ft wide, holding some 20,000 people with a gigantic 160,000 sq ft. 16K resolution wraparound LED display screen that encompasses the audience, who sits in four levels and a twenty-three-suite section, across the building’s nine floors.
Speakers use an enhanced spatial audio system with over 167,000 different speaker drivers, located behind the screens, positioned remotely, and are even through the floorboards, making for no aural shortcomings, wherever your location is, in this huge venue.
In other words, it’s all very impressive and sort of like a future IMAX Omnitheater times ten.
After a regular case of FOMO from the run’s start on 29 September, we finally made our way West to catch what turned out to be a special twenty-fourth show of the run, and their second-to-last show of the year.
(Secret pro tip for anyone that has GA floor tickets is that they give away 200 early VIP entry wristbands at the east entry beginning same day at 8am, so it may be worth your time getting up early to line up to try and nab one).
UK-based drummer/DJ Paul “The PSM” Lovejoy opened the evening with a thirty-five-minute continuous mix of familiar hits and classics to get the crowd in the mood, perched atop a moving Trabant on the GA floor, the inexpensive East German auto that was so much a fixture of the original tour (take your picture in one at the pop-up shop inside the hotel).
As he finished, the band casually took to the open and somewhat plain stage, a turntable design at the center and framed by four large lighting rigs along the back. As the familiar crunch of “Zoo Station” began their set for the evening, the visuals along the drab back wall began to digitally “crack and leak dust”, to split into four sections and allow light to come in, in a cross-shaped brilliance.
Bono, wearing black and those stylish fly sunglasses, spun around a center stage pole, and jerked randomly to the industrial beat. The Edge took up chorus vocals on “The Fly” and the word video barrage repeated in segments on all sides, eventually morphing into a shower of colored digits and letters that distorted perspectives of the sky falling and stage rising at once, which neither actually did.
The kaleidoscope visuals scrolling from ceiling to floor with iconic Vegas imagery during “Even Better Than the Real Thing” continued the sensory eye candy and “Mysterious Ways” played with beams of light that fluttered and flashed.
Bassist Adam Clayton was smiling most of the night, clearly enjoying himself, and drummer van den Burg proved a more than able replacement for the missing Mullen, his uniquely built drum screen encasing much of his equipment, to avoid echoes.
Thunder and heavy drums introduced “Until the End of the World”, still one of their most powerful songs live, and Bono would go briefly into the front center of the crowd to outstretched hands, as stage lights shifted to the oranges and yellows of a scorched earth.
A giant 'string' shot up to the 300+ ft ceiling for “Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World”, with a digital white balloon attached to its top and Bono skipping along a virtual sidewalk in tow, even playing hopscotch, as he sweetly approached his wife’s virtual doorstep.
The “Turntable Set” as it's come to be known (named from the Brian Eno-designed stage), came mid-show and allows the spontaneity and musical ad-lib of the band to perform often nightly changing songs, most performed in the re-imagined acoustic versions of their recent “Songs of Surrender” album.
On this night, the crowd was treated to the debut acoustic version of “City of Blinding Lights” and keeping in-step with the holiday season, “Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)”, the Darlene Love cover they hadn’t performed live since 1987.
“Ok, enough of that...should we wake up the Baby?” Bono announced, signaling the return to “Achtung Baby” songs, and for the longtime fans, some of the most satisfying moments of the evening- playing the album’s back-end tracks like “Acrobat”, “So Cruel”, and “Ultraviolet (Light My Way)’ stripped without additional graphics or visuals, just stark lighting and a reminder of how sonically powerful the band can still be.
The extended encore began similar to how the main set ended, with Bono (now in a Vegas white cocktail jacket) crooning in snippets of Elvis verses, while getting the crowd jumping on “Elevation”. The dome’s walls seemed to slip away as an outdoor view of the Vegas Strip evening cityscape revealed itself during new single, “Atomic City” and visions of “blue silken skies and burning flags” took us into the desert for “Where the Streets Have No Name”.
Bono even kept authentic to the Joshua Tree-era moment, shedding his jacket to perform wearing a vest, a look we haven’t seen live since 1990. “Without or Without You” took the crowd virtually into the water, with an approaching sphere revolving to expose a plethora of plants, insects, and animals, all endangered and native to Nevada, in mesmerizing graphics courtesy of artist Es Devlin.
The monochromatic montage of living things that continued to fill up the wraparound screen and went from porcelain white to blossoming with colors, on the evening’s final song, “Beautiful Day” with Bono ending the number in more hushed reverence, adding in a last verse from The Beatles’ “Blackbird”.
On the one hand, U2 Inc. is a well-oiled machine- the biggest band in the world, playing the biggest, newest venue in the world, now overseen by the industry’s biggest manager, and merchandising this residency to the hilt (the pop-up shop inside The Venetian was happy to sell $60 programs, $90 hoodies, and $25 coffee cups).
The Sphere run is so far advanced from the original and then-innovative 1991 stage design (we saw the band’s fifth Zoo TV show in Hampton VA) that they could easily be lost in all the sensory overload (but usually weren’t) and perceived as now just being a cog in the very commercial process they parodied thirty-two years ago on stage.
But… the band has earned its place in that high echelon with time-proven songs and powerful performances that justify their means to this high-dollar end. They still clearly enjoy playing together and still do so with a passion and soulful spirit (albeit one that is more aged, doesn't break much of a sweat, and is less urgent than their younger days) that still makes them worth every dollar to see live.
The Sphere and its visual accoutrements are a wonderful companion to showcasing what makes U2 great in concert, but it’s the essential weight of the songs and the stellar live performances that remain the reasons as to why after forty years, the band is still like none other.
(Click on any image to enlarge and see in full)
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| john c ([email protected]) ♥ weheartmusic.com ♥ X / Twitter.com |
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