U2, Las Vegas Sphere, review: The most sense-scrambling rock concert ever conceived

Sphere and loving in Las Vegas: on the record player-contoured stage of what is, reputedly, the world’s biggest ball-shaped structure – 336 feet tall and 516 feet wide, with 5.7 million cubic feet of performing space to fill – Bono is singing “All I Want Is You”.

It’s a song, he tells 18,000 first-night fans, that was his attempt to “write a wedding song from a woman’s point of view”. Then it’s into a testifying version of “Desire”, and a burst of “Love Me Do”, in honour of Paul McCartney, sitting somewhere up in the gods. Then, a lusty audience singalong to “Angel of Harlem”, acoustic version, and a bit of Van Morrison, “for all the Irish in the house”.

The kaleidoscopic cascade of AI-generated Elvises have been and gone. English designer Es Devlin’s Nevada Ark, a cathedral of glorious, pixelated sculptures of 26 of the state’s endangered species, will soon be bearing down on us. U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere is the unwieldy title for the band’s masterfully wieldy new show. But right now, the most senses-scrambling rock’n’roll concert ever conceived is, for a moment, having a breather.

We’re around 70 minutes into a 130-minute set, and this is the ambient section of the first night of U2’s three-act, 11-week, 25-show residency in Sin City. Lighting is generated by an algorithm created by Brian Eno, upon whose 2021 art piece Turntable the stage is modelled. Setlist momentarily centred on Songs of Surrender, this year’s collection of stripped-back versions of tracks plucked from all corners of the band’s 43-year-deep back catalogue. Respite welcomed by an arena-sized audience who’ve been assailed by an all-senses spectacular.

It’s half-time, basically.

U2 at Sphere is a son et lumière et vidéo extravaganza, foregrounding the band’s 1991 album Achtung Baby, and created to christen a new kind of entertainment venue – a technologically advanced playground-cum-amphitheatre with a $2.3 billion price-tag.

Sphere, brought to you by the billionaire people behind New York’s Madison Square Garden, comes wrapped in a 580,000-square-foot exterior LED display which can make the building look like Goliath’s eyeball. Or, on the night I flew in, a blood moon that’s splashed down in the desert. Inside, the 162,000-foot wraparound display fills your peripheral vision as completely as the pin-sharp sound quality fills your head.

At the Irish band’s groundbreaking Las Vegas staycation, nothing has been left to chance. It’s bells, whistles and vertiginous video visuals stretching as far as the neck can crane. But it’s testament to the creative synchronicity of the musicians, artists, designers and tech teams involved that everything lines up.

And it’s testament, too, to the strength of the band and their musicianship that, crucially, neither songs nor performers are lost in the onslaught of ultra-high-resolution imagery. Drummer Larry Mullen might be absent, recuperating after surgery, but nothing else is.

Even “Better Than the Real Thing”, the one that was Elvis-powered, sounds 32 years young. “Elevation” is a sports-banger, TeamU2 singalong – one that lurches into a punk-grunge blast of “My Way”, a nod to a bygone Vegas linchpin. And, in the last stretch, as the band wheel out the stadium-rock anthems, the Sphere’s USP – its horizon-filling screens – come into their own.

They display photorealistic scenes of downtown Vegas, the Nevada desert and, during a coruscating version of “Vertigo”, have choppers hovering over us. On “Where the Streets Have No Name”, they bring the outside in, transposing this wild indoors to the great outdoors. And finally, ultimately, on “With Or Without You”, we’re treated to Devlin’s imperilled menagerie, defiantly and gloriously filling the cavernous ceiling.

“I’m free, I came here for this fight,” sings Bono at the end of “Atomic City”, a cut-and-shut mix of “London Calling” and Blondie’s “Call Me” that was released as a standalone single the day before the opening night of U2:UV. “I’m front row in Las Vegas, and there’s a big one on tonight.”

On the Strip on Friday night, rock’s still-reigning Big One were both intimate and epic, in a brilliant show that remade what a gig could do. And they made everyone feel front row.