U2’s technological extravaganza in Las Vegas even wowed the band themselves, according to Newstalk Tech Correspondent Jess Kelly.
Returning from the opening weekend of U2’s Las Vegas residency, Jess told The Hard Shoulder the concert at Sphere was “the best weekend of her little life”.
“This has reset the standard for gigs in the future,” she said.
Looming over the Las Vegas strip is Sphere, a venue that took $2.4 billion to build, which Jess described as a “half a tennis ball”.
“It's 516 feet wide,” she explained. “And it is the largest LED screen in the world on the outside and on the inside.
“They are covered screens, and there are over 200 million pixels on those screens, so whether you want to have an emoji, the Achtung Baby, which is what U2 did, anything, you can have it on that sphere.
“It’s kind of mind boggling when you see it - I spent a good 40 minutes standing on the bridge between the Venetian hotel and the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, just staring at it, because it's unlike anything I'd ever seen before.”
That was unreal. It’s going to take me 3-5 business days to process it all… pic.twitter.com/AP58vH7tS0
— Jess Kelly 👩🏻💻 (@jesskellynt) October 1, 2023
Going inside, Jess was worried Sphere would be “all hype but no action” - but she was not disappointed.
“They started playing stuff on the screen, and when you see it, my brain is still struggling to comprehend what I saw,” she said.
Photos of the venue have flooded social media since the opening night, but they don’t do justice to the reality of standing in the middle of Sphere.
Oooof… Achtung Baby on the strip pic.twitter.com/3EBRXbJNDE
— Jess Kelly 👩🏻💻 (@jesskellynt) October 1, 2023
“The biggest wow moment for me was The Fly where the colours numbers and digits come up on the screen,” Jess said.
“I looked up at the top of the dome, and all of sudden it looked like the roof was falling in because the square base was moving further down.
“I got the impression that the band were kind of wowed throughout the show as well... at different points I saw Bono literally just looking up and kind of standing around and staring at the screen.”
U2 perform at The Sphere in Las Vegas. Rich Fury/Sphere Entertainment/@SphereVegas on XJess had the chance to speak to U2 members The Edge and Adam Clayton, who said the technology for this show “doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world”.
“There's always that nagging question ‘Is it going to break down?’,” The Edge said. “And my guitar stuff did – [a backstage worker] had to crawl out and started switching the guitars on his hands and knees.
“It was really comedic in a certain way – something so simple when you look at all the technology involved.”
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