Inside the Sphere, U2 Brings Us Higher (Despite Social Media Spoilers)
It was October, Friday the 13th and I was ready. I was ready for the push, I was ready for the crush, I was ready for what’s next. And, by the sounds of it, so were the hundreds of enthusiastic U2 fans that were slowly making their way across the carpeted bridge that connects the Venetian to the Sphere, the vertiginous venue where we’d watch U2 perform for exactly two hours. I was in Vegas and ready for U2 to take me higher. And even if the band didn’t, my seats in the 400 section of the most impressive entertainment venue in the country certainly would.
I was 28 the first time I visited Las Vegas, and I’d reluctantly return a couple more times before I turned 30. Back then, we had yet to be told that what happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas. That catchy marketing slogan would be unleashed onto the world a couple of years later, in 2003, just a year before Facebook and seven years before Instagram were born. Two decades later, I’m not sure if anyone still uses the destination’s iconic catchphrase.
In 2023, anything that happens anywhere doesn’t stay there for long. Particularly when it happens in Vegas. “Pics or it didn’t happen” is the populist mantra of our time. Or, for those who are more partial to catchphrases in the form of a question, “If you didn’t post about it, did it really happen?”
The answer, which I know because I’m old but not that old, is a resolute no.
Even before I set foot inside the Sphere to watch U2 perform on the seventh night of their 25-night U2:UV Achtung Baby Live residency, I had already posted a handful of Instagram Stories of the building, its LED-coated canvas an ever-changing collection of videos: vibrant geometric shapes, a whimsical yellow emoji, mesmerizing jellyfish, an eerie talking baby. The Sphere is almost unavoidable, and not just because it takes up 580,000 square feet of real estate just off the Strip. But because it’s on everyone’s lip, and on everyone’s feed. I wasn’t the only one posting on my socials. The hashtag #sphere on Instagram turns up 751k posts and counting, while on Tik Tok #spherelasvegas has more than 178M views.
And then there’s the U2 fans. So many U2 fans! So many U2 tee shirts. EVERYWHERE. YOU. GO. It’s not hard to figure out who’s in town to see the Irish band because, spoiler alert, they’re all wearing the merch. The majority are sporting their brand spanking new Sphere tee shirts, the ones with U2:UV SPHERE, LAS VEGAS written on them in bold fonts and even bolder neon colors. But there are plenty of non-Sphere tees, too. And you can also tell what U2 era the wearer most identifies with. Or maybe it’s the era they became a U2 fan. It’s not just Swifties who are celebrating their eras.
There are Gen-Xers in their Rattle and Hum, PopMart, and Zoo TV tee shirts — the latter for the OG “Achtung Baby” tour. There are plenty of youngish Boomers, in their mid-60s like Bono, who’ve not only held on to their Unforgettable Fire and Joshua Tree era concert tees but wear them proudly, like a badge of honor. Wandering the Venetian casino, I strike up a conversation with a Brazilian couple who flew in from Brasilia to see U2. They caught the show on Wednesday and were going back on Friday. “We had seats in the 300 level for the first show but on Friday we have standing tickets, so we can see the band better,” said the husband. I met another couple during a Red Rock Canyon hike who were in town from Philadelphia to see the show. The husband had seen U2 an impressive 30 times, not including the two times he would see them this week.
Riding a series of escalators to the top of the spherical building on that Friday the 13th, most people (me included) had their phones out, documenting every seemingly magical moment leading up to, and including, the exact minute when U2 would walk out onto the turntable-shaped stage to perform “Zoo Station.” Behind the band, the LED screen looked like a gigantic concrete wall that cracked open in the shape of a massive cross before turning into a series of flickering TV screens, four of which projected each member of the band (Bram van den Berg sitting in for drummer Larry Mullen Jr., who’s recovering from surgery). All 17,500 souls gathered at the temple of U2, because that’s what the Sphere felt like on that Friday the 13th, went wild — and by wild, I mean we clapped enthusiastically from our seats, especially those of us in the vertigo-inducing 400 section.
In the row behind me, a middle-aged man, looking very much like Bono’s 1990s era alter ego, the Fly, wore a black leather jacket and black wrap-around sunglasses. He scream-sang every word to every song, even the snippet of Oasis lyrics to “Don’t Look Back in Anger” that Bono added to “Angel of Harlem” during Act 2 of the show, which is made up of non “Achtung Baby” tracks. From my perch in the 400 section, I could see thousands of fans bopping in their seats, the way a mostly over-40 crowd will do; and while I couldn’t quite make out what the fans who splurged on floor tickets were doing, I can assume they were not moshing. A U2 crowd at the Sphere in Las Vegas needs a mosh pit like a fish needs a bicycle.
However spectacular it is to watch the video content that cloaks the Sphere on the outside, the experience is even more spectacular, more immersive, more exhilarating, more everything once you’re inside the 516-foot-wide dome. There’s the ceiling, which rises to 366 feet; there’s the 160,000-square-foot wrap-around LED screen that features an astonishing 16k resolution; and there’s the sound, which comes out of 164,000 speakers. Everything inside the Sphere is even better than the real thing. And in a city that already has an Empire State Building, an Eiffel Tower, an Egyptian pyramid, Venetian canals, ancient Roman ruins, and neon glazed structures galore, the $2.3 billion spherical building doesn’t just fit right in — it becomes the electrifying exclamation point the city didn’t know it needed. It’s the concert venue of the future. It’s the hashtag and the content we can’t get enough of.
The thing about Vegas is that even when you don’t much care for it, it has a way of pulling you back. Maybe it’s a bachelorette party, a football game, a conference, or, in my case, the prospect of watching a band I was crazy about in high school, play a dozen songs from an album I still love in a venue unlike any other. That was enough to draw me back to Las Vegas. Judging by how many people I spoke to who flew in from around the globe, it was enough for them too.
Watching U2 perform at the Sphere, there’s no reason to throw your body around, no reason to mosh in the pit because there’s just so much coming at you, so much visual and auditory content. And in 2023, content isn’t meant for just one screen, regardless how massive that screen may be. If done right, and U2 does it exactly right, the content is meant to be captured by the little screen in your hand, then shared to your followers on social media, who in turn will like and reshare to their followers.
To look away even for a moment means you might not see some magnificent detail, during “Even Better than the Real Thing,” of the accompanying AI-generated visual collage with Elvis and Vegas at its nucleus; or you might miss a crowd favorite, “Where the Streets Have No Name,” wherein the wraparound screen becomes a desert landscape with a white flag made of water vapor plumes swaying in the blue sky; or miss that moment when we all felt like Neo in the Matrix, while Bono sang “The Fly” and a torrent of binary code plummeted down from the ceiling into the band and everyone around. I didn’t buy a drink at the Sphere bar because I was afraid I’d have to go to the bathroom in the middle of a song.
“We have one more song, but I guess you already knew that,” said Bono before launching into “Beautiful Day,” during which the screen turned into a stunning art piece featuring a kaleidoscopic panorama of 26 endangered creatures specific to the state of Nevada. During the very last notes of the song, Bono morphed the lyrics into a snippet from Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.” We had all risen to our feet by that point, and we remained standing, all 17,500 of us, even after U2 said good night and walked off stage. We stood there watching the creatures glimmer and shine on the screen, not really wanting to leave, hoping that perhaps there might be another song, a second encore. But in our heart of hearts, we knew there would be no second encore — not on this night or any previous night. We would have heard about it on social media.
It's a testament to the band, the experience they deliver on stage and on the screen, that despite most of us kind of knowing what to expect because we’d seen it in our little screens, U2 still manages to deliver all the feels.
