U2 Goes Sphere-ical: Behind the Band’s Part in a Bet on a $2 Billion Dome That Could Change Live Music
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In the late 2000s, U2 embarked on the “U2 360” tour, so named because the band was playing stadiums in an in-the-round format. This weekend, the quartet kicks off a nearly three-month engagement in Las Vegas that could be nicknamed “U2 366.” Because 366 feet is the listed height of Sphere, the $2-billion-plus orb that the band will be christening with Friday’s opening night show. And it’s not just the exoskeleton of the building that towers so high in the desert air. The more-than-semi-circular screen behind and around the group is about 35 stories tall at its pixellated peak, too.
So don’t be surprised if the waiting rooms of the chiropractors of the American Southwest are filled with an inordinate amount of patients wearing their new souvenir U2 shirts next week. Or so the joke goes among expectant fans, anyway. The 167,000 loudspeakers built into the new venue guarantee that there will be a whole lotta shakin’ going on; the gargantuan 16K LED screen promises that fans will be doing a whole lotta cranin’, as well.
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Sphere is being described as the height, literally and figuratively, of what modern live entertainment can and will offer. So putting U2 in there to open a venue that represents how far the audio-visual tech envelope can be pushed in 2023 was a no-brainer for everyone involved … right?
“I thought it was a terrible idea!” confesses Willie Williams, U2’s creative director for close to four decades, candidly describing his reaction when the idea of having the group open Sphere was first informally presented to them close to two years ago. He changed his tune, but in the moment, the idea of moving into a venue unlike any other in the world, and then form-fitting a show to meet those peculiar specifics, felt like the opposite of anything Williams had ever done in his work with U2 going all the way back to 1983.
Even James Dolan, the New York business giant who conceived of the venue and has seen spent the better part of the last decade seeing it through, admits that there were some big, practical roadblocks that had to be overcome on the long path to make Sphere’s sight and sound be as brilliant in execution as they were cool on a sketchpad. “There are a few dome-shaped venues in the world,” Dolan says, “and I’ve been in some of them. It’s a horrible shape, for a classic sound system.”
Needless to say, there are quite different adjectives being used by these and other key participants for Sphere in advance of Friday night’s opening, all of them bending toward the idea that minds will be utterly blown once the first 18,000 people get a gander inside the place. If it doesn’t actually sound like undue hyperbole, that may be because hundreds of thousands of people have already been gasping just at the outside of the place, ever since its 580,000-square-foot exterior started being lit up two months ago, with jaw-dropping images making Sphere into everything from an enormous basketball to a giant, Dali-esque eyeball to, yes, the world’s most ginormous advertisements. (Hey, they’ve gotta start recouping that $2.3 billion somehow.) Even if the doors never opened, that exoskeleton would be a provocative piece of pop art, and a memorable part of Las Vegas architectural history, unto itself.
But what if the visuals that are being put up during the Sept. 29-Dec. 16 run of “U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere” did turn out to be some kind of letdown, against all promises? Well, if worst came to worst, having the most-loved rock band in the world taking the stage makes for an awfully reliable failsafe.
Says Dolan: “From what I have seen” of the visual display, “it will be a Willie Williams classic. I do have to say, though, that you could put up Looney Tunes cartoons up there with that music, and it will still be a fabulous show.”
Variety spoke with some of the key players in the development of Sphere and bringing U2 into it, including Dolan, Williams, Live Nation’s Arthur Fogel and Irving Azoff. The latter uber-manager has been a crucial bridge between some of these parties, being a longtime pal of Dolan’s who consulted on the Sphere project for years before he took on the venue’s first musical tenant, U2, as a management client in 2022.
“I was involved in helping secure the land where he decided to build this,” says Azoff, of the plot Dolan picked up to build Sphere one long block east of the Strip, adjacent to the Venetian resort. “So I’ve been around it since the very earliest stages. You know, a lot of people have great ideas, but it’s a combination of great ideas and executing them. I just watched this through many, many years and through the ebbs and flows of the pandemic and what it did to delivery, because these are one-of-a-kind technological parts that he needed to make this happen.” Did we mention yet that Sphere ended up going a reported $1 billion over budget, at least partly due to COVID-era overruns? “It’s especially gratifying to see my friend who had a dream, and against every kind of formidable thing that could happen, has persevered and gotten us to the finish line.
“I know the building will deliver, and I know the band will deliver both sonically and visually,” Azoff continues. “I realize this building is gonna be used a lot for films, too” — a new Darren Aronofsky film, “Postcard From Earth,” is about to be playing there when U2 isn’t — “but it’s a great time in the music business for those chosen few that get to play there, and that can sell enough tickets to play there, to participate in something so innovative.”
More on who else could conceivably headline Sphere in a minute. (The Las Vegas Review Journal’s entertainment columnist says word on the Strip is that Harry Styles is lined up for next year, although no one involved is saying anything about future bookings.) But before we get to the software, there’s the story of how Dolan’s vision for the hardware came to be realized.
Dolan has been one of New York’s biggest movers and shakers, not Las Vegas’. But this desert spectacle 2,500 to the west of the high-rise conference room from which he’s Zooming Variety is a passion project for the guy perhaps most famous for owning the Knicks and Rangers, not to mention running Madison Square Garden, largely due to it truly being his baby. There has been a legend, often-told, that the day after Dolan’s company sold what might have been considered the family heirloom, Cablevision, the very next day he sat with MSG Ventures’ David Dibble, drew a sketch of Sphere and said, “Let’s reinvent live entertainment.”
That version of the story is “slightly romanticized,” Dolan says, “but it was closely thereafter. After we had done the Cablevision deal,” selling the cable giant for $17.7 billion in 2016, “we had capital, and I wanted to create a growth strategy for MSG. And there was really no easy growth strategy available, buying anything. Buying more venues didn’t interest us. You can’t buy any more teams. We didn’t really want to go into the promotions business, like Live Nation. But then the notion of changing the model that venues were operated with is what really spurred me on. I’ve told this story: Madison Square Garden at the time was the busiest arena in the world, with something like 200 events annually, which still left us with 160 dark nights. And then you take a look at what were the most profitable out of the 200, and it’s the ones where we own the content — the Knicks and the Rangers. So I wanted to disrupt the model so that I could keep the building busy 365 days a year, and wanted to own the content. How could I do that? It had just evolved that the technology was just blossoming at that point to where you could do something like the Sphere.” (Yes, the owner of the place calls it “the” Sphere, even though technically it’s without a the, so you should feel free to, as well.) “And beforehand, we fooled around with a lot of different images and different shapes for it, but yes, I did settle in and drew a picture and said, ‘We should do this shape. This is the best one.’”
Dolan is deeply proud of the intense photorealism of Sphere’s wrap-around big screen. “When you look up and you look at the blue sky on that screen, it looks just like the blue sky if you stuck your head out your window now. It is difficult to tell the difference.” He says he took inspiration for that goal from a famous science-fiction short story by one of his favorite writers, Ray Bradbury, called “The Veldt,” about a children’s nursery with immersive screens on the walls. “It’s kind of amazing that Bradbury wrote that story in the ‘50s, and it really was about experiential media — and in the case of ‘The Veldt,’ in the home — and talked about crystal walls that turned into landscapes. I mean, it was not dissimilar to what we’re doing. So as we started to talk about what we could do technologically with the venue, ‘The Veldt’ came to mind right away. Could we create those kinds of experiences inside of the venue? I don’t think that we quite achieved Bradbury’s vision with it, and I don’t really want to completely achieve his vision, because in the end of his story, the parents get eaten by the lions. I think that would mean I would get eaten by the lions.”
Having said that he learned early on that domes were terrible for audio, Dolan says the team more than solved that with thousands of small speakers — everywhere from behind the LED panels on the screen to within individual seats — that overcompensated for the problem. “The beamforming sound technology not only cures all that, but creates studio-quality sound for every seat in the house. I will tell you artists that come in there and play the venue are going to be very spoiled, because, I’ve never heard anything like it, in any venue, and I’ve been to a lot of venues —distortion-free, crystal-clear sound without any bounce, etcetera. I was listening to U2 the other day and it’s like they’re playing for you in your living room.”
As for U2’s involvement, Fogel, the CEO of the global touring division of Live Nation Entertainment, has been a key figure, given his work with the band that goes back to the early ‘80s. “The seed was planted actually by Peter Shapiro, who’s part of the Live Nation family,” Fogel says. “He somehow planted the seed with Bono, going back to the fall of 2021, about the possibility of looking at opening the venue.” The negotiation got underway in earnest in early ‘22. When it came to drummer Larry Mullen Jr. not being available because of the need for surgery and recovery, “the commitment came together before that sort of surfaced as an issue. So it became a discussion and a consideration at that time, when it did surface, as to how to go forward, given the commitment was already in place to open the Sphere.” The O.G. drummer of 45 years is being replaced for this engagement by Krezip drummer Bram van den Berg, with Mullen’s assent. (Fans were encouraged to see Mullen back on the drummer’s stool for a just-released video, for a new single timed to the residency, “Atomic City,” filmed this month on Fremont Street.)
As for the visual component, demos that have occurred in Sphere (and in a small-scale prototype test building in Burbank) have focused on global outdoor photography that makes the building feel something like the original three-panel Cinerama films or Disneyland’s Soarin’ Over California on massive steroids. This type of cinematography has been made possible because Sphere’s parent company invented special spherical cameras for the process that seamlessly capture a more-than-180-degree view of the world in godlike resolution. That process will be in evidence when Aronofsky’s “Postcard” film shortly premieres. But Williams didn’t use them for the U2 show, going largely — not entirely — with more abstract, less severely realistic imagery to put up over the band’s heads.
“Big Sky is their camera, which is absolutely astonishing,” says Williams. “But it’s for making movies, and that’s not where we ended up going. I think that’s great, because between the U2 show and Darren’s film, there are two completely different uses of the space, which will be very interesting to contrast and compare. No, a real breakthrough for me was realizing that even though the canvas is vast, very simple things can be very effective. I mean, we do do some immersive, sort of big film stuff, because it would be rude not to. But there’s a lot of things which are really very simple and in that space incredibly effective. Because there are no corners, you have no real sense of where you are, and in the dark, we can present very simple shapes and spaces and environments that you completely believe are true. And if you move between those things in a live way, you really feel like the building is morphing.
“Darren’s film is extraordinary, and it takes you around the world. But rock ‘n’ roll and nature just isn’t a thing,” Williams continues, wryly. “How U2 would play in front of these films, at that scale… With ‘Joshua Tree,’ it was Anton Corbijn’s eye, and what he did there was truly remarkable to bring that kind of stillness and beauty into a rock environment. But the ‘Joshua Tree’ screen, huge and stadium-filling though it was, is about 10 percent of the size of this thing. So in my mind, there was no way that the premise of U2 playing in front of geographical scenes was ever going to work.”
As for what he did make work, Williams just says, “Strap in is all I would say.” Individual pieces of the show were assigned to visual artists including longtime teammate Es Devlin, Marco Brambilla (who did “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” “and it really is even better than the real thing”), John Gerrard (“an Irish artist, who works with flags… lots of symbolism in there”) and Industrial Light & Magic (“They took a break from ‘Star Wars’”). Also, “Brian Eno doesn’t often get directly involved in the shows, but he’s been incredibly helpful with this, and we’ve borrowed his (giant prop) record player, to use as a stage. … And we have not ignored the fact that we’re in Vegas. There’s a touch of Elvis in there.”
Fans that have bought up the 18,000 nightly tickets for the 25 scheduled shows have had a lot of curiosity about what U2 will be doing just as far as a setlist: A show centered around the classic 1991 album “Achtung Baby” has been promised.
Williams spills the details: “Having presented ‘The Joshua Tree’ as an album show [on world tours in 2017 and 2019], we didn’t feel obligated to do that with ‘Achtung Baby.’ We didn’t feel beholden to the album structure or doing it in one chunk, so it’s a more integrated approach. But it’s all there and it’s wonderful. I mean, I haven’t heard that solo in ‘Love Is Blindness’ for 30 years. And it’s as remarkable as ever.”
When Williams was quoted at the beginning of this piece as saying he initially thought doing this was “a terrible idea,” Williams was actually speaking of two things he was concerned about when the idea arose. One worry was conceiving a show specifically for a single venue with new and arguably odd requirements. The other was whether the whole thing would be a nod to the screens-heavy, multi-media ’92-93 Zoo TV tour. That show was about futurism — about being “ready for what’s next.” So would a full-on revival come down nostalgia for future-shock?
“I didn’t think we’d revisit Zoo TV,” Williams says, “because it seems like, well, the whole world has become Zoo TV since then. The Zoo TV video confessional basically is TikTok. So I felt like that language has probably played out. Every show out there looks like a cross between Zoo TV and PopMart (U2’s ’97 tour), and I wasn’t sure there was much more water in that well.” But the more he thought about it, the more he was focus on certain visual elements that were unique to Zoo TV that have not been so heavily replicated since. “And so I’m revisiting (Zoo TV) more than I thought I would, which I’m sure diehard fans will be very happy about. It’s more the atmosphere of the Zoo TV show that we’ve embraced for some of the ‘Achtung Baby’ section, rather than anything too specific. But some of Mark Pellington’s original 1992 footage is in there, in a very re-commodified form. That was a joy for me, because he was so crucial to the whole thing back then — and he’s coming to opening night, which is rather nice.”
The bigger nut Williams felt he had to crack was the Sphere space itself. “With all the big stuff I’ve done for U2 and anyone else, we don’t start with the equipment, we start with the idea, and then figure out what we need to realize that idea. And sometimes it involves big video, sometimes it doesn’t. Whereas here, the only given we had going in was the building — and a building that didn’t exist, and in fact isn’t finished now. So it was odd starting a show with hardware and with a space rather than the other way around. And we’re also sharing the space with the Darren Aronofsky movie. So normally I’m working through the night to do programming and so forth, whereas we have to vacate this building from time to time so Darren and team can come in. But I think in the end these proved to be positive creative limitations. It has been a bit like doing a three-legged obstacle course, but we’ve got there.”
How sore will everyone’s necks be, with that six-story-tall screen? “I think the movie (‘Postcard From Earth’) probably will have more of an issue with that than the U2 show, because we don’t feel obliged to use the whole thing all the time. There are periods, as always with the U2 show, where we just leave the band and the music to connect with the audience. So there’s definitely relief from the overkill in the show. Obviously we want to maximize the experience, and because we’re first in there, we want to claim the territory and just see what this thing can do, But it doesn’t matter. In anything — even if it’s the most spectacular thing you’ve ever seen in your life — after half an hour, you get used to it. That’s just the way we humans are.”
One of the odd things about Sphere, Williams points out, is that the theater space couldn’t be less traditional… and yet it’s a little bit old-fashioned, too, in a certain seating regard. Outside appearances can be illusory in indicating what it’s like inside — basically, an arena-sized audience filling a space that isn’t configured like an arena at all, thanks to a fairly steep rake.
“What we have enjoyed about the Sphere venue is that actually it’s very small,” Williams says. “Even though it has this gigantically huge roof, It’s 18,000 — it’s not a stadium. And certainly for the band standing on stage, the audience feels incredibly close. It feels like a theater stage, actually. And having just done the ‘Surrender’ show with Bono, you definitely feel something similar in the language. Because it’s people standing on a stage, facing in one direction, playing to an audience, or looking back at them.”
For all the talk about built-in speakers in the seats that make up most of the auditorium, Williams is enthusiastic about the standing-room area — something that might be called a “pit” if this weren’t such a high-class joint. “Being on the floor is going to be quite something. It feels so small. I was laughing with Adam (Clayton) because we both, for some reason, thought of Hammersmith Palais. It’s much bigger obviously, but because it’s kind of long and thin, the people on the floor are going to have an absolute ball. Whereas the people upstairs, it’ll be more of a sit-down visual experience. But that’s always the case with U2 shows. They want the energy of the audience close to them, yet they appreciate that there are people my age that might not want to stand for the whole thing.”
Fogel saw what a hunger there was to see U2 in the flesh again — and that without any definite prospect for a new album or a world tour, this fills a need that may or may not be satisfied again soon. “In 2019, we did other parts of the world with ‘The Joshua Tree,’” finally wrapping up in India, “but the truth is, we’re basically five, six years since the band toured in North America or Europe. So it’s great to have them back at it, particularly in this unique way. And whatever comes down the road comes down the road.”
Azoff says no one should be automatically pessimistic about a U2 tour. “I’m hoping that ‘Atomic City’ is the first track of a new album. … I could speculate on how long or what that will take. But I wouldn’t rule out them coming back (to Sphere). I wouldn’t rule out a world tour. Larry has said, ‘I intend to do everything I can to get healthy enough to be in this band — in the touring band — again.’ I mean, I wouldn’t rule anything out, but it’s unknown at this point.”
And other acts coming in to Sphere? It will be sooner rather than later, but limited in the number of stars we’ll see passing through in a year. Dolan estimates three or four residencies a year happening, but no one-off single gigs. For his part, Azoff notes, “Baz Halpin has been looking at it; he works with several major entertainers,” Azoff says. “And I know Willie and his team would come back. So I think there’ll be a lot of options. It really is, at minimum, a four-month process, I think, to build the visuals.”
Williams has his doubts about how easy it would be for anyone to come close to what he and the band have done. “I can’t imagine how anybody else is ever going to play here, frankly, because we’ve had 18 months to put it together, and we’ve gone through the journey with MSG in terms of making it work in the building. Absolutely everything is bespoke, usually involving things that we haven’t really had to think about before.” But Sphere’s principals believe the learning curve they went through with U2 can greatly tighten up that process.
Says Azoff, “It’s premature to tell you what’s coming up. But many of the very biggest, most iconic acts in the business checked it out. And U2 has an option to continue at the Sphere for two more years. So I think we need to let U2 get acclimated to see what they’re going to do next, and then I would think by the end of the U2 residency, certainly, we will be ready to announce other music projects in the Sphere.” No putting the cart before the U2 horse. “I’ve been doing this a long time,” Azoff says, “and I’m as excited about this as anything I’ve ever been involved in.”
Williams admits he didn’t start out as excited as he ended up being, if only because he is not the type of guy who is into the “neon flashin’ and your one-armed bandits crashin’,” to quote Elvis. “The last thing I wanted to do was spend six months in Las Vegas, so I wasn’t at all keen,” he confesses. “But U2 are very clever people, and — I can say this because we’re all the same age — even solidly into their 60s, they don’t want to just sit and repeat themselves. They’re always looking for the next challenge, in where can we take the idea of rock performance. And so ultimately, of course, they were completely right.
“I mean, I know that if U2 was about to start a stadium tour now, in the face of everything else that’s out there at the moment, it would raise a certain amount of interest, but it wouldn’t get the global attention that this is getting, because they are discovering a new format. On Friday, 18,000 people will walk into that space. None of them have ever been there before. There’s never been a space like it, and we’re going to do a show for them. And to have that kind of new energy at this point in their career is truly remarkable. To even have the hunger to do it is really remarkable.”
Dolan is more into gambling than Williams — not at the roulette wheel, but on the building itself. Having run a billion over budget, by all accounts, is he still expecting to be profitable with Sphere?
“Yes, I absolutely expect it to be profitable. Will it generate enough profits to justify the capital that was put into it? I think so, but it remains to be seen. I mean, so far, the biggest hurdles in that is making sure that you have a product that the consumer is going to want. And what I’ve seen of our product, I think we have that. and then it comes down to marketing and selling tickets and generating revenue and sponsorships, and that all looks like it’s on a very good trajectory. We’re already seeing worldwide interest from other countries that are talking to us about building (Spheres) for them. And once we debut the product to the public, I think we’re going to do very well, but I’m not going to declare victory before I get there.”
The second Sphere has long been touted for the U.K., “and London is still very much moving forward,” Dolan says. “That is definitely a big part of the business plan, to build more Spheres all over the world. And by the way, different-size ones too — probably not much bigger than the one in Vegas, but we’ve actually gone through already architectural drawings and designs for smaller Spheres for smaller markets. We have a fully developed construction design and construction company that has a lot of experience building all over the world. And since we have the experience of building the first one, it won’t be as expensive as the first one.”
Where does Sphere fit on the scale of passion projects for Dolan? “There have been other things I’ve done in my career where I’ve taken risks,” he says by way of a preamble. “I spent over $4 billion rebuilding the network for Cablevision, converting it to fiber optics, and that was an exciting time. When we decided to spend that money, we didn’t really know how people were going to use all the bandwidth. There was just this new thing called the internet, and it was AOL and Excite, and nobody was making a lot of money over there. So no one knew what the potential was, but we went ahead because we believed that the additional bandwidth was going to be worth it. As it turned out, that was obviously right. But while you’re spending the money, it always gets a little death-defying.
“But I didn’t invent fiber optics and I didn’t invent digital transmission. With this one, a lot more hung on our vision for the product, in terms of my own involvement in terms of creating the product and designing it and so that’s made it nearer and dearer to my heart.
“And then,” Dolan adds — as a $2.3 billion aside — “the amount of money is not insignificant, either. So between the two of those things, it’s the top of the list.”
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