U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere was a concert residency by the Irish rock band U2 that took place at Sphere in Paradise, Nevada, in the Las Vegas Valley. Consisting of 40 concerts from 29 September 2023 to 2 March 2024, the residency inaugurated the venue, with each show featuring a full performance of the group's 1991 album Achtung Baby along with a mix of other songs from their catalogue. The shows leveraged Sphere's immersive video and sound capabilities, which include a 16K resolution wraparound LED video screen measuring , and speakers with beamforming and wave field synthesis technologies.
The show was conceptualised over an 18-month period by U2's long-time production designer Willie Williams, in collaboration with artist and designer Es Devlin and architect Ric Lipson. Several artists were commissioned to provide video artwork for the concerts, including Devlin, Marco Brambilla, John Gerrard, and the effects studio Industrial Light & Magic. The stage featured a minimalist design in the shape of a record player, borrowed from Brian Eno's art piece "Turntable". The band's creative team faced numerous challenges while developing the show, which included tailoring it to a venue with brand-new technology while it was still being built, designing a video playback system suitable for the high-resolution screen, and sharing the space with the crew for Darren Aronofsky's film Postcard from Earth.
First rumoured in July 2022, the residency was announced in a Super Bowl LVII television advertisement in February 2023, followed by date confirmations and ticket sales in April and May. To promote the residency, U2 released a Las Vegas-themed single on opening night called "Atomic City", and a temporary exhibit for fans was created at the Venetian resort that adjoins Sphere. U2's drummer Larry Mullen Jr. did not participate in the residency in order to recuperate from surgery, marking the first time since 1978 that the group performed without him; Dutch drummer Bram van den Berg from the band Krezip filled in.
U2:UV Achtung Baby Live received wide critical acclaim. Many reviews highlighted the successful fusion of U2's anthemic music with the spectacle of the venue, while commenting on the show's potential impact on live entertainment as a whole. Initially scheduled to run until December 2023 for 25 shows, the residency was extended into March 2024 with 15 additional concerts due to high demand. The residency grossed $244.5 million from 663,000 tickets sold, making it the fourth-highest-grossing concert residency of all time. It was filmed for the immersive concert film V-U2, which began screening exclusively at Sphere in September 2024.
Background
In 1991, the Irish rock band U2 released their seventh studio album, Achtung Baby, which was critically acclaimed and sold 18 million copies. The supporting Zoo TV Tour from 1992 to 1993 was a multimedia spectacle intended to instill sensory overload in the audience, featuring dozens of video screens, Trabant automobiles in the lighting system, and a belly dancer. As Achtung Babys 30th anniversary approached in 2021, the band contemplated if they should commemorate the milestone while the COVID-19 pandemic was still ongoing; they considered the possibility of staging concerts, similar to their 2017 and 2019 tours that commemorated the 30th anniversary of their 1987 album The Joshua Tree. For U2's bassist Adam Clayton, their biggest question was: "how do you update the Zoo TV concept? Because all the predictions of Zoo TV have come to pass: fake news, media overload, the MTV generation, wars fought on television with camera systems that could follow a missile down the street, as it was in the Iraq-Kuwait war at that time. So we just thought: we can't take this out [on the road]."
The live entertainment venue Sphere was announced in February 2018 as a joint project between the Madison Square Garden (MSG) Company and Las Vegas Sands Corporation. The venue was marketed for its potential to immerse audiences with revolutionary sound and video capabilities. Measuring high and wide at its broadest point, Sphere is located just off the Las Vegas Strip, east of the Venetian, which was owned by Las Vegas Sands at the onset of the project. Groundbreaking on Sphere took place in September 2018 with expectations that it would open in 2021. In March 2020, MSG Entertainment announced that construction was being halted due to the pandemic. By August, the company said that construction had resumed and that Sphere's opening had been postponed until 2023. The venue was originally estimated to cost between US$1.2 billion and US$1.7 billion, but by the time construction was completed, costs had risen to US$2.3 billion.
Booking According to U2's guitarist the Edge, the band first heard about Sphere in 2020 from friends involved with the project and through their creative team, as they wanted to stay informed about technological advancements for concerts, particularly regarding live audio. He said, "We got the feeling that amongst the Sphere team, we'd been identified as prime candidates for the job of opening the venue." Concert promoter Peter Shapiro, who was a producer for the band's concert film U2 3D, first approached their lead vocalist Bono in autumn 2021 with the idea of U2 inaugurating Sphere.
From conversations with Shapiro and MSG Entertainment chief executive James L. Dolan, Bono learned about the immersive sound system that the German company Holoplot was designing for the venue. He subsequently called the band's long-time sound engineer Joe O'Herlihy in August 2021 and tasked him with learning more about it. O'Herlihy travelled to Germany to participate in a demonstration of the speaker system at Congress Center, an industrial exhibition hall in Leipzig. He tested the speakers with multitrack recordings he had brought from U2's Joshua Tree Tour 2019, and was immediately struck by the "intelligibility of Bono's voice". O'Herlihy originally intended to visit for only a day but was so enthused that he stayed for an entire week to learn as much as he could about Holoplot's system. By the time he left, he was convinced that it was the "future of [his] industry" and told Bono and the Edge that they "definitely [had] to be the first band into the Sphere".
After being unofficially asked if U2 would consider opening Sphere, Bono and the Edge visited the half-built venue as well as Sphere Studios, a quarter-scale replica of the venue in Burbank, California, for a demonstration of Sphere's eventual sound and video capabilities. The duo left the meeting excited but their creative team disabused them of the idea that designing a show would be easy. Michael Rapino, the CEO of Live Nation Entertainment, unsuccessfully tried to dissuade Bono from opening Sphere, fearing that the venue's LED screen could make U2's audiences queasy. Interest in a potential show that would commemorate Achtung Baby coalesced around the idea of not touring a complex concert production in the post-COVID era. Negotiations with U2 subsequently began in earnest in early 2022.
Initially, there were discussions about booking the American rock band Phish, with whom Dolan and MSG Entertainment have a long-standing relationship, as Sphere's inaugural act; Phish's guitarist Trey Anastasio was the first performer to utilise the "Sphere Immersive Sound" system during his August 2022 shows at the MSG Entertainment-owned Beacon Theatre in New York City. Ultimately, U2 agreed to open Sphere with a concert residency, followed by Phish. Dolan reportedly paid U2 $10 million to produce their show, on top of their guaranteed earnings of $4 million per show from Live Nation. The deal was arranged by entertainment executive Irving Azoff and his son Jeffrey of Full Stop Management. Irving Azoff has a business partnership with MSG Entertainment and helped Dolan secure the plot of land on which Sphere was built. Azoff also became U2's manager in 2022, succeeding Guy Oseary after his nine-year tenure as their manager. Azoff said at the beginning of the residency that U2's contract included an option for them to continue performing at Sphere for two more years.
In November 2022, U2's drummer Larry Mullen Jr. said that he needed surgery to continue performing, as he had "lots of bits falling off, elbows, knees, neck". He said that if the band performed in 2023, it would likely be without him. Mullen's physical issues had not surfaced until after the group had agreed to the concerts, by which point they could not reschedule; the Edge said, "We made a commitment." In need of a temporary replacement, U2 hired the Dutch drummer Bram van den Berg of the band Krezip, having been previously introduced to him by the Dutch DJ Martin Garrix.
Development Assembling production team In early 2022, Bono presented the idea for a U2 residency at Sphere to their long-time production designer Willie Williams. Initially, Williams thought "it was a terrible idea". From a personal standpoint, he said that he hated Las Vegas, calling it a dark, cynical, and expensive city and "the place rock n' roll comes to die". From a practical perspective, he was also sceptical about tailoring a U2 show to a specific venue with new technical requirements. In his prior experiences with the band, the creative team always started with their ideas before selecting the equipment that could help them realise those ideas; for Sphere, he found it odd that they would need to take the reverse approach by starting with an unfinished venue and its hardware as the only givens.
Williams was also unsure whether the proposed show should reference the Zoo TV Tour, as he believed that its multimedia spectacle had become ubiquitous over the following 30 years. He said: "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 [U2's 1997 tour] PopMart... and I wasn't sure there was much more water in that well." Ultimately, he was convinced to take on the project after reflecting on the band's 2017 and 2019 Joshua Tree anniversary tours, which he thought avoided nostalgia by presenting the album in a contemporary way as if it was their latest release. He decided he could mirror this approach for an Achtung Baby anniversary show and focus on the album rather than the Zoo TV Tour. Williams highlighted certain visual elements from the tour that had not been as widely replicated, with the goal of recreating its overall atmosphere.
Williams began by engaging stage designer and artist Es Devlin, who worked on the band's 2015 Innocence + Experience Tour, and Ric Lipson of the architectural firm Stufish, forming the core of the band's creative team. Williams made the early decision to bring all the band's collaborators to Las Vegas, with nearly his entire team relocating temporarily to the city. Many crew members from prior U2 tours were involved in the production, including Stefaan "Smasher" Desmedt, U2's long-time technical and video director and the creative technical director of the live production rental agency Fuse Technical Group. After Williams convinced him to come out of retirement in August 2022 to work on Bono's 2022–2023 "Stories of Surrender" theatre shows, Desmedt subsequently agreed to work on U2's Sphere residency as well; his son Matisse programmed the shows' visuals. Joining Stefaan Desmedt for the video and camera direction were Allen Branton and Felix Peralta; Williams previously worked with Desmedt and Branton on the 1993 filming of U2's concert video Zoo TV: Live from Sydney. For the lighting team, Williams reunited lighting directors Alex Murphy and Ethan Weber, who previously worked together on U2's 360° Tour, and he added Matt Beecher, who served as lighting director on the "Stories of Surrender" shows. Long-time U2 producers Brian Eno and Steve Lillywhite also served as advisers.