U2 has no limits when it comes to putting themselves on stage. The Irish group surpasses them all, however, with its residency show in Las Vegas, where it performs in a spherical-shaped hall built expressly for it. “There is nothing like it on the planet,” says Jonathan Labbee, of the Montreal company SACO Technologies, involved in the project.
The boundaries of reality are never really there when U2 decides to put on a new show. Over the past three decades, cutting-edge technologies have even had to be developed or improved to make the wildest stage dreams of the group and its close collaborators come true. However, with U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere, the limits of the rock concert as we knew it are completely shattered.
“It’s not even an evolution [compared to what existed], it’s downright a transition towards something else,” summarizes Yanick Fournier, vice-president of business development at SACO Techologies, who obtained the mandate of create the huge exterior and interior screens of the state-of-the-art venue where the Irish group performs.
The Sphere (whose external structure is called an “exosphere”) was developed and built for MSG Entertainment. U2 is the first artist in residence in this new venue, designed to present immersive shows.
The photos and videos that we have seen everywhere on the internet since Friday, the evening of the inaugural concert, indeed suggest that this is a unique experience of its kind. Imagine: one of the most universally known rock bands on the planet, playing in a visually stunning environment in a spherical hall twice the width and one and a third times the height of the Montreal Biosphere.
U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere left more than one child behind. The reviewer for the British daily The Guardian called the show a “stunning and admirably raw extravaganza”. He specifies that even on the scale of U2, a group not exactly shy of its ambitions, it is “grandiose”. Variety, in the United States, judged this show, which is the complete opposite of what one expects of a rock concert, to be “spectacular”.
SACO Technologies has spent the last five years working on the Sphere project – and challenges. In addition to having to design the exterior surface, animated day and night, using approximately 50 million small LED lights grouped in rounds of 48, the company had to develop a unique curved screen for the interior.
“We had to create a screen that allowed sound to pass through,” explains Yanick Fournier. You don’t see any speakers in the arena. U2 had almost nothing on stage. The sound is of incredible quality. » The result is, in his opinion, “dazzling”.
The Montreal firm is not its first participation in a show involving U2. “We were born into rock’n’roll,” says Jonathan Labbee. U2 was our first client. » SACO Technologies designed the group’s first giant screen using LED technology for its Pop Mart tour in 1996. The company also contributed to the Elevation and Vertigo tours.
This time, its client was not U2, but MSG Entertainment, which wanted to build “the arena of the future,” where it will present shows and other immersive experiences. However, U2 was the best artist to launch this new venue, according to Jonathan Labbee and Yanick Fournier.
U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere runs until at least mid-December. Bono, The Edge and Adam Clayton are performing for the first time in their band’s history without their drummer, Larry Mullen Jr., who required surgery to resolve health issues caused by decades of gigging. He is replaced by the Dutchman Bram van den Berg.
The Las Vegas concert features songs from Achtung Baby, as well as classics like Elevation, Where the Streets Have No Name, With or Without You and Beautiful Day.
Designing innovative and extravagant stage devices has been part of U2’s artistic approach for three decades. Reminders.
Bono described the Zoo TV show as “Disneyland on acid.” U2 began to play around this time with the possibilities offered by giant screens, often pushing the limits of this technology. Willie Williams, lighting designer and set designer for the Irish group’s concerts since 1983, was the artistic coordinator of Zoo TV. The stage structure was designed by architect Mark Fisher, a favorite of rock stars.
The PopMart show, however, was even more extravagant than Zoo TV: the group performed under a huge yellow arch (a nod to McDonald’s), in front of a giant screen, and even entered the stage coming out of a disco lemon…
U2 returned to earth for their Elevation and Vertigo tours in the early 2000s. Both shows were based on the same concept: a traditional stage with a circular (Elevation) or elliptical (Vertigo) walkway built in front of it. The brilliant innovation of the Vertigo show was a retractable screen curtain made of luminous balls which covered the stage without blocking the view. “The idea came up in one of my conversations with Mark Fisher and it turned out that we had both thought of the same thing, each on our own,” revealed Willie Williams in an interview with La Presse in 2005.
For years, Willie Williams was against the idea of a center stage. “When you go to see a group, you have to feel that it is one, the energy must come from one place,” he told La Presse in 2005. However, in 2009, Bono returned to load. Willie Williams had the idea to make the central stage structure look like it was part of the stadiums where U2 performed. Mark Fisher then designed a huge “clamp” which notably supported a huge conical screen. The structure required four days to assemble. The Montreal representations directly demanded the construction of an amphitheater on the site of the former Blue Bonnets racetrack.