U2 EXPANDS SPHERE OF INFLUENCE WITH ADDITIONAL DATES

As expected, U2 has extended its Las Vegas residency, U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere, with 11 dates in January and February, bringing the total show count to 36. The core trio of Bono, The Edge and Adam Clayton will once again be joined by Bram van den Berg on drums while Larry Mullen Jr. continues to recover from back surgery.

The new gigs will take place on 1/26-27, 1/31, 2/2-3, 2/7, 2/9-10, 2/15 and 2/17-18. Good luck getting anywhere near Sphere the weekend of 2/9, with Las Vegas also hosting a little event called the Super Bowl that Sunday. U2 plays its next Sphere show tomorrow (10/20).

In our review of the 9/29 opening night festivities, we said Sphere has the “ability to cover every surface with stunningly hi-def images and far surpasses any kind of visual production ever experienced—what it offers artists is nothing less than a canvas for world-building. Team U2’s artful deployment of its extraordinary new tools included several dazzling set pieces, one of which was a CGI-like Vegas cityscape that deconstructed itself, girder by girder, until it was a bare desert floor, precisely the terrain from which the band’s most effective work has sprung.”

“I can safely now for me say that everything I had hoped and imagined for it over-delivered,” U2 manager Irving Azoff told us in an interview published earlier today. “Once you got 18,000 people in the place, the sound got even better.”