U2 and The Sphere - Simply magic!

Ireland's musical revolutionaries look ahead by going back...

On the face of it, reading about the relic-y rockers U2 opting for a lengthy 40-show residency over several months at the high tech wonder of the modern world, Las Vegas’s “The Sphere,” it sounded like two worlds colliding.

The God-celebrating, uplifting Irish minstrels with songs of, experience, optimism, and hope, you know, “A Beautiful Day,” all of them in their 60’s, spending all that time in the City Of Sin, with its glitter, all-night gambling parlors, strip clubs, flash and spectacle seemed wholly incongruous.

Bono, bravely overcoming stage fright, welcomes us at The Sphere.

U2 has been there before. When their mega-smash album “The Joshua Tree” and subsequent world tour landed the band on the cover of Time Magazine, bringing them an international stardom beyond their wildest imagination, the band responded a couple records later with “The PopMart” tour where, onstage, they came out of a giant lemon.

Well, every time except once where the lemon didn’t open.

Some years later, as Apple was introducing the IPhone 6, the band thought it was a cool idea to reward fans - well, everyone who had I-Tunes - planting their brand new album “Songs Of Innocence” on their ITunes for free! But without asking.

Which, you could say, showed Bono’s innocence and optimism, never did he for a moment expect that there might be a backlash from people who were peeved that Apple had the nerve to deliver them an album they didn’t ask for. So much for the band’s overly generous gesture. Welcome to our planet.

Happily for those of us who have followed the band’s extraordinary career - I saw two of the opening three “Joshua Tree” shows in Worcester, Mass. - they’ve kept on touring, recording and over those 40 Sphere shows, revisiting what many believe was their most innovative, looking-down-the-road release “Achtung Baby” and the eye-popping, over-the-top “Zoo TV Tour” that followed it. (Saw that tour, too. Twice. Sensational.)

Released in November of 1991, some of it recorded in Berlin while The Wall was coming down, “Achtung Baby” was an album where it seemed Bono and The Edge (Paul Hewson and David Evans), the singer and songwriter/guitarist were somehow inspired by the overwhelming media and Internet overload that would soon overtake our world, throwing out all kinds of messages that some blatant, some subliminal and not always positive.

U2 were able to turn that all around with video screens, their own TV station and a stunning set of songs, blasting their signal and sound all over the world, even calling The White House from the stage, asking to speak to President George Bush, opening the show with a video clip of Bush saying “We will, we will rock you.”

As the anniversary of that memorable tour approached, word leaked out of Dublin that they might take Zoo TV back out on the road. We didn’t expect it would be at The Sphere. Which, as it turned out was a superb choice. With all the technological razzle-dazzle that anybody could have conjured and some they couldn’t, here was a band with the confidence and experience to know how to use it - and not overdo it.

The Sphere was the kind of stage where the technology helped present the music, the ideas behind the songs, the album, what U2 were all about, why they were still out there (minus drummer Larry Mullen, laid up with back trouble. Bram van den Berg filled in admirably)

For a band that, after all these years - their first album “Boy” came out in 1980 - wanted to remain true to their considerable legacy, traipsing back through the superb collection of tunes on “Achtung Baby” might have been a way to reinvigorate them, celebrating and honoring, really, songs like “One” and “Zoo Station” and “Love Is Blindness” as well as their earlier classics.

They even tossed in a Las Vegas tribute tune, “Atomic City” where they let the dazzle of The Sphere really show itself. They seemed to really be enjoying themselves, supposedly are working on a new album with a possible tour to follow.

Here’s a sample of “Atomic City” and the splendor of The Sphere

After all these years and albums (170 million albums worldwide), it’s amazing that the band (A.) remains together - these four guys met in high school! - (B.) and they have continued to be artistically restless - their most recent release was “Songs Of Surrender” a collection of all their hit songs recently re-recorded in mostly calmer versions (Sorry, didn’t do it for me) and (C.) after 22 Grammy Awards, eight No. 1 albums and more money than several European countries, they still want to keep going, even into their 60’s, God love ‘em.

Interviewed by the New York Times Magazine a couple years ago, Bono still sounded like a guy who had the fire, something to prove, something to say.

“So right now I want to write the most unforgiving, obnoxious, defiant, [bleep]-off-to-the-pop-charts rock ’n’ roll song that we’ve ever made,” he said. “I spoke to Edge about it this week. He’s going, “Is it that call again?”

“What call?”

“The one about we’re going to write the big [expletive]-off rock song?”

And I say, “Yeah, it’s our job!” We can make songs famous now, but I don’t think U2 can make them hits.”

But we’re still listening. I am, that’s for sure. Hope you are, too. A new U2 album might help us find what we’ve been looking for.