It’s been over a year since U2 began their 40-concert residency at the Sphere, Las Vegas’s new spherical super-venue, and now bassist Adam Clayton has been reflecting on the experience of playing there.
“It was an amazing building and it was an amazing show to play,” he told Ireland’s The Late Late Show. “Because, normally, musicians are put in these sports buildings that sound terrible, but the Sphere sounded amazing. In fact, it sounded so amazing that people said to me, ‘I can hear the bass’, which usually they don’t say to me very often.”
Given the visual impact of the Sphere’s 16k, 15,000m2 screens, there was always the danger that the music itself would end up playing second fiddle, so it’s reassuring to hear Clayton singing the praises of the audio, too. For U2, though, there was an element of risk involved when they signed on to be the opening act, because they didn’t really know what they were getting into.
“It was kind of nerve-racking, because we signed up for it when we had seen the plan, and it looked like the Death Star,” says Clayton. “It wasn’t built, we didn’t know if the tech worked, and we had to design a show to go into this building. So we agreed to do it because we thought the tech [was] interesting and it’s great to be the first show in. We rehearsed, we built the show outside of the building, turned up day one, did a couple of rehearsals and said, ‘Well, I don’t know if it’s going to work, but let’s go.’”
He needn’t have worried: both band and venue received rave reviews, and shorter residencies from Phish, Dead & Company and the Eagles, who are booked in until March next year, soon followed.
For U2, though, the focus is on what comes next: a reissue of their 2004 album How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, which is released on 22 November. This includes not only a remastered version of the original record, but also the ‘shadow album’, How to Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb, which features new and unreleased songs that have recently been rediscovered.
And, while these may have been ‘outtakes’, Clayton feels that, with the benefit of hindsight, they deserve to be heard.
“Everything that we didn’t use on the first one was kind of great anyway - we just discarded it and moved on,” he explains, adding that it was U2’s guitarist who first realised that the material was worthy of release. “Edge went back to the discarded tracks and went, ‘Actually, this is the band sounding really good. This is the band playing really well,’” Clayton confirms.
What’s more, the bassist feels that the passing of time means that these unheard songs can now be heard in a new context.
“In the 20 years since we did that [album] music has changed - the way people receive music has changed, it’s streaming,” he points out. “And the sound of music has changed, so when we went back to tracks that were played by a band in a room, we went ‘ooh, vaguely charming, moving, powerful,’ and it just sounded like something that people hadn’t heard for a while.”
