U2 could be set to take up residency in Las Vegas in the world's largest billion dollar sphere next year, The Irish Daily Star has learned.
The superstar rockers are rumoured to be the first band that will play at the MSG Sphere at The Venetian in Las Vegas when the €2.2 billion arena opens next year.
According to multiple sources to Billboard, Bono, The Edge, Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton could also be in talks about a new tour in North America.
Read More: U2's Bono announces secret brother he didn't know he had - and how he found out
Fan websites heavily reported that the band had asked previous crews they had worked with in the past to keep their schedules open for June 2023, suggesting that plans for a new tour was forming.
The band’s performances will be the first dates of a multi-show residency by U2 at the high-tech arena, which is being built by Madison Square Garden Entertainment chairman James Dolan near the Venetian off the Las Vegas Strip.
Officials with MSGE describe the MSG Sphere at The Venetian as the next generation of live entertainment, offering fans a multi-sensory experience of sound and light inside the largest spherical structure ever created.
For concerts, the MSG Sphere at The Venetian can hold 20,000 standing spectators or 17,500 seated guests, with 23 VIP suites.
The Sphere will include 160,000 square feet of video viewing space (Sphere officials describe the technology as “interior immersive display”), state-of-the-art spatial audio and an exterior exosphere that changes the building’s look via fully programmable LED technology. It will connect to the Venetian Resort via an approximately 1,000-foot-long pedestrian bridge.
U2’s possible concerts at the venue will be part of a residency that will be spread out over several months and be performed on non-consecutive days.
Management for U2 did not yet respond to requests for comment made by the Irish Daily Star.
In December, Madison Square Garden Entertainment announced it was taking over construction of the state-of-the-art venue, which was first announced in February 2018. The news meant that general contractor AECOM would transition to a supporting role under a new services agreement.
The announcement included news that “significant progress” had been made on construction of the venue, noting that the structure reached its widest point with completion of its sixth-level concrete ring beam, which is 490 feet wide and sits 113 feet above the ground.
MSG Entertainment previously disclosed in its August 2021 earnings report that the opening of MSG Sphere at The Venetian has been pushed from 2021 to sometime in 2023 — a cost-saving measure necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. MSG plans to open the MSG Sphere at The Venetian in time to participate in the FIA Formula One World Championship when it comes to Nevada in November 2023.
A second MSG Sphere is being planned in London and was given a green light by local officials to begin construction in March.
The speculation comes just months ahead of Bono releasing his first memoir, Surrender, to mark his 62nd birthday.
The memoir's title, "Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story," refers to the book's 40 chapters, each of which will be named after a U2 song.
"When I started to write this book I was hoping to draw in detail what I'd previously only sketched in songs," Bono said at the time he announced the book.
"The people, places, and possibilities in my life. Surrender is a word freighted with meaning for me. Growing up in Ireland in the seventies with my fists up (musically speaking), it was not a natural concept.
"A word I only circled until I gathered my thoughts for the book. I am still grappling with this most humbling of commands. In the band, in my marriage, in my faith, in my life as an activist. Surrender is the story of one pilgrim’s lack of progress…with a fair amount of fun along the way."
The Dublin frontman also recently disclosed he has a half-brother he has not talked about before, who was born after his father had an affair while living at home in Dublin with Bono, his brother Norman and their mother.
Bono described the discovery, and told how he finally resolved his difficult relationship with his late father, a postal worker Brendan “Bob” Hewson, in a candid radio interview in the runup to the publication of the new book on BBC’s Desert Island Discs.
He said at the time: “I do have another who I love and adore,” he tells Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. Bono, whose real name is Paul, refers to finding a sibling “that I didn’t know I didn’t have … or maybe I did”.
Learning of the existence of a half-brother, and of a clandestine romance, has helped Bono make sense of his father’s behaviour at the time of the sudden death of his mother, Iris, when Bono was 14. His father died in 2001.
“My father was going through a lot. His head was elsewhere because his heart was elsewhere,” Bono, 62, recalls. “I could tell my father had a deep friendship with this gorgeous woman who was part of the family and then they had a child which was all kept a secret. Nobody knew.”
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