U2 in Las Vegas: the greatest show on earth

Social media is already ablaze with footage from the Sphere, a dazzling auditorium where Bono's band have a new residency. Dylan Jones reports on its opening night

BONO always has a ready quip when contextualising the next great U2 adventure. "First we played clubs, then we played caves and now we play cathedrals," he said. And right now there is no greater cathedral than the Madison Square Garden Sphere in Las Vegas, which opened on Friday with the first show in U2's Achtung Baby residency. Backstage before the show, hugging and high-fiving and generally spreading the love (which he does with more warmth than any other rock star), Bono was full of bonhomie. Because U2, the greatest live act in the world (copyright all newspapers), were about to do what they are best at: convening, entertaining, and giving meaning to the art of performance.

Yet again, U2 are reinventing the 21st-century live experience, this time in a venue that looks like the world's largest marble. As I flew into Vegas on Thursday night, the Sphere looked as though it had colonised the city's famous Strip, a beautiful, gigantic pixelated piece of post-modernist sculpture sitting proud above a sea of correlated kitsch. Characterised by a 90m-tall circular exterior covered in a mind-boggling LED screen, the Sphere contains a steeply seated auditorium, with an enormous wraparound screen. Billed as the largest LED screen in the world, it features 268,435,456 pixels (I didn't count), the equivalent of 72 gargantuan televisions. There are bells, there are whistles, and there is everything in between. It cost more than $2 billion and you can see every dollar. Every minute of content produced for the show is the equivalent of one hour of streaming television, and it's all there in front of you for you to see.