With the words “It’s Elvis’ Cathedral!” U2’s Bono opened the MSG Sphere in Las Vegas. The spherical room is covered with a giant screen.

A giant screen with more than 250 billion pixels – stretching inside and outside the room – shows a desert sunrise, the horizon shimmering around the room, Nevada’s endangered species , an ocean and fireworks: many celebrities attended the opening of the room. MSG sphere in Las Vegas has. Guests included former tennis players Steffi Graf and Andre Agassi as well as actors and actresses like Elizabeth Banks, Dakota Fanning, Aaron Paul, Bryan Cranston, Jon Hamm and Josh Duhamel.

According to operators, the MSG Sphere is the largest spherical hall in the world – 111 meters high and almost 160 meters wide. It can accommodate up to 20,000 people. The audience is surrounded by a huge LED screen and special sounds, wind, steam and various smells can be generated using the latest technologies.

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U2’s Bono: “It’s Elvis’ Cathedral!”

Irish rock band U2 opened Las Vegas’ new spherical event venue, MSG Sphere, with a spectacular live show. “It’s Elvis’ cathedral!” shouted frontman Bono on Friday night (September 29) after the first songs, all from the album “Aktion Baby” (1991).

U2 will play 25 nights at MSG Sphere in Las Vegas through December. “The show was gigantic, the clear visuals were extremely real,” said Anne Viefhues, who traveled to Las Vegas for the German fansite “u2tour.de”, immediately after the opening dpa concert. “Sometimes it was like the images were happening to you. Musically, the band was fantastic too.” Bono often seemed visibly emotional, humbled by the scale of the event and the venue and moved to tears to be in front of fans again after the pandemic.

“As if God were coming down from heaven”

The replacement of ailing drummer Larry Mullen with Dutchman Bram van den Berg was enthusiastically received by the band and fans. It’s clear that Mullen is and will remain U2’s drummer, says Michelle Shermer, who works for the ONE organization, co-founded by Bono. “But Bram did very well.” She also found the show incredible: “Sometimes it was like God was coming down from the sky – and the next moment the lights went out and it was very intimate again, just the group alone without much- something else.”

Bono (63) and his colleagues have repeatedly used new show elements on previous tours – during the Zoo TV Tour (1992 to 1993), for example, huge televisions and Trabis were hung on the above the stage.