Graham Reid | | 3 min read
In rock culture, playing Las Vegas is equivalent to one of Dante's circles of Hell – either greed or fraud – where the damned, at the fag-end of their careers, work out their twilight years.
That's the cliché, largely based on an image of a bloated and sweating Elvis, emblematic of the neon seduction and curse of Vegas.
But megastars – Elton, Cher, Adele, Katy Perry, Christine Aguilera among them -- gravitate there because of the personal comfort and certainties of a controlled performing environment.
When U2 announced they'd be opening Vegas' 17,500 capacity MSG Sphere in September it was more ammunition to deride the band if you never liked their bombast and self-righteousness.
However they are revisiting their 90s Achtung Baby album and ZooTV tour, their most innovative and daring album and one of the greatest visual spectacles in rock. The concerts referenced crass television, base politics, advertising, Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi-era propaganda films and the empty epigrams of US visual artist Jenny Holzer and delivered a techno-rock soundtrack.
It was a refracted view of the present projected into an unimaginable future where lies were sold as truth, opinion was fact, news was a lie and the world was awash with division, television channels and screen images removed from reality. Bad actors were revered and followed slavishly by legions.
That sensory overload and innate cynicism seems entirely appropriate in kitsch'n'glitz Vegas.
Drummer Larry Mullen will be absent – surgery required, apparently – but the band stand to make something north of $US1.3 million a night. And more from merchandise.
A tasty retirement top-up – they're all in their 60s – but also another refracting reboot of U2's career following 2021's 30th anniversary reissue of Achtung Baby (with imaginative remixes), frontman Bono's carpet-bombing of self-examination and name-dropping in his current best-selling memoir Surrender; 40 Songs, One Story and now the tie-in Songs of Surrender, 40 of their songs “re-recorded and reimagined”.
Curated and produced by The Edge who takes over some of the vocals, the non-chronological collection reaches back to their 1979 debut recordings Out of Control and Stories for Boys (the latter as a piano ballad) and up to their last studio album Songs of Experience of 2017 for less thumping Lights of Home, a minimalist band revisit to Get Out of Your Own Way and an acoustic version of The Little Things That Give You Away.
One as an aching piano ballad initially seems an unpromising opener but effectively telegraphs this collection's mood where the rhythm section often stands down for measured, stripped back editions of classic songs and deep cuts.
Among the rewards: a rewritten Walk On about Ukraine ("And if the comic takes the stage and no one laughs . . . this is the greatest act of all, a stand up for freedom"), the Daniel Lanois-like atmosphere of Where the Streets Have No Name; Out of Control (from their debut album Boy) as a snappy acoustic statement of youthful intent (“we got spirit, we got soul”); Pride, Sunday Bloody Sunday, I Will Follow, Stuck in a Moment With You, Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For all benefitting by being powered-down and less demonstrative; The Fly as shuffling white funk with Middle Eastern allusions; the gospel piano treatment of If God Will Send His Angels . . .
These reverse-engineered versions sound like classy, downbeat demos.
But, ever canny, U2 hedge their bets with the forthcoming, more bellicose and challenging Vegas shows, their first live concerts since the final concert on their Joshua Tree tour in December 2019.
For that it's back again to that promising future of three decades ago.
It's all . . . lights, camera, Achtung Baby.
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Elsewhere has an extensive article about the original ZooTV tour, and the Achtung Baby and Zooropa albums have long been Essential Elsewhere albums.
Songs of Surrender comes as double vinyl set with lyrics sheet but just selects 16 of the songs. Completists would want to CD edition.
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