U2 kicks off Las Vegas residency at The Venetian’s new venue Sphere

LAS VEGAS — The Irish rock band, U2, kicked off their Las Vegas residency Friday at The Venetian’s new venue, Sphere.

The band is also making history at the same time as being the first band to perform at Sphere, according to People magazine. It also marks their first live show in about four years.

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Sphere has a 16K resolution screen that “transported 18,600 fans from the stars in the night sky to a surreal collage of Vegas images, the arid deserts of Nevada, and the information overload of Zoo TV,” according to Rolling Stone.

The venue has 160,000 speakers and over 260 million video pixels, CBS News reported.

“That’s the thing about the resolution of this screen and photoreal potential of it is that if you show what’s outside the building on this wrap-around screen, the building disappears,” Bono said, according to the news outlet.

Friday’s concert marked U2′s first of a 25-show residency called “U2: UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere,” according to The New York Times.

The setlist was broken down into four parts, according to Variety. One part is “Achtung Baby” part 1, the second part is “Rattle and Hum” interlude, the third part is “Achtung Baby” part 2 and the fourth part is the encore. There are approximately 22 songs in the two-hour show.

“That’s what we started out wanting from the very beginning of the band is just to smash the fourth wall, get to our audience,” Bono told CBS News, according to People.

During the show, according to Variety, Bono dedicated a song Friday to the late Jimmy Buffet which was an emotion moment.

U2′s resident “celebrates the band’s acclaimed album ‘Achtung Baby,’ as well as its accompanying industry-defining ZOO TV Tour which broke the mold in 1991 and firmly establish the band’s reputation as artists who have consistently pushed the boundaries of live performance, with ground-breaking stage shows that embrace the latest in technology and innovation,” according to a news release obtained by People.

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