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After an initial announcement during a Super Bowl commercial in February, U2 has revealed the first five dates of its highly anticipated residency at the new Las Vegas venue Sphere at the Venetian. The Irish rock legends will perform at the state-of-the-art new facility on Sept. 29-30, Oct. 5, and Oct. 7-8, and will feature material from their beloved 1991 album Achtung Baby. Tickets will be available through pre-registration with Ticketmaster's Verified Fan program and through a separate U2.com subscriber pre-sale. For details, click here. In addition, U2 is selling 50 VIP tickets for each show to benefit Bono's AIDS activism non-profit, (RED). As previously reported, Dutch musician Bram van den Berg will fill in for drummer Larry Mullen Jr. for the Sphere shows, while the latter recovers from surgery. The Sphere will reportedly offer 160,000 square feet of immersive video displays that “wrap up, around, and behind the audience,” coupled with Sphere Immersive Sound and 4D technologies for a multi-sensory experience. The venue can host 20,000 standing fans or 17,500 seated guests and will have 23 VIP suites. “Bottom line, U2 hasn’t played live since December 2019 and we need to get back on stage and see the faces of our fans again. And what a unique stage they’re building for us out there in the desert,” U2 said in a statement in February. “We’re the right band, Achtung Baby the right album, and the Sphere the right venue to take the live experience of music to the next level. That’s what U2’s been trying to do all along with our satellite stages and video installations, most memorably on the Zoo TV Tour, which ended in Tokyo 30 years ago this fall” (the groundbreaking Zoo TV Tour was staged in stadiums worldwide in 1992-93 to promote Achtung Baby). Last month, U2 released Songs of Surrender, a retrospective album offering “re-imagined and re-recorded” versions of 40 of the band’s classic songs. Bono is also continuing on with solo dates over the next few weeks at New York's Beacon Theatre in support of his 2022 memoir, Surrender.

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