From The Sydney Morning Herald:

Pop Goes A New World Tour By Jon Casimir

U2, Sam Boyd Stadium, Las Vegas, April 25

THE first thing you see as you enter the arena is the giant golden arch. More than 30 metres high, it dominates the stage, dwarfing the performersbelow it.

As a symbol, it’s comfortably ambiguous, self-consciously playful. Onemoment it looks like half of the McDonald’s logo, the next it’s ’60s sci-fi kitsch - something the Jetson family spaceship might putter through at any moment. What are you meant to make of it? Whatever you want.

The next thing that strikes is the bulging, grape-like cluster of bright orangespeakers (all mono) adorning the arch. To the right of the stage, an equally giant toothpick skewers an outsized olive (green, stuffed), which looks rather like Saturn, surrounded by rings of light. Maybe it’s meant to be transmitting the show to the universe. Who knows?

Suspended from the toothpick is a lemon so big it would require its ownpavilion at the Easter Show. It’s pretty safe to say the lemon has no particular relevance (beyond being the name of an old song and a staple of detergent ads), but it’s damned attractive.

As you scan the stage, the meanings, references and possibilities pile on top of each other. It quickly becomes obvious why U2 chose Las Vegas to launch PopMart - what the show shares with America’s fastest growing city is an accelerated hyperreality, the blurring of the synthetic and the real.

Though the staging assaults the senses before the concert has even begun,the true star waits quietly at the back. The $US6 million ($7.7 million) centrepiece of PopMart is the world’s biggest LED screen, 52 by 17 metres, which displays footage of the band as well as specially commissioned, often exquisite work from video artists and animators.

The quality of the images is not as precise as that allowed by some othertypes of screen, but the appealingly low-fi, pixellated look intentionally (or is it just fortuitously?) recalls the use of dots by Roy Lichtenstein, whose fighter pilot paintings are animated and included in the show.

From the ground, the screen seems almost unimaginably big, the images impossibly lush and seductive. Even at the back of the stadium it was just a headshakingly beautiful sight.

But then, PopMart, a sly, cheeky collision of Pop Art and K-Mart, of art and consumerism, was always going to be huge - U2 have never been inclined to the token gesture. Insiders estimate it is three to five times more technically complex than 1993’s Zooropa, until now the benchmark of stadium performance.

On the opening night of its 14-month world tour, a cool, crisp desert evening in Nevada, PopMart made the Ben Hur chariot race look like an earwig derby. The tour, which will crashland on Sydney early next year, is costing $US214,000 a day and it’s not hard to see why - the money is all there on the stage.

The important thing to note about PopMart is that it is not Zoo Two. It’s immediately warmer than its predecessor. Its signals are clear, bold and primary coloured, compared with Zooropa’s fractured, distorted and occasionally contradictory perspectives. Its scale is still overwhelming, but it doesn’t throw disorientation into the bargain as well.

Where Zooropa was a cerebral outing, a heavily ironic exploration of the information age, PopMart is, for all the posturing of its title and its cheesy visual cues, a more emotional affair. By constructing a stage show which initially emphasises music as ephemeral, as plastic-sheened consumer culture, the performers challenge themselves to go beyond that definition. They embrace it, but they know they must also transcend it.

Opening with an urgent, clamorous reading of Mofo, from the latest album,Pop, the show played its hand by rushing headlong into I Will Follow, now 17 years old and still appropriately bursting with adolescent energy. The two songs set a pace which rarely eased. PopMart doesn’t offer U2 in reflective mode - it is aimed at the body.

The two-hour concert, in front of 37,000 fans, picked selectively through the back catalogue (Pride, Where The Streets Have No Name, With Or Without You, I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, Until the End of the World) but focused mainly on pop.

There were signs of first-night nerves, and a little rust in the engine (they had to stop and restart a version of Staring At The Sun) but there were more than enough extraordinary moments to make up for any quibbles. My favourite was seeing two people standing in the bleachers with mobile phones held towards the stage, relaying proceedings to friends who had not been able to make it (or perhaps they were just taping bits on their answering machines). But I digress …

Songs like Miami and Last Night On Earth found a compelling ferocity notquite captured on record, while If God Would Send His Angels sounded even more achingly vulnerable than its impressive recorded self. Old favouriteswere rendered with grace, clarity and purpose. And for his usual solo turn, TheEdge led the crowd through a karaoke version of "my favourite Bob Dylan song", Daydream Believer.

The band, whose costumes (bassist Adam Clayton wore a safety helmet, overalls and dust mask) suggested that they enjoyed dressing up as the Village People in their recent Discotheque video a little too much, pushed thesongs to their limits, reminding all present that U2 is much more than just spectacle. But what a spectacle it was.

What PopMart proved, as if we didn’t know it already, is that there are two kinds of stadium rock band. There are those who are U2 and those who aren’t. And those who aren’t are a long way behind.

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