Can U2 outdo Vegas?

AT five o'clock this morning Irish time, U2 take the stage at the Sam Boyd Stadium in Las Vegas for the first night of their PopMart Tour 1997. America's casino capital is a crazy, kitschy choice for the Irish hand's latest gamble, but PopMart's high concept consumer theme seems perfectly suited to the atmosphere of excess which pulsates through this commercial oasis in the Nevada desert.

But, though U2's stage show is reputedly bigger and brighter than ZOO TV, it's still hard to see how it could compete with the sheer scale and spectacle of Las Vegas itself. PopMart may have a giant Golden Arch, a massive Mirrorhall Lemon, an enormous olive on a hundred foot cocktail stick, and the largest television screen in the world, but Vegas has it licked, hands down.

The handful of hotel casinos which surround the intersection of Tropicana Avenue and the Las Vegas Strip, boast the most eye popping sights ever clustered together on one street corner. The New York New York, for instance, looks like the Manhattan skyline, its fake Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty towering impressively over the strip, while the Excalibur is Camelot reborn, a cartoon Disney fantasy for adults; the awesome pyramid of the Luxor Hotel, where the members of U2 and their entourage are staying, is guarded by a giant sphinx and marked by a sharply outlined Cleopatra's Needle.

The PopMart stage, however, might just manage to create a memorable spectacle of its own: Wednesday's USA Today newspaper carried a report that Las Vegas police received a huge number of UFO calls from residents living near the Sam Boyd stadium. Nevadans are notorious for their X Files imaginations - remember, this is the place of the semi-mythical Area 51 but this time the strange sightings were caused not by imagined aliens but by 18 very real high density beams which shoot two miles in the air as part of U2's light show. Not quite as intense as the single beam of light which emits from atop The Luxor's pyramid, but certainly every bit as dazzling.

It's to this beacon in the desert that a large contingent of Irish guests have converged, here to witness the first night of a world wide trek which will take U2 nearly two years to complete. In the vast atrium of the Luxor, friends and family of the band blend in with Japanese tourists, honeymooning couples and Middle American families on vacation; Ali Hewson is here with the kids, as is The Edge's girlfriend Morleigh Steinberg, Larry Mullen's girlfriend Anne Acheson, and Paul McGuinness's partner Kathy Gilfillan.

The members of U2, however, are nowhere to be seen - they're holed up at the Sam Boyd Stadium doing intensive rehearsals and ironing out any last minute problems with the stage show. They had their final dress rehearsal at 9 o'clock on Thursday night, after a less than satisfactory dry run the previous day, during which it became apparent that the brightness of the giant 120 foot by 50 foot television screen threatened to completely overshadow the band.

The same problem happened with ZOO TV when it kicked off five years ago, and the production team had to gradually scale down the onstage clutter of TV screens and Trabants in order to give the band some space to interact with the crowd. This time round, according to production manager Jake Kennedy, clutter is not the problem PopMart has been designed to be clean and well defined, and the use of giant props like the Golden Arch and the Mirrorball Lemon will keep the show in focus.

But the band will have to try and deal with the cloying barrage of bright images - including animated and abstract works by Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Brian Eno and Roy Lichtenstein which will pour out of the giant screen like so much eyecandy. As with ZOO TV, says Kennedy, the solution will come with on the road modification, and by the time the tour reaches Europe, it is hoped that the glitches will have been well and truly tweaked out.

Another problem, this one unique to the desert location, is so called "Vegas throat", caused by the dryness of the Nevada air.

So far, it hasn't affected Bono's voice, and the band's rehearsals have been right on song soundwise, but it has hit many members of the crew, making it more difficult to bark out orders.

On the eve of the show. Las Vegas has been hit by 50 m.p.h. gusts, which have turned the trees into wild palms and even blown a couple of roofs off nearby apartment buildings, but the PopMart stage has been designed to withstand gales of up to 100 m.p.h. By yesterday, however, the winds had died down, and the stage was set for a rocking night out in Vegas. The big forecast was for major traffic snarl ups in the greater Las Vegas area, but this time it wasn't U2 who would be stopping the traffic, but a major airshow which is scheduled for this weekend.

The band itself arrived in Vegas two weeks ago, along with manager Paul McGuinness, soundman Joe O'Herlihy, and filmmaker Ned O'Hanlon, whose company Dream chaser is filming an hour long special on the band, entitled U2 A Year In Pop. The programme, directed by O'Hanlon's partner, Maurice Linnane, tells the history of U2 up to the end of ZOO TV in December 1993, then picks up the story from their various side projects right through to the recording of POP and the preparations for the current tour.

After they've filmed today's concert, the footage will be whisked off to a specially constructed editing suite in the Luxor, then sent by satellite to the ABC network in New York for broadcast tonight at 10 p.m. Pacific time.

The hand have rehearsed most of the tracks from the current album, POP, including Discotheque, Please, If You Wear That Velvet Dress and Staring At The Sun, along with some older material like I Will Follow and Where The Streets Have No Name. They also added Pride (In The Name Of Love) and With Or Without You at later rehearsals, but nobody in the U2 camp can say for sure what songs will reach the final setlist. It's pretty certain, however, that they'll open the show with MoFo, the hard, techno tract; on the album, preceding it with a rerecorded version of M's Pop Musik to set the scene.

Halfway through the show, just as they did during ZOO TV, the band will cross the cat walk to a smaller stage in the middle of the stadium and perform a short, semi acoustic set.

Meanwhile, in San Diego, California and Denver, Colorado, crews are busy building two more stages for the next shows on Monday and Thursday respectively. The only bits missing are the Arch, the Lemon, the Cocktail Stick and the Screen - there is only one of each and as soon as the Las Vegas concert ends, these will he loaded onto 75 trucks and hauled across the desert in time for the next gig.

AFTER the opening show, the people of Las Vegas have more sightings to report - this time of the celebrity variety.

The U2 aftershow party is at the Hard Rock Hotel on the Strip (it's probably still going on as you read this) and the guest list includes Christian Slater, Bruce Willis, Cameron Diaz, Michael Stipe, Mel Gibson, Nicholas Cage, Calvin Klein, Tim Burton, Pamela Anderson and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Perhaps not all of these stars will make it across the Mojave desert to party with Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen (Arnie has just had a heart operation, which might prevent him from coming), but there should be enough famous people there to make it a truly memorable first night.

Las Vegas is seen as America's last bastion of officially sanctioned decadence - it remains to be seen if U2's PopMart tour is a true artistic statement or just another overblown rock folly.