South Florida Sun Sentinel from Fort Lauderdale, Florida • Page 12

12A Sun-Sentinel, Saturday. November 15. 1997 CONCERT REVIEW Look who's minding your follSlllGSS. Business strategist Marcia Pounds, every Friday in BUSINESS, page 3. One strategy a week for better business.

Sun-Sentinel U2 dazzles 50,000 fans in audiovisual symphony Two-hour show blends Irish group's old and new hits 1 miUWX, rTF3T4 6 "ft" VI iflk Lffrf'inri 4 Pt St Tropez Living Room 1 II llfi 1 IJfS-XsSft-s 1111 I I lf Sofa, loveseat, cocktail, endtable Select Fabrics. Sleeper 5200 extra Oil WE SHIP WORLDWIDE LAUDERDALE LAKES KiliS? Room Group" (2 Blks. hast ot 441 Hrr 71 lcI iff 3659 n.w. wth st. 484-4880 A VJLL 10 am to 6:00 pm Sunday 11am to 6:00 pm Staff photoROBERT DUYOS Bono performs to about 50,000 on Friday night at Pro Player Stadium.

mmMfmmm By SEAN PICCOU Music Writer Still the band that rocks the world, U2 rolled into Pro Player Stadium on Friday night and made the case that "PopMart," the Irish foursome's latest Olympian undertaking, is worth a blown fortune or two. The band came to South Florida having just played to half-capacity crowds in Tampa and Jacksonville more setbacks in a year that has seen U2's grip on the world's fancy slip a few notches. Pop, the current album, and the accompanying 100-date tour, have drawn an unaccustomed mixture of praise, criticism and outright shrugs. Here, however, about 50,000 people greeted U2 as band members Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen walked across the stadium floor through the crowd to a stage that could only be described as Jetsonian in appearance and proportions. The two-hour show that followed blended rock music and pop visuals on a scale so grand, everything the senses could perceive seemed to move or happen in slow motion, as if time itself were being dilated by the sheer weight of the presentation.

U2 worked this black-hole sensation to full effect, using bigness of sight and sound not to flatten its audience into submission, but to completely envelop it. A mammoth LED screen, 56 feet high by 170 feet wide, carried live band video and art by Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Roy Lichtenstein, among others, to every corner of Pro Player Stadium. A sound system equipped to handle U2's broad, spatial song ar-ragements complemented the visuals. Props including a 10-story golden arch, a boulder-sized mirror ball in the shape of a lemon, and a giant olive-toothpick ensemble rounded out the parade. The audience responded to this sensory squall not by going berserk, but by simply taking it all in, saving its biggest cheers for the band's time-tested hits.

The group opened with Moo, one of the pulsing, techno-col-ored tracks from Pop. From there, the group alternated between songs from Pop an album in which U2 showed plenty of confidence, despite its detractors and past material, including Even Better Than the Real Thing, Pride, Until the End of the World, New Yeafs Day and 1 Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For. The band moved to a second, midfield stage for a brief, unplugged-style interlude: Staring at the Sun, which, stripped of its studio trappings, emerged as a stunning, harmony-rich ballad; and a sentimental rendering of Sunday Bloody Sunday by The Edge, who stood alone under a spotlight, singing and playing guitar. The band followed by melding Miami, from Pop, and Bullet the Blue Sky to create a kind of God's-eye-view of sex- and violence-drenched America a country that so obsesses U2, it sometimes can seem the band has forgotten that it is Irish. Whatever nationality he claims, frontman Bono proved as charming and wily as ever, singing emotively through a mix so mountainous, songs seemed to literally slide off the stage; changing costumes like an old Vaude-villian; and dancing with and embracing spectators.

The Edge's cowboy hat was a suitable affectation; he wrangled a range of guitar sounds effectively, whether blowing out blues-rock noise on Discotheque or streaming ambient chords through If You Wear That Velvet Dress. Bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen may be show biz's hardest-working rhythm section: They kept an intricate, powerful pulse more galvanizing than anything the DJs whom U2 have come to admire could program though drum machines. Still, at one point, Bono offered what amounted to a defense of the dance- and techno-dabbling album, Pop: "We're always looking for new sights, new sounds If we keep it interesting for us, it won't be I boring for you. Anyways, thank you for sticking by us, Miami." 3 'Price reductions will be taken at the cash registers Intermediate markdowns may have been taken. This special promotion excludes all prior sales.

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