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Before the Orange Bowl, U2 Played Sunrise and Pembroke Pines
The band’s South Florida story began in a Sunrise theater, grew through two nights at the Sportatorium and reached Miami’s Orange Bowl four years later.
On June 23, 1983, U2 played the Sunrise Musical Theatre. It was a South Florida date on the band’s War tour, with the Alarm opening. Concert listings often file the show under “Miami,” but U2’s own archive gets the location right: the theater was in Sunrise, Broward County.
The distinction matters on a map. It matters less to the larger story of how this region first heard the band. U2 had three albums behind them, and War had brought “New Year’s Day” and “Sunday Bloody Sunday” into their live set. The group was gaining an American audience, but the vast stadium productions that would later define a U2 tour were still ahead.
One fan who attended the Sunrise show remembered arriving early and meeting Bono. In a recollection posted years later, he described hearing “New Year’s Day” begin to reach Miami radio while concertgoers already seemed to know songs from the earlier albums Boy and October. It is one listener’s memory, not a measure of local airplay or the whole audience. It does capture the appeal of an early U2 concert: the chance to see a band just as more people were finding it.
Two years later, U2 returned to South Florida on a different scale. The band played the Hollywood Sportatorium on May 3 and 4, 1985. Despite its name, the arena stood in Pembroke Pines. By then, The Unforgettable Fire was out, and U2 was drawing arena crowds.
We have something unusually valuable from the second night: an account written at the time by someone who was there. In the May 14 issue of FIU’s student newspaper, The Sunblazer, features editor Mina Socarras reviewed the May 4 concert. She described a sold-out crowd, Bono receiving a bouquet of roses and tossing the flowers back to fans one by one. During “I Fall Down,” she reported, he told the audience that South Florida had been among the first places to give the song radio play.
That exchange gives the Sportatorium show a place in local music history beyond its tour date. Whether every person in the arena remembered the band from Sunrise is unknowable. But the newspaper review records a connection Bono made with the South Florida audience in the room. FIU preserved the view from that night, before decades of later fame could reshape the memory of it.
Then came December 3, 1987. U2 played the Miami Orange Bowl on The Joshua Tree tour. This time the venue really was in Miami. The theater date in Sunrise and the Sportatorium nights in Pembroke Pines had become the opening chapters of a much bigger regional story.
The progression is striking: a theater in 1983, an arena in 1985, the Orange Bowl in 1987. But it is the small details that keep those years from becoming a list of venues: a fan arriving early in Sunrise; roses moving from a Sportatorium stage back into the crowd; an FIU student sitting down afterward to write what she had seen.
For South Florida, U2 did not simply appear at the Orange Bowl as a finished phenomenon. The region had heard them on the way there.