No Place to Hyde!
live! - July/August 2000
by Mike Lethby - Photography by Mike Lethby and Angela Lubrano

While the sun god smiled on Glasto - or at least raised a bit of a half-hearted grin - three weeks later it had very different ideas when attention turned to London's Hyde Park. Together with the crews and a 100,000 strong live audience, Robin Johnson took a soaking at Party In The Park.

Considering several hours were spent trying to run a complex and fast-moving live event while coping with something akin to a vast waterfall from the skies, it's hardly surprising that the main talking point post-Party In The Park has been about the weather!

But it's to the eternal credit of all concerned that, despite the downpour, the third and largest PITP so far ran to time with relatively few problems obvious from the viewpoint of the 100,000+ revellers that piled into London's Hyde Park. Thanks to the sheer tonnage of water that deposited itself on the site, inevitably there were a few technical glitches, but overall the Party was a triumph of skill and professionalism.

Ronan Keating eggs on the crowd.

This year, a different approach was taken in that one stage was used, with an integrated revolve to aid artist changeovers. The artist, corporate hospitality and crew working areas were also separated, with access strictly controlled, resulting in areas that weren't overcrowded and were hopefully more pleasant to work/be in.

Singing and infrastructure
Star Hire provided most of the on-site structures including the stage, side platforms for the presenters and sign language (for the hearing Impaired), mix tower, several delay towers for both sound and vision, disabled platforms, camera platforms and cable bridges for TV. In all, the company provided 37 different structures.

The stage was the biggest Vertech system used so far, this being the first time that the roof had been enlarged to a 25m span. Because of the increased span, the trim height was also raised, effectively scaling the whole system up. The PA wings were situated outside of the presenter platforms. Overall, the whole structure was as wide, almost to the inch, as last year's side-by-side stages.

"One of the problems is that because the whole thing has been configured for TV, the performance space is very shallow," said Star Hire's Roger Barrett. "All the weight is concentrated into the downstage half of the roof so, in comparison, the back half of the roof has very little on it. It's fine, but we had the spreadsheet from hell on the weight distribution! "

To aid quick band changeovers, a 12 metre revolve was built into the main stage, mirrored by two five metre ones for flanking platforms. Stage One Creative Services provided the drive and control system for all three, using its Q Motion control system.

The main revolve had to be set into the stage to accommodate rolling risers. "Because we think it's something that's going to be used again, we built the revolve actually into the structural system that we use for the stage floor," said Barrett. "It's now an option on any of our Vertech stages, we just leave the middle 44 square feet of scaffolding out and drop the whole revolve system in."

Stage manager Steve Jones notes: "I was initially a bit sceptical about the idea, but it worked out pretty well. Trying to run the show from one stage was pretty ambitious but it worked out well."

Star Hire also provided 2.5km of Steelshield fencing for the site perimeter, as well as internal separation. The backstage separation occurred almost naturally, because the lack of available space made double-stacking the VIP and artist Portakabins (an impressive 147 trucks-worth of which were supplied by Search) an obvious space-saver. A raised platform was constructed to serve the upstairs ones with a covered walkway bridge to the stage for the artists, which delivered them to the show control platform and the stage.

"The concept was very good and certainly seemed to work from the technicians viewpoint," said Barrett. Eve Trakway's new CS30 bridge took VIPs over the top of the main entrance gates, keeping them away from the queues and provided a fast route to the hospitality area.

Working to designs by Alan Chester of Hangman, Stage One Creative Services dressed the front of the main stage roof with a huge 60m by 5.5m silver heraldic scroll structure. Brilliant Stages provided stage risers, while Pit Stop Barriers provided the hardware to keep the main arena's punters out of the front stage area, and the front stage area punters off the stage!

Sound
This was the first time that Canegreen had provided the sound at PITP, proving something of a baptism of fire (not to mention water!) for sound designer Andrew Frengley.

The main PA consisted of two Meyer SB-1 parabolic dishes, three MSL-6s, 20 MSL-4s, and nine 650-R2P subs per side, with eight MSL-2s providing front fill.

Sidefills

Delays were arranged to maximise sight lines and tie in with existing structures, which combined both sound and video delays. On the rear of the FOH mix tower, two SB-1s and six MSL-6s provided a central delay. Flanking this further down the arena were further symmetrically-placed delay towers of nine MSL-4s, three BS-4s and one SB-1. Further back again was another central delay of 12 MSL-4s.

Two smaller field delays of EAW KF750s and four MSL-2s provided infill for the VIP grandstands and royal box.

FOH was run from two Yamaha PM4000 desks and a Midas XL3, with processing mainly four BSS Soundweb networks and a Meyer SIM system. Outboard gear was, according to Frengley: "millions of compressors, millions of gates, etc."

For monitors, two Midas XL4s and an XL200 were used, plus another XL4 for use by Savage Garden and Bon Jovi. Monitors were Meyer PSMs and 24 of Canegreen's generic 1x15" + 2" horn wedges, with sidefills of four MSL-4s and two PSW-2s per side. Three 'floating' fills were also employed, consisting of two UPAs & one USW-1P per fill. Ten IEM systems were available, split as required for each artist.

Canegreen also provided a separate gate/crowd control PA of EAW 853s, a small PA in the press area and the main comms system, run through an Amek 501.

"I was happy with the system, even in the wind," says Frengley. "It was running a little harder than I'd anticipated, so it wasn't quite as 'homogeneous' as I was looking for. But the few complaints we had about the sound came from people who had sat themselves right next to toilet blocks, etc. We were really happy with it, in those conditions especially."

Lighting
The show's LD was Vince Foster, aided by Pete Barnes. The LSD-provided lighting spec was huge, including 85 High End Studio Colors, 75 Studio Spots, 24 City Colors and Coloramas, 20 Deathstar Strobes, 40 Diversitronic 3K strobes, 64 Molefays, 18 bars of six, ten 5ks, eight truss spots, five Gladiators, four Lightning Strikes, six cracked oil machines and six smoke machines - totalling around 3,500 channels of DMX - run from two WholeHog II consoles with expansion wings.

To take account of the live broadcast, Foster's approach was to find out where all the cameras were going to be and basically filling in any black holes on screen. He used the video screens almost as lighting effects themselves, also working on having lighting framed around the screens. "At the end of the day, we pretty well put lighting wherever screens weren't," he said.

In terms of the show itself, Foster and Barnes basically built colour palettes, colour chases, intensity chases, stage moves, audience moves and bounced between them. "As usual with a show like this, all the record companies sent us shitloads of tapes and CDs of what songs the artists were going to play," Foster continued. "But it's just impossible to attempt to tag it all and build a structured show with the timescale we had. Building scenes and operating them on the fly is the only way to approach this sort of show. Pete and I have done so many shows like this, it's quite easy to find the appropriate lighting for any sort of song."

Considering the downpour on the Sunday afternoon and the showers that punctuated the whole weekend, Foster was impressed at the way the lighting coped with the conditions: "I was very pleasantly surprised at how well that everything held out, because a lot of it did get a real soaking," he said. "About 35% of the lighting was on the wings and wasn't in any way covered. A few lights shut down, but after a few minutes we homed them and they started again all right."

The operating position high on the mix tower also left Foster, Barnes and the WholeHogs exposed to a soaking or two. This resulted in the fizzling out of two of the monitors on the WholeHogs, although one recovered to battle on again.

Screens and video
Screenco provided a total of 196 square meters of LED screens. All was 25mm pitch equipment from the ex-Unitek hire stock, purchased by Screenco earlier in the year. A 36 square meter screen was positioned on the rear of the mix tower with the sound delays. The remaining 160 square meters was configured as five screens - a main landscape screen stage Centre, flanked by two portrait screens, with another two large landscape screens on the PA wings. The landscape screens were used mainly for conventional show relay footage and showing videos between bands, while the two portrait screens were used for a combination of live and video footage, and graphics.

STEPS

The screens on the combined sound/vision delays further down the arena had separate video feeds with a variable video delay to match the audio delay. These screens were from Gearhouse, who provided two 26 square meters and two 32 square meters. One of the former utilised the first major use of the company's latest screen and Genius 1 processor, which is not yet officially launched. The final delay green was provided by Black Box Vision.

Video production was by Black Pig, under the auspices of Chris Saunders. The camera mix was by Matt Askem, with Richard Shipman doing the on stage graphics mix.

"There was a total of 32 separate inputs to the system which were mixed together and sent out," said Saunders. "Everything was serial digital. We had ten of our own cameras and five VTR digital betacam playback machines, with three hard disk units for video playback. At some points we had to create four separate vision outputs going to the screens on stage."

There was also an Oxygene machine for live video sampling and manipulation, plus two caption generators for putting messages on the screens.

The company edited together all of the material that was used on the screens. "For every artist we had to re-edit their pop promo or create something new for them," Saunders continued. "In the end there were something like 85 separate video inserts. I made the TV advertisement for the show, which was then adapted and used as generic 'base of graphics' for the event itself. We also made up ads for the Prince's Trust. Pretty much everything you saw there we had created specially for the job in some way or another, even if it was just taking an advertisement in from a company and changing the aspect ratio of it so it would work on all the screens."

Black Pig also supplied all the audio playback used for the artists who used full playback or tracked to live vocals. "If we produced a piece of video that would go behind them, it made sense that everything was synched up!" says Saunders. "So we put all the artist playback material from DAT on to the digital Betacam and the audio playback for the videos was fed to two playback and two spare channels with each. I suppose it's quite unusual for the screen blokes to be dealing with that sort of thing."

The company also ran out about 50 different monitors and projectors around the site for the various hospitality and artist areas ("That was the hardest bit of all," noted Saunders). They also supplied the autocue and the international press feeds, which consisted of about 20 video and audio outputs, controlled by LD Publicity.

Rigging
As with a number of the companies involved, Star Rigging has worked an all three PITPs. "The challenges remain pretty much the same," observed Mark Armstrong wryly. "Putting too much and too heavy into too small a roof!"

With the whole (tele)visual show designed around the video screens, the scenic elements were very important. Star Rigging used 30 hoists for the lighting rig, 40 for the screens on stage and on the wings and another 30+ for the main PA stacks and delays. "We had a crew of seven riggers for the eight days of the build and not a lot of time was spent in catering!" Armstrong was keen to note.

Stage One provided the tracking for the two centre stage landscape screens, as well as four Tirak winches for flying the movable portrait screens at each side of the stage, to allow for smooth band changeovers.

Stage One's production director Mark Johnson, who coordinated the company's activities on site, noted: "This year the organisers wanted the event to be bigger and better than ever before, and it was our job to rise to the challenge and give life to their creative ideas."

Clockwise from top left: Monitor position; Sound & video delays; The Party in full swing; The video nerve centre

Power
Showpower again provided 'every ounce' of the site's power requirements, with the team headed by Terry Hamilton. A total of around 80 generators were in use, largely from the company's own stocks, although a few had to be subbed in. These ranged from a number of 75OkVa and 500kVa sources for the main stage, down to 'innumerable smaller' units for the many concessions stalls. This was also the first time that Showpower assigned dedicated people to deal with the requirements of the concessions stalls. "It just seems to grow every year!" said the company's Tony Harbor.

Security
Security director for the event was Mark Hamilton of Rock Steady. 550 staff were on duty from Rock Steady, Show & Event Security, Goldrange Ltd and Celebrity Protection. Each company was responsible for different areas of the site, aided by this year's physical divisions.

"The way the site was divided and run was a major improvement this year," said Hamilton. "Keeping the VIP hospitality, artist and working areas separate made things easier for everyone concerned, access was much stricter, the areas weren't overcrowded and so more pleasant to be in."

"The grandstand was also physically divided into two and making access to that and the front stage area for competition winners via a separate entrance and the Eve Trakway bridge also helped," he continued. "Everything was just overall easier to deal with. It seems that constant improvements are being made, which is very good."

The main problems encountered by the security teams were lost children and punters not using common sense by trying to bring in ridiculously big water bottles. However, Hamilton made a point of saying that he thought the Capital Radio-staffed information point did "a first class job."

"We lost about 10 - 15% of the audience because of the weather, but I was very impressed with the durability of the punters," he said.

Other services
MTFX provided the event's pyro requirements. For Queen/Five, large pyros were placed across the front of the stage, firing simultaneously with maroons underneath it. Silver jets and bubble machines were the main things used for other bands, wind machines for Victoria Beckham and, for Destiny's Child, two air cannons which projected fake dollar bills into the air over the audience. For the finale the company provided confetti and glitter.

Despite the weather, MTFX experienced no major problems, apart from some electrical circuits tripping out. "We battled through with polythene in hand," said Mark Turner. "It certainly wasn't the easiest of conditions, but we survived!"

Stage Miracles provided stage manager Steve Jones, plus two assistant stage managers, 13 spot ops and 16 other crew.

Crew catering was provided by Eat Your Hearts Out. A special mention must be made of Kim Davenport, who took pity on many a drenched (and very grateful) soul during the downpour, ranging from St Johns Ambulance personnel to previous and current editors of this august journal!

Let it rain
The sheer volume of water which descended from the skies unavoidably caused a few problems with the production although, as previously noted, thanks to the skill and professionalism of everybody involved, these were generally kept to a minimum from the public perspective.

Bon Jovi

Power
Roger Barrett: "It's the most rain actually during a show that many of us had seen for years. Downstage was wry wet and there was a minor problem with the sheets between the main stage and one of the side stages because the ties between the roof sheets appeared to have been loosened, probably because someone was getting some racks in and they hadn't been re-tightened. People attacked it with the time honoured 'push the water out with a broom handle' technique and some ended up in the monitor position. There were thousands of gallons a minute coming off the stage roof, so there were bound to be a few problems, but it all ran to time. The biggest problem was with the get-out, we couldn't use heavy machinery because it would have ploughed the ground right up. So it delayed it by a day."

Star Rigging's Mark Armstrong added: "We had to assist the stage guys with the bad weather, but the problems for us were really that the load out had to make more use of cherry pickers and reduce the amount of climbing allowed until the weather improved, because of the wet metal. Of course they had safety lines fitted, but it was brought in as a precaution.

The video side managed to escape relatively unscathed, as Chris Saunders noted: "Some of the cameras were extremely exposed to the weather, we lost a strip of LED screen for a short while, thanks to a dislodged fibre optic cable and the autocue went down because it was standing in several inches of water. But the only other real problem we had was with generators tripping out backstage, but that's kind of par for the course."

On the front of house tower, the erection of an eight foot camera platform was something of a bone of contention for the sound guys on the Saturday afternoon. However, in the event it actually proved to be a bonus, as Andrew Frengley explained:

"We complained a bit to begin with, but the camera platform turned out to be a bit of a blessing in disguise because it gave us eight feet of extra protection from the rain. We still got a bit of spray, but nothing really life threatening. The Meyer stuff is self powered, so there's some quite large voltages floating around the boxes and we were quite concerned about the the left sub system, but it ended up OK."

Public perception
Unfortunately, in terms of the public perception of problems, it's invariably the sound department that suffers most. This was no exception, and Frengley understandably feels a bit miffed that this is the case.

"Everybody was hammered by the rain because you don't often see rain like that. However, it's important to view the weather problems in context," he said. "It is a live music event and and as such the sound company interfaces with the artists at the closest level. For example, when the screen and lighting guys suffer a couple of losses during the show, no-one is going to make much of a hoo-haa about it. It's not the same as Gabrielle losing her vocal mic. When artists feel they're being 'compromised' they'll make it known, which is why it looks to the audience that we're suffering worse than anybody else."

"Two of the monitor consoles were knocked out by the water. I mean they were soaked, literally full of water, which affected a fair proportion of our system! That's quite hard to deal with and to maintain a show which has an act hitting the stage every 15 minutes."

"There's no bones about it, it's a tough show under normal circumstances. It's nine hours of people on stage and there's just no respite. And it's not going to stop, so you just have to be on it. It's as hard as a gig gets."

"When half of your equipment is being hammered by torrential rain it becomes nigh on impossible and the idea that you can do it without any faults appearing is frankly ridiculous. The crew did a great job. It ran to time and everybody realises that it was a good job in incredibly difficult circumstances."

Stage manager Steve Jones concurred with this view, saying: "Losing the monitor desks caused major problems with having to re-patch everything. The slippery surface and keeping everything covered also caused problems, of course. But it went well, it's just such a big show, so many bands and artists, the odd little hiccup is inevitable. Life would be made a lot easier for us if the weather was good!"

LSD's Mickey Curbishley added: "It was a humungous event for an outdoor show during the day. And despite the weather it worked really well, both live and on TV. The crew was very good, they had it well covered."

The neatest summing up came from Show & Event's Tony Ball, who said simply: "There were 32 bands and 100,000 people. It wasn't an easy event, but it went very well."

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