Is it a stage collapse or a life-and-death situation? No, it's just a Metallica concert....

June 18^th – With stage effects now at such a level of sophistication it’s hard to see sometimes where the line between fantasy and real-life is drawn. There’s many theatre shows now in operation that just leave the watcher awestruck (have you seen How to Train Your Dragon) with their ingenuity and lifelike props and set.

This theatricality spilt over into the rock arena during the late 70’s with Mr. Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and Queen’s We Will Rock You tours (that’s the original We Will Rock You tour not that shite Ben Elton cobbled together from other people’s work, you understand) and on into the 80’s with Kate Bush’s (do you think, if I asked nicely, she’d marry me? No, me neither but what’s life without dreams) with Kate Bush’s Never For Ever tour and then on thro’ to the 00’s and shows like Okonokos and Lady Gaga (although her Bad Romance opening is too near the apocryphal ‘band in a pea pod’ routine that blighted the life of Spinal Tap for me to feel comfortable with).

I guess, in a way, the rock show that relies on personality rather than performance is more inclined to feature outrageous sets and costume in order to compensate for poor performers and so, whenever the opportunity arises to add a bit of colour to a particular set or song in order to salvage it, the use of F/X, specifically pyrotechnics, becomes the point of contact for the crowd/band/drama. It’s only when these things go wrong, however, that the blurred line of fantasy/reality become just a little bit too fantastically real to be recognised and acted upon.

That’s what struck home when watching the footage of the stage collapse in Edmonton when Metallica played there in 2012. Shan’t lay out the details, you can catch it on YouTube if you want, but suffice to say there’s what seems to be a major truss collapse (stop sniggering) and various bites of set fall to the stage along with a guy who, one imagines, was a follow-spot op. Dreadful. Lights go out, a lighting gantry falls near the audience and one of the crew runs off stage, his clothing alight…a really serious set of terrible accidents…except… Seems it wasn’t.

The guy who’s set on fire is wearing a mask and padded clothes and positions himself strategically over the pyro grill (anyone doing this for a living would know where not to stand in the case of a misfire…and misfires are only looked at after the show, not  during). The guy who supposedly falls from the top truss has his plummet to earth controlled by a fly-line on a pulley and all the truss and gantry land strategically around him, and in a complete reversal of what any respected crew and band would be trained to do in the case of such an accident, they all either remain on or rush onto the stage. Anyway, nobody died. But…what if sufficient members of the audience had believed it to be a real overhead staging collapse; what if the falling gantry had been sufficient to start a mass exodus. What then? It’s this blurring of the lines that can sometimes detach the real from the unreal.

There’s been many such real rock show disasters to choose from. Woodstock 1999, the Pukklepop Festival in Belgium, Roskilde in Denmark, the Damageplan shoot-out in Ohio and the Love Parade gig in Dusseldorf have all claimed multiple lives, real lives, and these incidents can happen anywhere, anytime and in any size venue.

On this day in 2012 the scheduled Radiohead concert for 40,000 in Toronto (Canada, again) was cancelled after their over-stage rigging collapsed, killing one and injuring several: When Great White set off their pyros at the Station Club where 462 people were watching their gig, the reality took several precious seconds out of the escape time for 100 people as, at first, I seemed to be just part of the show, a fantasy; just part of the show long enough for folk to be filming the blaze as it engulfed the stage, ceiling above it and then them… Tell you what, rock concert organisers recognise your responsibilities and, for my sake and 'cos I love you, each show you go to as a punter just remember to remain sensible enough to recognise fantasy from reality...just might save your life; OK?