Could Your Show Use The ‘Adele’ Venue Solution?

The summer may still be some time off, but while fans have a while to wait to enjoy summer gigs and music festivals, event organisers will be hard at work planning ahead, booking up acts and doing important logistical work.

Much of that will involve booking temporary facilities. While some venues are designed with permanent features - such as amphitheatres built into hillsides with bench seating - many events will use temporary elements.

An example of this was highlighted recently when it was revealed superstar single Adele will be performing in ‘pop up’ temporary stadiums during her summer tour of Germany.

She will perform four concerts in Munich in the bespoke venue, which will be set up outdoors and potentially set a new bar for outdoor event facilities.

Of course, there will be plenty of temporary stadium facilities in action in the summer. Old Trafford Cricket Ground has become famous for a temporary stand that has a curious sense of permanence about it, being brought back for major matches every year.

Ironically, however, it exists because the venue also holds concerts, with the space being used for the stage and to move equipment onto the outfield. When the stand is in place, the bands have gone and the cricket is back.

However, these pop-up spectator facilities do not exist in isolation. For any big event, temporary shelters will be required to supplement them. 

A prime example is that of big music festivals. An event like Glastonbury effectively has multiple gigs going on all at once, every one of them at a temporary stage in a venue with temporary food stores, temporary warehousing to maintain supplies, temporary first aid facilities and temporary toilets and more in a temporary home for 200,000 people.

Similarly, When Adele takes to the stage in Munich, one can be pretty sure the green field that is briefly transformed will not just be about the stage she performs on or the seated areas around it.

Quite apart from her dressing room and other backstage facilities, there will need to be large numbers of temporary shelters and facilities. Some of these may be found at any event like fast food and drink stands, but also temporary toilets, shelters for those queuing for park-and-ride bus services if it isn’t close to a station, and temporary storerooms.

The key, of course, is that all this can be brought in and then out again easily. In the same way that Worthy Farm is normally just another dairy farm in Somerset producing milk for breakfast cereals and Cheddar cheese, the open-air field at Messe Munchen will be able to revert to its normal use before too long.

Of course, open-air gigs, even in summer, can be lacking shelter in certain ways, so there is always a gamble on the weather. Even Adele may not be able to “set fire to the rain”, even if she sings about it.

At a one-off evening event, that may not be so bad. But at a festival where people can be present for days, having plenty of other temporary shelters to take refuge in will be just as important as the pop-up stage where the stars can perform.