The show must go on – except when it shouldn’t. In 2022, scarcely a week goes by without a major artist stopping a gig for safety reasons such as preventing crowd surges or alerting the medical team.
In July, Adele stopped her Hyde Park show four times to help overheating fans. Harry Styles repeatedly pressed pause during his latest tour earlier this year; Doja Cat waited five minutes for security to sort out an issue at Lollapalooza Argentina, and Sam Fender warned fans to stop fighting at his Glasgow gig. Pharrell Williams, Slipknot, Ed Sheeran, John Mayer, Lady Gaga, Billie Eilish and the Killers have also had to act as crowd control.
This cautiousness is evidently the product of the Astroworld festival disaster last November. Run by the rapper Travis Scott, the event saw a fatal crowd crush cause the deaths of 10 fans and injure more than 300.
Scott was criticised for allegedly disregarding fans’ pleas to stop the show, continuing to perform until the arrival of an ambulance caused him to cut the music. He has denied responsibility, saying he was unaware that anything was amiss until after his set.
“I would guarantee that since Astroworld, management companies are saying to their artists: if you see this happening, do not in any circumstances incite the crowd,” says Steve Allen. A tour manager for Led Zeppelin, Blur, Pulp and Red Hot Chilli Peppers, he is now head of the consultancy organisation Crowd Safety and was an expert witness in the Astroworld civil lawsuits. “If someone is saying stop the show, then stop the show. If not, it’ll be the end of your career.”
In September 1997, Allen coined the term “showstop procedure” while working with Oasis. At a gig in Aberdeen, the energy of the crowd was so “off the Richter scale” that it necessitated establishing a formal plan of action in the event of future mishap. “I explained to Noel that if we didn’t have this system in place, there’s a strong possibility that someone’s going to get seriously hurt.”
The system he set up saw him stand on the stage barrier ready to signal to the Gallaghers if the crowd’s safety was compromised. It was an overwhelming success, he says. “We had it down to a tee. We must have stopped 17 to 25 different shows around the world; the band were 100% compliant. They didn’t want a death or a major incident at their concerts, simple as that.”
The founder of Mind Over Matter Consultancy, Prof Chris Kemp, who started the world’s first crowd management degree, says that the procedure worked because it came from the band themselves. “Anybody else who tried to get on stage and do that [wouldn’t have worked]. The Gallagher brothers actually cared about what happened.”
So did Allen’s team, who he says accepted ridicule for wearing noise-cancelling headphones to communicate with one another – as opposed to clip-on mic headsets – before they went mainstream. Given that people die within three minutes of not having oxygen, he says, you “need to hear”.
While shows had been stopped before – Nirvana stopped a show in Oakland in 1993 to challenge a sexual assault in the crowd – it was Allen’s codification of the procedure in 1997 that made it a serious tool in the crowd manager’s arsenal, and one now widely used by security staff worldwide.
The vast majority of crowd management today is still preventive rather than – as with the showstop procedure – reactive. “There needs to be a clear understanding of roles and responsibilities,” Allen explains, referencing the extensive planning he undertook for Eminem’s Anger Management tour, in which they invited the police force from the city of the subsequent gig to prepare by attending the one before.
In 2016, Kemp worked with the Roskilde festival in Denmark – the scene of a 2000 tragedy where nine people…
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