Live 8 concert is Big and Beautiful

Quoted from: http://news.scotsman.com

'Big may be beautiful for the London’s Live 8 concert, but size comes at a price. With 150,000 music fans set to descend on Hyde Park to enjoy top acts including Sir Paul McCartney, Madonna and Robbie Williams, the event promises to be big in every sense of the word. The stage on July 2 will be as high five London double decker buses stacked on top of each other and as wide as six lined up nose to tail. Two hundred and seventy tons of steel and wood is being used to build the stage and over 30 tons of sound, lighting and video equipment will be suspended from its roof. With so many acts signing up to take part in the charity event, and the amount of equipment they will bring with them, the back stage change over area will be big enough to accommodate 29 London buses. The sound system for the event consists of over 200 speaker cabinets hung on either side of the stage. On the stage there will be three £100,000 digital mixing consoles, 48 stage fold back speaker cabinets and 24 1,500 watt amplifiers. To make use of all this power there will be over 500 microphones and 8,000 metres of microphone cable. Organisers claim Live 8’s London gig will boast the “largest concentration of screens ever used at a European outdoor concert site”, with a total of 12 giant screens covering a total area of 472 square metres. Engineers are having to slow down the videos by up to a second so it is in synch at the back stage area, given that video signals travel at 690 million mph and sound only travels at 750mph. Back stage there will be 300 temporary cabins, 20 marquees, 200 toilets and 20 showers. The infrastructure to run the site will include 300 telephones, 50 individual high speed connections and three wireless broadband systems. And don’t forget the grub. Over the three weeks it will take to build the site the crew will consume 10,000 rashers of bacon, 12,000 sausages, 18,000 eggs, 2,000 lbs of cheese, 50,000 litres of water, 5,000 apples and 8,000 bananas. At the end of it all the clean up teams will have to remove over 3,000 tons of rubbish and over 350,000 people will have attended the various events and watched over 150 bands. Seven thousand passes and wrist bands will have been issued and 1.2 billion e-mails will have been sent out relating to the logistics of the whole operation.'