Sign up for IQ Index
The latest industry news to your inbox.
IQ goes behind the scenes of the Grammy Award-winning singer's blockbuster, Live Nation-promoted German residency
By Adam Woods on 10 Oct 2024
“A bit random, but still fabulous,” was how Adele previewed her month-long, ten-date Munich residency when announcing the August shows on Instagram at the beginning of the year.
‘Fabulous’ was right on the nail, as 730,000 fans will tell you. The star’s first shows in Europe since 2016 – and her last for “an incredibly long time,” if her final-night announcement holds true – were a thing to behold: a remarkably high-end production in a matt black amphitheatre, every last detail carefully geared to reflect Adele’s personal brand, her tastes, her particular connection with her fans.
As for ‘random,’ that’s certainly there, too – a one-off European concert series by a London-born superstar in the capital of Bavaria; a pop-up stadium on a patch of ground typically reserved for massive exhibitions; and, for pre-event and after-hours fun, Adele World: an area the size of a small festival, with a recreation of lost Kilburn (London) venue The Good Ship, a fairground, and live performances including a Spice Girls tribute group.
But from a plan only green-lit in January came a universally praised, record-toppling, one-of-a-kind summer stadium residency. Having concluded on 31 August, the shows can lay claim to the highest attendance of any concert residency outside Las Vegas, as well as the world’s biggest temporary arena and the largest continuous LED wall, at 220m long and 4,159.7m2 in area.
Water under the bridge
Adele’s agent, WME’s Lucy Dickins, speaking as the run approached its close, is keen to give credit to the production team that realised the vision, with around a month on-site to build it all, amid European weather that drowned out rehearsals. “Adele’s team are A-class,” says Dickins, with emphasis. “They are so unbelievable. I’ve never seen one person flapping. We’ve gone through storms. We’ve had lightning. Adele had half a rehearsal before this show. That’s all she had: half a rehearsal. She went from playing to 4,500 people in Vegas to a stage like that and went boom. Just took it on. And not once have I seen Paul, Matt, none of them, ever losing their cool.”
Paul is production manager Paul English, and Matt is Matt Askem, Adele’s creative director since 2016 – both veterans of her Weekends With Adele Las Vegas show, which has run at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace since November 2022 and will conclude in a couple of months’ time.
“It’s not rocket science, and it’s not military, but jeez, we are pretty close”
“It’s been a journey, and it’s been a challenge”
“The blood, sweat, and tears that have gone into this, I can’t tell you,” says English, likewise speaking as the Munich shows approached their final weekend. “It’s been a journey, and it’s been a challenge. But it’s been fantastic to put together the team that I have here. They are an amazing team, and they have pulled off an amazing feat.”
The German residency reunited the core team behind the Vegas one: English, Askem, show director Kim Gavin, technical designer Malcolm Birkett, sound engineer Dave Bracey, lighting designer Cory FitzGerald of Silent House, Ric Lipson and Ray Winkler of stage architects Stufish – as well as video suppliers Solotech, Clair Global for audio, lighting and rigging providers Neg Earth, and others.
“I remember Paul saying, ‘Let’s put the team back together,’” says Gavin. “We really work together very well, and that is what has made this what it is.”
As English reels off the suppliers and collaborators who made the Munich shows happen, he throws out dizzying figures: 3km of trussing, 1.3km of LED stage lighting, 60 trucks of black steel for the staging, 350 crew for the load-in, 200 on show days.
“It’s not rocket science, and it’s not military, but jeez, we are pretty close,” says English. “The logistics of putting this together are really something.”
“It’s been very intense because something like this has never been done before,” adds Marek Lieberberg, CEO of Live Nation GSA and the promoter of the shows. “There is no precedent. We could not simply use a blueprint of another project – we had to start from scratch.”
Built on the exhibition ground at Munich Messe, the arena alone is a remarkable thing. You’ll surely have seen it by now – a stadium’s worth of seated grandstands and standing areas in the shape of half an octagon, all facing that vast, flowing screen.
“The fact that we were not touring the show meant that the scale of the staging could be much bigger than you would normally have”
Hello from the other side
“We knew it was going to be enormous because 80,000 people is approximately Wembley Stadium, but we basically flipped the two huge audience bleachers in a stadium onto one side,” says production designer Florian Wieder. “It was an ideal scenario, not only for her but also for the viewers and the visitors. And that scenario seems to have helped get the whole concept over the line.”
The venue was dismantled soon after the concluding show, but for a month, it offered a picture of a stadium show freed from its normal limitations. The screen’s 220m width dramatically broadened the vista presented to the audience, while the B-stage, through which Adele rose at the start of the concert, jutted much further out into the middle of the crowd than a standard stadium show would allow.
“The fact that we were not touring the show meant that the scale of the staging could be much bigger than you would normally have,” says Malcolm Birkett. “60m wide is a big stadium set, and we are 220m wide. Thrusts are normally 30m or 40m long; we had an 80m-long thrust and then a 200m passerelle.”
Gavin sums up the show’s aesthetic as “beautiful, well-staged, classic, stylish. Whoever looks at it, the first thing that strikes them is the scale of it, but the scale is also very appealing, which is something you don’t always get,” he says.
Those terms, of course, also describe Adele’s Las Vegas concerts, but it’s still a big step from a 4,500-capacity residency to an outdoor one of 73,000 a night.
“You could actually fit Caesars Palace in the standing area here, which is inside the passerelle,” says Ian Woodall at Solotech, which supplied the famous screen. “It’s pretty amazing really.”
“She’ll say, ‘Let’s do it, let’s really raise the roof'”
Clearly, the screen – and the Munich residency as a whole – gave Adele the one thing she doesn’t have in Las Vegas: a vast canvas built for big feelings and big audiences.
“One thing that Adele loves is scale,” says Gavin. “She is really gung-ho. She’ll say, ‘Let’s do it, let’s really raise the roof.’ You show her a lot of pyro or flames or whatever, and she goes, ‘Is that it?’ If she does one thing in a show, she needs to do it really, really well.”
But in practice, scale was only one part of the brief – the other being the sense of close-up engagement the show’s star also insisted upon.
Make you feel my love
“Adele wanted to create an environment and a space that felt intimate,” says Askem. “Which sounds crazy when you’re talking about 80,000 people in an audience, but it was part of what appealed about this.
“She didn’t want to perform in a standard stadium where you’ve got tiers and tiers of people, and you can’t have a rapport with them. Her idea was that she wanted to embrace the audience, and she wanted the B-stage to be in the middle of the space, and the audience to be wrapped around the stage like an amphitheatre – that was the lead brief from her. And I think we’ve managed to achieve that,” he adds.
So how did we get here, with an extremely choosy, non-touring pop star building her own stadium in Munich? Dickins remembers a series of proposals, beginning several years ago, from Austrian promoter Klaus Leutgeb’s Leutgeb Entertainment Group.
“They offered me some shows for her to come and play in Germany, in an open-air stadium where they had done shows with Helene Fischer and Robbie Williams,” she says. “And I said, ‘I’m not really sure I’m going to get Adele to come. Why would she come and play Germany on an open-air site? We get offers all the time, and she’s not an artist that goes on a world tour.’ It was just a bit random.”
“I knew questions would be asked, like, why Germany? Why Munich?”
An updated offer last year, with the suggestion of a purpose-built stadium, illustrated by a sketch from production designer Florian Wieder (who also subsequently masterminded Adele World), eventually piqued Dickins’ interest, and prompted her to take the concept to Adele’s manager, Dickins’ own brother Jonathan.
“I knew questions would be asked, like, why Germany? Why Munich?” says Dickins. “Well, she hasn’t played in Europe since 2016, and if you look at Munich, it’s slap-bang in the middle. But the main bit for me was the Oktoberfest is held here. So they have infrastructure to get a lot of people in and a lot of people out. I had all these ideas going around in my head, and I called Jonathan, and he was like, ‘Yeah, it’s interesting.’”
Jonathan soon became as centrally involved in the project as he was with Adele’s Vegas shows. With Askem liaising closely with Adele, the wheels started turning in earnest last autumn, and Stufish were drafted in to provide a stage design.
“We met with her, must have been around the 23rd of October,” says Winkler. “At that point, lots of sketches and lots of ideas were circulating, and it was a bit like Chinese whispers. But we had about half an hour with her, and I think within that half an hour, we nailed this concept of a big scroll that was sort of unfurling itself.
“The idea of ‘the embrace’ was something that I had pushed very hard, both metaphorically as well as practically, because the sheer scale of what she was about to enter into required her to feel like she was able to embrace her audience.”
As the project gained momentum, it became clear just how much investment would be required to realise it to Adele’s specifications, and Live Nation was brought on board, with the backing of CEO and president Michael Rapino and VP touring Omar Al-joulani.
“At these shows, we possibly experienced the greatest open-air sound ever”
Lieberberg says support from the very top of Live Nation was critical, given the magnitude and substantial investment that was needed. And he’s full of praise for the production team.
“We had so many brilliant minds joining forces,” he says. “At these shows, we possibly experienced the greatest open-air sound ever – it was like sitting in a studio with B&O boxes and a Thorens player, and you put on the vinyl. And then you have a world-record LED wall in the shape of a wave, like a film scroll. A tailor-made stadium, all in black, no advertising at all, just with Adele signage. It’s really a piece of art.”
A work of art
“In German, there’s a word for it: Gesamtkunstwerk. A total piece of art, a composition of many parts creating an artwork in itself. And people realise that when they enter into a new environment that is so different from any other arena or stadium. This stadium was made for the show, and the show was made for the stadium.” Anyone who saw the show will know the screen is key to the concept – a vast scroll that fills the eyes of everyone in the place, from the very front to the very back.
“In a space as big as the one we have, the cameras are important because everyone needs to feel close to her and be able to see her,” says Askem, speaking in the midst of the shows. “And so the screen, although it is the biggest screen I’ve ever worked with, the biggest temporary screen that’s ever been built, it’s not an ego trip,” says Askem. “It’s big so that you feel that sense of intimacy.”
The fact that the screen offers a continuous surface was one of its great assets, according to Askem. “That gives us a great canvas to play on,” he says. “With most shows, what you tend to see is that there is a screen for the content, the general imagery, and then there are separate screens for the live cameras, and incorporating the two things so they’re all happening on one surface is actually quite difficult. It’s not always a happy marriage, and I feel like we’ve managed to achieve that successfully in most of the songs.”
“The content, for me, is unbelievable”
The show’s blend of live footage and pre-shot segments was a tour de force, filling the arena with on-stage action but not afraid to depart from that script. Four songs didn’t have live cameras at all – a choice Askem says he didn’t initially imagine making but which Adele argued for.
“And I think we got away with it,” says Askem. “I did six different shoot days with her in in LA for the visuals that we have, shooting different scenarios. There was one in a studio with a lot of rain curtains, grated floors and things so she could perform in the rain. And then there are other songs that incorporate content from those shoots – Skyfall and Water Under The Bridge have it, Love In The Dark, Send My Love.”
From start to finish, the show revels in its back-drop, turning the scroll ends into lighthouses for Hold On, reflecting the crowd back at themselves for Someone Like You, showcasing the band across a dazzling array of TV screens on Rolling in the Deep.
“The content, for me, is unbelievable,” says Dickins. “The bit where the scroll becomes like a lighthouse, it’s just amazing. You know when you go to a show and as you get to the end, you get the bang, the big finish – this show keeps bringing them.”
But unusually for a big show, a critical part of the experience took place outside the arena itself, in the Adele World area that aimed – with great success – to conjure the spirit of the artist’s life, career, and taste in wine.
“If you really try and do something like this to communicate the culture of the artist, maybe you can do something different”
I drink wine
“I was there on a Saturday night, and we did karaoke,” says Dickins. “We went and saw the Spice Girls, we were on the Ferris wheel, on the carousel, getting drinks and food. I don’t know if it was a European thing, but the vibe in there was so lovely.
“They can be really anonymous, can’t they, big shows? However hard you try, they can all be a bit like each other. But if you really try and do something like this to communicate the culture of the artist, maybe you can do something different.”
While much has been made of the randomness of a huge outdoor space in Munich for a show like this, in practice, experts agree it is one of very few spaces that could have done the job. In addition to its location and transport connections, it also has power, water, fibre-optic connections, and waste pipes running underneath from its day job as a site for industrial trade fairs.
“For events such as this one, this space is perfect, maybe one of a kind,” says Lieberberg. “It’s vast and close to the city and it can be converted into anything you can imagine – anything that’s physically possible.”
“It had a lot going for it,” agrees Birkett, though he notes that the area isn’t without a few challenges. “The scale of it makes it seem flat, but it isn’t. Working out how to deal with the slope around the width of the stage was challenging.”
Indeed, figuring out how to operate in Germany at all could have presented difficulties.
“It’s a milestone in music history, for sure. And it seems too good to waste”
“Britain is Safety Island, and we are continually bamboozling everyone with health and safety, but here it’s another level,” says English. “I thank God for [Live Nation production head] Sebastian [Pichel], who made it easy for us to work in the German system.”
Birkett, meanwhile, reserves his greatest pride for the parts of the build the audience never saw. “It is almost as much of a work of art behind the screen as it was in front,” he says. “And then the un- der-stage world: the network of tunnels, the areas under the passerelle and under the B-stage, where we had to dig an enormous hole for the lifts. It is what is going underneath that is the tricky bit.”
Tabloid stories have suggested that the stadium itself would now somehow go on tour – missing the essential point that you don’t build something this huge in order to move it around the place.
“It’s not tourable,” says Birkett. “But it certainly had a unique sort of feeling about it. The wide-open nature of it felt very different to regular shows – more akin to a national event or an opening ceremony than a music show.”
Nonetheless, in a live world hungry for new concepts, it is hard to imagine this Munich residency failing to inspire further residencies of a similar type. Most of those involved suspect as much, though all agree this isn’t an easy template to follow.
“Before this started, I said: ‘Never before and never again,’” says Lieberberg. “Now, I would say, ‘Never before but maybe again.’ I mean, we need to analyse the Munich residency thoroughly. All the shows have been spectacular and overwhelming, from Adele’s unique performances to the audience response, as well as the reaction of the media worldwide. It’s a milestone in music history, for sure. And it seems too good to waste. But if we ever did something like this again, it has to cater to the specific vision of the artist, like this one has.”
“I don’t know any artist that would have pulled that off the way she did”
Skyfall
Dickins has ideas of her own but with the same caveat. “Not everyone is of Adele’s scale,” she says. “I mean, I still have yet to see anyone greater than her live. She’s the most unbelievable professional I’ve ever, ever had the pleasure of working with. She’s super-smart, she always knows exactly what she’s doing.”
In the event, after the rehearsal downpours, only one show was blighted by rain – and Dickins thinks it may have been the best of the lot.
“We had one show where it rained, and when you saw her play that show – putting a pair of sneakers on on-stage, the way she talked to the crowd – I don’t know any artist that would have pulled that off the way she did. She’s unbelievable. She’s a once-in-a-lifetime talent for me.”
Get more stories like this in your inbox by signing up for IQ Index, IQ’s free email digest of essential live music industry news.