The future of arena gigs: does London need another mega concert arena like The Sphere?

The images – it’s been hard to avoid them – are stunning. U2 are specks on a tiny stage, dwarfed by what surrounds them. For “Where the Streets Have No Name” they appear to be playing in an amphitheatre deep in the desert, the sands and skies stretching out behind them, around them. For “Even Better Than the Real Thing” they are centred in a vast, fantastical playground of neon, for “The Fly”, flashing random letters and numbers encompass everything. Welcome to the most technologically advanced rock show in history, at its newest, most expensive venue, The Sphere in Las Vegas. Not to put too fine a point on it, it makes previous stage spectaculars look amateurish: Muse at Wembley Stadium, drones and all, suddenly looks about as advanced as that indie band in the back room of a pub.

The reviewers were duly overwhelmed by the spectacle the band and the venue presented. The screens provided “a sequence of genuinely astonishing visual effects”, the Guardian noted. “The screens are bewilderingly good, so good that it’s impossible to take your eyes off them,” reckoned the Evening Standard. The whole thing “will change live entertainment forever”, said the Daily Telegraph (it’s a measure of how much is invested in this project that reviewers were flown in from outside the US to the opening night; and there was a special incentive to impress British reviewers, which we’ll come to later).

The great revolutions in rock and pop aren’t just the result of visionary musicians; they’re often caused by technological or economic change. To take just one example, the entire shape of pop was determined in 1948, with the launch of the 7in and 12in formats: the single became the teenage telegraph, communicating urgent messages in three-minute bursts at a pocket-money-friendly price; the album was the chosen medium to display artistry, to leave a legacy. Without the 7in, no “Good Vibrations”, or “Ghost Town”, or “Virginia Plain”. Without the 12in, no Sgt Pepper, or London Calling, or What’s Going On.

Arena rock is no different. It owes its very existence to something entirely non-musical: the expansion of the National Basketball Association in 1966 and the National Hockey League in 1967. A total of 20 new sports teams meant a surge in the number of arenas being built in the US, and a slew of large venues for the bands who were exploding in popularity. Two of those new venues, in particular – Madison Square Garden, in the heart of Manhattan, and the “Fabulous” Forum in the LA suburb of Inglewood – became among the status venues of arena rock.

Think of Led Zeppelin, who played the Forum 16 times during their career – not for nothing was their 2003 live album called How the West Was Won; or of Fleetwood Mac for whom it was their home show – last month they released Rumours Live, capturing a thrilling August 1977 show at the Forum. As for Madison Square Garden, it remains the gig that every band wants, and captures for posterity – Wikipedia lists 57 live albums recorded there, and I wouldn’t bet on that list being complete.

Nevertheless, arena shows wouldn’t have been possible without another breakthrough – decent amplification. Though it’s a myth – repeated by the band themselves – that when the Beatles played at Shea Stadium in New York, the sound was piped through the venue’s PA system, it’s true that the PA they used – an array of Electro-Voice LR4 column speakers set up around the stage, roughly at the edge of the baseball diamond – was entirely inadequate for the show. When the Beatles complained that they could never hear themselves on stage, it wasn’t the fault of the screaming fans.

Two brothers in rural Pennsylvania changed all that. Gene and Roy Clair, who lived in the small town of Lititz, roughly 70 miles from Philadelphia, were electronics buffs and supplied their homemade speaker systems for concerts at Franklin and Marshall College in nearby Lancaster. One night in 1966, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons played the college, and were so impressed by the Clairs’ system that they took it out on the road, rather than using the in-house PAs. Word spread among other artists, and soon the Clairs were bespoke suppliers of PAs for rock royalty.

The company they founded, Clair Global, is still family-run, and still based in Lititz, which has become the arena rock capital of the world. Clair Global, along with the production company Tait Towers, helped found Rock Lititz, a 96-acre campus that houses pretty much every company a band needs to assemble a big production – right down to a firm whose business is building the hoists that lift lighting rigs into the rafters – along with two huge rehearsal spaces – one for arena gigs, one for stadium gigs – where every aspect of the show can be tested before going out on the road (it’s one reason why a great many arena and stadium tours have their opening night within driving distance of western Pennsylvania).

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The need for a place like Rock Lititz was driven by the expansion of productions from the 1970s on: ELO had their spaceship lighting rig built for the 1978 tour to promote the multi-million-selling album Out of the Blue – it was so groundbreaking that it became a news story in the towns it visited (“The 60-foot flying saucer was designed by an aerospace engineer who worked on the Concorde,” reported the NBC affiliate in Fort Worth, earnestly); Kiss had their pyrotechnics and drum risers that shot up to the ceiling; Pink Floyd became secondary to their staging, notably when they toured in support of The Wall in 1980 and 1981, with a wall built on stage through the show. It was so impractical they were only able to perform the show 31 times in four cities. “It was absurdly expensive,” their drummer Nick Mason later said. “It’s not something other people will do, generally, because it’s just so expensive to put on, it’s simply not feasible.”

Nowadays, arena productions are often vast – theatrical spectacles as much as musical performances. Which is where The Sphere comes in: it’s the next step in rock as spectacle. And its operator, Madison Square Garden Entertainment, plans to build a network of such venues worldwide, starting with one in Stratford in East London: planning permission has been granted by the London Legacy Development Corporation, despite opposition from local residents and Newham council, though the planning process is currently stalled in central government.

Community concerns aside, though, there are pressing concerns for the live music world with the Stratford Sphere. Does London, which already has three indoor venues with capacities above 10,000, really need a fourth enormodome? Though it is budgeted at £800m, can that target be met, given this country’s continuing difficulties with completing projects to budget, and the fact the Vegas Sphere ended up costing $2.3bn? And is the Sphere so specialist that it could only really be used by an elite tier of act – Taylor Swift or Beyoncé – capable of selling out a long run of a site-specific show? Certainly, U2 would not be able to replicate their Vegas show anywhere else (perhaps the aim of a global network of Spheres is to eventually set up a self-contained touring network for mega-acts). It’s not even clear whether a band with a conventional set-up would be able to bring in their own lighting rig and PA and play a Sphere venue as an ordinary show. And, the reason it’s impossible to answer them is that MSG Entertainment, having agreed to answer questions for this article, chose not to send any answers to the 14 questions sent in.

It’s hard, in fact, to find anyone keen to comment on the London Sphere. Of three arena-level promoters contacted, two said they were not willing to speak, and the third did not reply. LIVE, the umbrella organisation for live music in the UK, sent a bland statement that did not answer the six questions posed, the principal one of which was, “Does London need a fourth 10,000-plus cap venue?” Some of this, doubtless, is politics. AEG, the operator of the O2 Arena, is unsurprisingly strongly opposed to a higher-spec venue opening three stops up the Jubilee Line, and few in the live music industry would want to be caught in the crossfire between the two companies.

Guy Dunstan, MD of arenas and ticketing for Birmingham’s NEC group – a member of the National Arenas Association, representing 23 big UK venues – steps up to the plate, albeit cautiously. “It looks spectacular in terms of production and scale,” he says of the Sphere, “but that’s a lot of resource commitment and cost for a production specific to that venue that can’t be replicated elsewhere. We’ve probably got the strongest arena network for a country of our size, because we can accommodate tours that fit into each arena night after night – that’s part of the success of our venues.”

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As to whether London actually needs and can sustain a fourth arena, Mark Davyd of the Music Venues Trust, which campaigns on behalf of small venues across the UK, sometimes in partnership with arena operators, says no one knows – not MSG, not the mayor, not Newham council, and not him. “And the reason none of us honestly know, no matter what the proposal says or the planning assessment says, is because nothing in the process of this application has so far addressed the impact of building another arena in London on the one area of the economy of London on which it must, undoubtedly, have the most impact; the music ecosystem. We simply don’t know whether another 10,000-plus capacity arena will be positive or negative for the 100 Club, or EartH, or The Lexington, or Omeara.”

So what should be done? Should the venue be waved through, or blocked? “Before this proposal goes any further, everyone should stop and demand that we find out [what the impact will be],” Davyd says. “The music ecosystem is incredibly fragile at the grassroots and even the medium concert-hall size right now. Dropping huge additional capacity into it without knowing the impact it might have is fantastically risky and we just shouldn’t do it. I’m not personally pro or anti this or that arena, or operator, or proposal, and Music Venue Trust certainly hasn’t formed a final view on it. We will have a view on it when we understand it.”

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What London really does need, though, is more grassroots venues. Davyd points out that U2 made their London debut at the Moonlight Club in West Hampstead on 1 December 1979, and the following night played the Nashville Rooms in West Kensington. “Would the band ever have connected with their fan base without those early shows? Would they ever have tapped into a supportive music industry if they weren’t seen at those shows? I don’t know, But I do know that currently, MSG has one of the biggest grossing shows in the world, while both the London venues U2 played are closed.”

And London also needs a good West End venue. The Lyceum, just off the Strand, and the Dominion at the south end of Tottenham Court Road, are both long lost, gone to conventional theatre. The Astoria, a couple of hundred metres south of the Dominion, was demolished to make way for the Elizabeth Line. There are still clubs, albeit far fewer than there were, but the only two regular music venues in the West End are Heaven, near Charing Cross, and the new HERE at Outernet, opposite where the Astoria used to stand. Neither are ideal venues, and HERE, the larger of them, only holds 2,000 people.

Doubtless, anyone seeing the U2 show at The Sphere will be knocked sideways by its brilliance. All the footage looks astounding, and who would not want to see a spectacle on that scale? Perhaps it is the next step for live music in large arenas. But it does not and will not exist in a vacuum – it needs all those other venues to develop the acts that might eventually fill it. And if someone chooses to spend £200 on going to see an act at The Sphere, knowing that even if they don’t like the music all that much, at least their minds will be blown by the spectacle, that’s 10 smaller shows they won’t be buying tickets for, where the artist might have been able to build a connection with them as an individual through the songs. But, as ever in the music industry, it’s never all about the music.