Concert safety has become a big deal, especially since a lady died at a Linkin’ Park gig. Saturday night saw the Red Hot Chili Peppers performing in Jo’burg (set list here) and according to The New Age, it was ‘ a shambles’ and security were accepting bribes. Big Concerts say they’re talking crap. Click for more..

According to The New Age:

Ticket holders left the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert on Saturday night at FNB Stadium before the main event as they feared for their safety.

With an increasing number of high-profile performers visiting South Africa and drawing thousands of people to big venues, questions are now being raised about safety standards.

Poor organisation, lack of crowd control and oversubscription were the main complaints that inundated social media networks, The Big Concerts and other websites following the stadium event.

Big Concerts chief operations officer John Langford said he could not comment on the night’s events as he was not there. However, he said that all security guards used by Big Concerts were registered with the Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority and that all security measures were discussed with the police who supervised the entire event.

In response to oversubscription of tickets, Langford said the venue capacity was carefully calculated with the fire department.

He said negligence “could mean jail time” and was not feasible.

But concert goers took to Twitter to complain about the alleged bribery of security guards for access into the golden circle.

[more here]

Big Concerts fired back, in an article published by channel24:

Big Concerts has denied any chaos or incidents at the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert at the FNB Stadium in Nasrec, Johannesburg on Saturday, 2 February.

Fans and concertgoers complained on social networks on Monday about the bad organisation at the event as well as an incident involving locked gates which prevented some people from leaving, forcing them to turn back and take another route.

Channel24 asked Dionne Domyan of the Publicity Workshop, who organised the event with Big Concerts, how many concertgoers attended the show and the actual capacity of the stadium, but we were left unanswered and furnished with a blanket official statement.

According to Justin van Wyk of Big Concerts, “There was no chaos or any significant incident which required us to engage anyone other than our customers in the ordinary course of business.

[more here]

Very interesting indeed.

Were you there? How was it for you? Leave a comment below and let us know.

[image source:@mikesharman]