It was a phenomenal night on Saturday when Axl, Slash, Duff and co lit up Changi Exhibition Centre in Guns N’ Roses’ first ever show in Singapore, with over 50,000 fans in attendance.
While the band themselves received overwhelming praise all around for a stunning, long-awaited performance that spanned over two hours, it was the concert experience itself that was overwhelmingly said to be considerably shitty.
Some TL;DR pointers in case you haven’t seen the insane amount of hate concert organisers LAMC Productions received from attendees:
- Massive traffic jams on the road headed towards Changi Exhibition Centre (Aviation Park Road) caused fans to miss out on the first few songs when the concert kicked off. Folks had to ditch their transports and actually run to the venue in order not to miss out.
- It wasn’t sounding too good during the concert. Ironically, folks who paid through the nose to stand in front reported imbalanced sound levels, while those standing at the back heard it all pretty well.
- No proper ticket screening at the door — folks who paid for cheaper tickets could freely enter the more expensive areas.
- Lack of food stalls to provide for hungry concert goers. Lack of orderly queue system meant some people had to wait nearly two hours for a single burger.
- Bars ran out of alcohol early. There were only two bars to accommodate 50,000 people.
- Usage of RFID meant that folks had to use their wrist tags to purchase food and drinks — but many couldn’t even do so due to overly long queues. Basically, they had plenty of useless value left in their tags — but LAMC promises to refund all of them.
- Inadequate number of buses to shuttle fans away from the very out-of-the-way venue. Some reportedly waited over two hours for their shuttle bus rides.
But don’t take our word for it: here are just some posts made by very, very angry fans.
LAMC Productions’ co-owner Ross Knudson heard it all, and — surprisingly — took full responsibility for the mess that was meant to be a historic welcoming of Guns N’ Roses to Singapore. In an interview with Bandwagon Asia, Knudson clarified each and every segment of what went wrong that night. Read their full interview to get a full picture of the things LAMC admitted they could have done better, and check out some of the highlights below:
Congestion partly caused by dump trucks in the area: “We requested that they stopped running [the day before] but they didn’t stop,” Knudson said. “They were out there barrelling away down the road, and they were dangerous — with all these cars and vehicles around.”
They should have gotten more buses: “Last time, for Metallica, we only used Singapore Expo [as a destination point] for every bus. It was good that we opened different locations and I think that worked out okay. We should’ve had another 100 buses, that could’ve helped.”
Mismanagement of the taxi pick up zones: “Our idea was to turn that zone into a Changi Airport-styled taxi queue. When it got clogged up with other taxis who were simply sitting there waiting for their customers, that was a problem. That was something worth anticipating.”
Not foreseeing how RFID tags could pose a problem: “At 7pm [an hour before Guns N’ Roses were scheduled to take the stage], I went out there and looked and thought to myself “Oh God, there’s thousands of people outside!” and I know Axl [Rose]’s not gonna delay the show,” Knudson said. “I knew that, in one hour, there’s no way we can get all these people in.”
Not having enough stalls to serve food and drinks: “We should have had a different way of doing it — I wish we had one giant bar serving the whole venue, that would’ve been better,” Knudson said. “That’s also another level of logistics we had to deal with, and we didn’t put enough time and effort on that.”
On the crazy level of logistics that needed to be handled: “It’s got a lot of moving parts that require a lot of staffing, and it’s really a military operation to run it,” he explained. “In concerts, you only have a short window of time to do it. And you’ve got to pull it all together and run it to the best of your ability. At the same time, you have to meet your requirements and satisfy the police.”
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