Folk at 300 below: Katie Melua’s bizarre and pointless concert under the sea
Prisons. Haunted mansions. Cars. A literal spaceship. The list of strange places to record albums goes on and on and y’know, why shouldn’t it?
We all love a novelty, and if you can get inspired by recording in strange and out there settings, then fill your boots, I say. However, it is always worth asking why one is doing this. It’s a question that more than a few people should have asked Katie Melua when she recorded a live album 303metres below sea level in 2006. One imagines they didn’t.
To be clear, not every album needs to be recorded in a professional-grade studio, far from it. Many artists feel like their records need to be recorded in places where the surroundings match the content. It’s the reason that Trent Reznor recorded The Downward Spiral in the Hollywood hills house the Manson family murders were committed, but Katie Melua’s Concert Under The Sea just seems to have been done for the sake of it. At least on the surface.
If you take a look far, far beneath that surface, we can start to piece together what was actually going on here. Now, the concert wasn’t performed in a submarine or in one of the famed concert halls of Bikini Bottom but instead at the Troll A platform, a gas rig off the west coast of Norway that in 1996 was hailed the world’s largest offshore gas platform by the Guinness Book of World Records. Not the last time that book will come up, so watch this space.
The gig was set up at the base of one of the platform’s hollow legs and was attended by 20 of the platform’s staff. Melua, 22 years old at the time, underwent extensive medical tests to ensure her safety. A process that even her journey to the venue proves was necessary. Speaking to the BBC, Melua said that “It took nine minutes to go from the main part of the gas platform down to the bottom of the shaft in a lift”. Nine full minutes of constant descent into the depths of the sea. One can only imagine how much your ears pop after that.
So why did Katie Melua do this?
It’s a fine question. I’m sure the workers at the platform were very grateful to have the woman who, at the time, was the biggest-selling female artist in the UK come and play for them, but there were only 20 of them. So, it can’t have been the audience. It did earn a place for Melua in the Guinness Book of World Records for ‘deepest underwater concert’. That’s a form of immortality, I guess, but a spot in the record books is much easier to achieve than one might think, so it’s probably not that.
However, perhaps we can just all agree that it was one of those two options, because the truth is a lot less exciting than either of them. It was a corporate gig with a few more bells and whistles. 2006 marked the tenth anniversary of Statoil (now Equinor ASA) operating on the Troll gas field that gives the platform its name, and the Katie Melua gig was organised to celebrate it. That’s it. The concert was recorded and released as a live album under the name Concert Under The Sea, I assume because everything Melua touched at the time turned to Gold records.
Other than that, it’s the gig equivalent of “this could have been an email”. She didn’t even play ‘Under the Sea’, but I assume that’s a joke so old to the workers that they would have gotten cross. Shouldn’t have bothered Melua though. What else were they other than a captive audience?
