Here comes the Sun King: The utter insanity of Paul McCartney’s 3000th gig
Reaching your 3000th gig is a momentous occasion, and a landmark that ought to be celebrated in style, so when the time came for Paul McCartney to mark this milestone, he wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of his big day.
While he might not have originally imagined that this would be happening in St Petersburg, and would probably have felt that a more appropriate location would be in his hometown of Liverpool, a gig is a gig, and you’ve surely got to accept that a landmark show can happen anywhere in the world. That being said, you’ve got to be prepared for whatever your touring schedule might throw at you, and one thing that probably wasn’t accounted for when booking such a big show in Russia was what almost ended up turning it into a catastrophe.
The thing is, the weather in St Petersburg can be unpredictable at the best of times, with temperatures often reaching double figures in the negatives during the winter months, and the last thing you want as a musician is for your hands to freeze up in such treacherous climates. However, with it being scheduled for June 2004, there was less of a chance of a cold snap putting a spanner in the works, so surely everything was going to be alright, right?
Rain, however, was another issue entirely, and when you’ve got to play a show outdoors, that can really put a damper on the mood, if you’ll pardon the pun. Nobody likes standing outside, unable to move for the massive crowds while getting soaked by the elements, and not even Sir Paul was going to be able to convince an audience to brave the weather if it was pissing it down.
So, when it was announced that torrential downpours would be covering the city over the weekend that McCartney was scheduled to perform, extreme measures were taken to ensure that that wasn’t going to spoil the party. If this had been George Harrison’s show, perhaps a little rendition of ‘Here Comes the Sun’ would’ve been enough to stave off the rain, but McCartney had to take a far more extreme measure to ensure that the weather held out for his concert.
The solution? Macca and his crew spent £20,000 on dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide) to be fired into the sky in order to prevent any precipitation in a process known as ‘cloud seeding’. The idea of this was to ensure that any possible rain would get trapped before it could fall upon the crowds, and therefore make sure of the fact that his performance would remain dry, because the water droplets would either freeze or shrink to a molecular level that it would become impossible to rain down.
As planned, it didn’t rain for McCartney’s big moment, but it’s hard to know whether his extortionate measures even worked or not. There’s a chance that the forecast was wrong anyway, such is the unpredictability of meteorological predictions, and that it never rained anyway, but when you’ve got a shitload of money to spend on changing the weather, then why wouldn’t you take the measure that makes it seem like you’ve got Zeusian superpowers?
