POP ‘superstars’ who can draw in fans in their tens of thousands were not actually invented by Simon Cowell.
They have in fact been around since the 1950s.
A famous concert for the biggest band in the world, the Beatles, set the ball rolling way back in 1965 at the New York’s Shea Stadium with a reported 55,000+ in attendance.
It didn’t take long before another behemoth of British rock, the Rolling Stones, took the mantle from the Fab Four with reportedly up to 500,000 in a 1969 free outdoor festival held in London’s Hyde Park on 5 July 1969.
It was the Stones first gig in more than two years and originally intended as a platform to introduce their new guitarist, Mick Taylor, but the circumstances took an unexpected turn due to the untimely passing of former band member Brian Jones who drowned in his swimming pool just two days before.
It wasn’t the best concert with the Stones reportedly being out of tune. In a 1971 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, guitarist Keith Richards’ evaluated their performance by saying: “We played pretty bad until near the end, because we hadn’t played for years… Nobody minded, because they just wanted to hear us play again.”
Fast-forward to 1996 and again staying in Blighty, but this time with Brit Pop bad boys the Gallagher brothers and a two-night sellout at Knebworth for Oasis.
It is estimated that 500,000 were there and apparently they could have sold out the venue 20 times over.
Moving into 2003 and another free concert, when the ex-Housemartin now more formally known as Fatboy Slim took Brighton Beach by storm.
It was expected that 60,000 people would turn up to the free event, but early in the afternoon it was estimated that over 250,000 were in attendance, with revelllers turning the Channel into the biggest public toilet Britain has ever seen.
It was reported that things could have gone very wrong and the gig had a permamant impact on the way UK events were subsequently run.
It wasn’t long though until the million mark was breached. In 2005, the Live 8 concert took place at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where an impressive 1.5million fans lined up along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway for a mile-long stretch.
The following year, in 2006, The Rolling Stones graced the stage for a remarkable performance on Rio De Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach, captivating an even bigger crowd of 2million fanatics.
Sticking with Copacabana, model railway enthusiast Rod Stewart managed to draw an impressive crowd of over 3.5million punters to a 1994 New Year’s Eve celebration. One assumes the vast majority couldn’t see his famous barnet rocking the night away.
But the holder of the biggest concert ever, depending on who you talk to, belongs to Jean Michel Jarre and a massive free concert with in excess of an astonishing 3.5million people in front of the imposing architecture of the State University of Moscow in 1997.
Imagine what the queue for the bar was like?
