This is the kind of challenge Edwin Shirley Staging faces every week. As a professional staging provider with bases in the UK, America, Japan and Australia, the company is well known in the confines of the music business. Outside the music world, ESS is probably best known for designing and constructing Skyscape, the Millennium Dome's baby sister.
Like the construction industry, staging work has to be completed to a strict budget, often to a very tight programme and frequently in the worst of weather. However, unlike construction, staging deadlines just cannot be missed. With an audience of thousands – and in the case of televised shows, millions – it is not even a consideration. "We've never lost a show yet through not having the stage ready," says John Wilson, senior project manager for ESS.
Three months to go
Planning for the Tom Jones show started some three months before the event, when Wilson put together the bid to supply the stage for the Cardiff concert: he also had to include a stage for another Tom Jones show a week earlier in Warwick in the bid. "The staging world is very competitive and clients are very price-sensitive," says Stephen Court, head of sales and marketing at ESS. "You have to be innovative with the product you are supplying to give the client best value."
ESS is very active in developing products to add value to its bid. From the promoter's brief, ESS put forward a bid based on the company's Mini Tower System. This innovative staging system was developed by ESS 10 years ago – in the days of the rock megatour – when the company provided giant stages for world tours by acts such as Genesis and Michael Jackson.
The company realised that using a modular tower and truss system, rather than cobbling the stage together from scaffolding every night, resulted in massive efficiency gains. The system's design allows it to be assembled and dismantled easily by an untrained workforce with a minimum of supervision, and its modular dimensions enable it to fit snugly into the back of a truck – or fleet of trucks, in the case of Michael Jackson's show. It is a system that the company is now using for the construction of temporary buildings, which now makes up more than 50% of the firm's income.
Two months to go
With a successful bid under his belt, Wilson meets the production team on site along with the show's lighting and sound equipment suppliers. The meeting allows the teams to discuss how to manage the logistics for each site and to establish or renew working relationships. "It's important to meet everyone involved to understand their specific requirements," says Wilson.
Access is the major concern in Cardiff: there is very little space for loading and unloading trucks, and access to the castle grounds involves either crossing an ancient drawbridge or delivering equipment through a portcullis gate that is too narrow for a truck to pass. "Everything will have to be unloaded from the trucks outside the castle and carried to site on either a forklift or on a flatbed van," explains Wilson.
Six weeks to go
At this stage, ESS begins detailed design of the modularised staging system. A tight budget does not stretch to two separate stage superstructures for the two venues. Instead, the designers will have to allow for the Warwick stage to be dismantled, put on trucks and re-erected in Cardiff. But experience tells the designers that time is just too tight to use the same podium, the part the performers actually stand on, for both concerts; instead, a new podium will be delivered to Cardiff from the firm's London warehouse.
Having finalised the design, ESS' drawing office takes over. It produces CAD drawings that are rushed to an external consultant – usually engineer Buro Happold – to be checked along with the structural calculations. Once the design has been given the thumbs-up, ESS produces an equipment schedule and carries out a quick stock check to ensure that there are sufficient modules in its warehouse to build the stage when the trucks turn up. Finally, the rigging crews and trucks are booked and special pieces of structure manufactured (see box "The supply chain").
Two weeks to go
The warehouse team starts to pull together the gear, clean the tarpaulins that will protect the stage, and pre-assemble any components to save valuable time on site.
One week to go
One week before the Cardiff show, the crew is hard at work in Warwick assembling the stage and superstructure, ready for the first of three nights of shows that will finish on Sunday, two days before the stage is due to be completed in Cardiff.
Two days to go
It is Sunday night, and Tom Jones has just walked off stage after his final performance in Warwick. At 8am the next day, the Warwick crew can begin work dismantling the stage superstructure as the logistical challenge begins. Over 120 tonnes of staging, comprising 12,000 separate components, must be swiftly dismantled. The workers ESS employs for the task are all freelance, young, and flexible in the hours they work. They know that their working day might be anything from eight to 24 hours. Meanwhile, in Cardiff, the second stage podium arrives from the ESS warehouse and a second crew is there to assemble it.
One day to go
Tuesday morning: the main crew leaves the dismantled stage superstructure in Warwick ready to be loaded on to trucks and sped to Cardiff. The stage is almost complete, but there is a problem: the first truck, scheduled to arrive at 11am, is late. An anxious phone call and the reason for the delay is clear: the crane due in Warwick to load the trucks has turned up five hours late.
Eight hours to go
By midday, eight hours before the stage is due to be completed, the trucks finally start arriving. But the delay with the crane has thrown out the carefully-prepared delivery schedule. Instead of turning up at regular two-hour slots, the huge articulated trucks are rumbling into the unloading area in pairs. With little enough space to empty a single truck, it is starting to get chaotic. Rather than suffer further delays, Paul Lovell-Butt, crew chief at Cardiff, makes a couple of pleading phone calls to the local council and space in a nearby park is made available.
With the loading bay problem resolved and the tower modules now starting to accumulate beside the stage, Lovell-Butt and his crew can at last begin to assemble the superstructure. He has fewer than eight hours before night starts to fall, and the team is already behind schedule. "We'll work round it – it's not a major problem," says Lovell-Butt calmly, before putting his lack of anxiety in context: "Touring Jackson around the world – now that is a major problem."
Four hours to go
It is mid-afternoon and the production team is starting to stumble onto site. They make straight for the rigging crew with a request to extend the stage by one module. Surprisingly, the request is simply acknowledged and an additional module duly appears. "We anticipate these things, so we always carry extra modules," says Lovell-Butt. Last-minute changes are one reason the firm has a structural engineer on 24-hour call.
Zero
Late evening, and temporary floodlights illuminate a group of tired figures. Eight steel towers rise through the podium. The towers support three giant trusses waiting to be dressed in coloured lights. All that remains to be done is for the tarpaulins to be added, which the crew will do first thing tomorrow morning, and then their job will be complete. Two days later, Tom Jones will arrive to make the ladies swoon. The men at ESS already know how they'll feel.
