Tickets for 2015’s Glastonbury Festival sold out in a record breaking 26 minutes earlier this year. The festival which is held in Somerset, England attracts music lovers from across the world and is considered to be the biggest and best music event.
For those who haven’t made the pilgrimage to the 1200 acre stretch of Worthy Farm (owned by the Eavis family), one of the most spectacular areas of the festival is hosted by Bristol-based creative firm Arcadia.
The towering, World Of The Worlds-like structure can be seen and heard across the festival and has hosted the world best DJ’s including Fatboy Slim and Skrillex in front of a crowd of 70,000.
Made from recycled military hardware including jet engines and helicopter blades, the stage combines creative recycling, music, pyrotechnics, acrobatics and lighting to create an incredible audio/visual atmosphere.
Material suppliers Metals4U recently interviewed company directors Pip Rush and Bertie Cole on how they turn their ideas into reality, the importance of recycling and what Glastonbury means to them.
“It’s a very creative chicken and egg scenario”, explains Rush and Cole. “The bits we find often steer the ideas we have. We built the spider legs in a few weeks, but it took a few years of shows to evolve into the moving creature it is now. We go on a 'scrap tour' once a year, which consists of a UK wide motorbike journey taking pictures of everything we find that looks useful.
Then we send a lorry round to pick up the good bits at the end (hoping they haven't reached the crusher yet). We use a bit of everything; plastics, wood and all sorts of metals.”
Essential testing and maintenance are vital to the design of the “Spider” stage. Cole explains: “Arcadia work with structural engineers to assess the type of metal the structural components are made from and then use computer modelling to calculate the structural strength of the components assembled into complete structures.”
More information about Arcadia can be found
here.
