With greater than 35 years’ expertise, Allen has been head of safety for artists together with Oasis, Eminem, Shakira, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Led Zeppelin.
In the Nineties, he developed what is named the “show-stop procedure, external” – a fast, co-ordinated response to crowd surges that may convey a live performance to an instantaneous halt.
The system was designed throughout Oasis’s 1997 Be Here Now Tour.
“I was well versed with dynamic crowds but Oasis was a completely different beast,” Allen remembers.
“Their crowd profile was off the Richter scale, and it was very apparent to me that we need to have something in place.”
The process appears apparent now, however it established a chain of command that had beforehand different from venue to venue.
For the complete tour Allen stood at the safety boundaries, sustaining radio contact together with his group and by no means leaving the band’s line of sight.
“I told Noel and Liam: ‘If I give the sign, there’s a reason to stop the show. It means this is life-critical; I’m not doing it to spoil your night,'” he later recalled, external.
It proved essential at Manchester City Stadium in 2005.
As Oasis performed the opening bars of Lyla, the crowd rushed ahead and a safety barrier cracked.
Footage of the concert shows, external individuals being lifted off their toes and carried alongside in a wave of our bodies that hits the barrier then reverberates again by way of the viewers.
“In the control tower, they had CCTV and everything, but they couldn’t see what we could see [on the ground],” says Allen.
Thanks to the show-stop system, “we had safety spotters who were able to radio the tower, and we stopped the show”, he says.
Immediately, the stage lights went off, a floodlight illuminated the viewers and all audio was minimize, aside from Noel Gallagher’s microphone, permitting him to calmly clarify the scenario earlier than the band left the stage.
Some 25 minutes later, after the barrier was repaired, Allen gave the go-forward for a restart.
“The band had full trust in my decision. Everything was safe, no injuries, no deaths. Everyone went home safely, reputations intact.”
