Bare land festival build, Chalong

The brief

The promoter had the brand, the lineup and an audience flying in from outside Thailand. They needed a site, a stage that looked like nothing their crowd had seen at home, and everything between the airport and the last set handled by one team. The date was fixed by the artists and the high season, which meant the permits, the ground works and the shipping all ran on a clock that could not move.

The site

The land was forest before it was anything, and wasteland by the time we saw it: an uneven surface pitted with potholes, with residential neighbours on one boundary. Access was straightforward, which on a site like this is the one thing you cannot fix later. Everything else was missing. There was no mains power and no water, so the whole site ran on generators with spare lighting held on site as backup, and on water tanks brought in and refilled. The survey set the stage position by the sound direction, facing away from the houses.

The ground works came first and took most of the schedule: excavate the potholed ground, level it, then seed grass and water it in, so that three thousand people would spend three days standing on turf rather than dust. Then fencing, gates, path lighting, toilets, water tanks and the generator compound, all before a single piece of stage arrived.

What we built

The main stage was bamboo and scaffold, and that was a design decision before it was a practical one. The audience was flying in from Europe, and the client wanted them to feel they were still in Thailand and still in nature rather than looking at the same truss they would see at home. The carved face was designed for the show and built on site. The roof was rated for wind and inspected under the temporary structure permit before the rig went in. The sound system was sized for the field with delays, the lighting rig ran on a dedicated generator, and the bars, traders, production office, artist compound and crew catering all had their own power and water.

Licensing ran in parallel: district notification, police permit for crowd and sound, the structure inspection and a noise agreement with the neighbours, with the promoter's licensed Thai partner holding the alcohol side. Artist logistics covered the whole lineup and their teams, flights, hotels and drivers. Content was shot through the build and the show, with drone footage where the permit allowed.

What went wrong and how it was handled

The neighbours were the most important relationship on the job, ahead of any supplier, and the noise reading at their fence line is now the first number on every site plan.

The numbers

The module

This was end to end, which is why it is written up first. Everything in kit and stage and full production, plus the site finding, the design, the bar and trader build and the content. Similar ground, and the same crew, is covered on the Phuket and festival production pages.