MILESAGO - Performance - Venues - Sydney
RANDWICK RACECOURSE
Alison Road, Randwick, Sydney
Located 5km from the city centre, Randwick is Australia's largest racecourse. Like the Hordern Pavilion, Randwick Racecourse was pressed into use as a concert venue after the demolition of the Sydney Stadium in 1970. The Hordern was Sydney's main indoor venue throughout the '70s but its relatively modest capacity (5,300) precluded its use by many 'big-name' acts, whose tours were by this time geared towards the huge sports arenas available in North America and Europe.
In the 1960s large outdoor concerts were comparitvely rare, for a simple practical reason. The Beatles had started the trend towards "arena" concerts with their famous US tours from 1964-66, including the historic Shea Stadium concert in 1965 which was the largest concert crowd ever seen up to that time. But concert amplification for rock music was still in its infancy and the puny PA systems available to The Beatles were hopelessly inadequate when ranged against combined lungpower of 60,000 screaming teenagers. Considering that the most powerful amplifiers group possessed were only 100 watts, and that they were forced to sing through PA systems designed for commentary and announcements, it's no wonder that they were constantly drowned out by the deafening screams of teenage fans, and that they rapidly tired of being unable to be heard and gave up touring.
Things began to change
in 1966, with the invention of the "Slave" PA amplifier by the
great English engineer Charlie Watkins, founder of
Watkins
Electric Music -- WEM. This was followed by the
ground-breaking sound system put together by audio engineer Alan Markoff
for the Woodstock
Festival, the largest and most powerful PA systen ever created
up to that time -- so powerful, Markoff recalls, that at the amplifiers'
lowest setting the Woodstock speakers would cause pain for anyone standing
within 10 feet!
Prior to Woodstock, providing quality concert amplification
for a crowd of even 50,000 people was unheard of, and creating a system
for the anticipated 100,000 patrons was at the very outer limit of what
was technically possible in 1969. In the event, the crowd exceeded 500,000.
The system performed poorly and it failed on several occasions, but the
Woodstock PA worked well enough to prove that it would soon be possible
to make sound systems far bigger and more powerful than anyone had previously
thought possible. More importantly, Woodstock proved that rock music could attract
audience of wholly unprecedented sizes, and in so doing it ushered in
the so-called "Stadium Era". Within a couple of
years concert amplification had made huge strides in development and by
the early '70s groups finally had access to large, very powerfu, portable
multi-channel mixing desks and PA systems, as well as lighting rigs of
ever-increasing size and compexity -- systems that could easily project
sound to an audience of tens or even hundreds of thousands. In Australia
these concert systems were first supplied by the Sydney-based
Lenard company, who also supplied the
PA for Australia's first rock festival at
Ourimbah in 1970. Because of Australia's
relatively small population, there were no large American-style indoor arenas,
so when major rock tours began visiting Australian in the early '70s promoters were
obliged to stage the concerts in large outdoor venues like Randwick Racecourse and
the RAS Showground in Sydney, the Kooyong Tennis Centre in Melbourne or the WACA cricket ground in Perth.
These sportsgrounds were used to stage numerous large concerts in this period including
as The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. The shortcomings of this practice soon became
obvious, howewver: these large arenas were not acoustically designed for rock music
and of course they were uncovered. Some events were rained out, since overseas acts
tended to tour in our summer months (Dec.-Feb.) but the situation wasn't recified in
Sydney until after the huge public outcry over the disgraceful standard of the Sydney
Showground for the Bob Dylan concert in 1978. That show was staged only a
few days after the end of the Royal Easter Show, and it had rained solidly during the
entire Easter period, with the result that patrons (including the author) had to stand
in a fetid, inches-deep mixture of mud and animal manure. Only after the outcry following
the Dylan concert was finally taken to construct a large-capacity indoor venue --
the Sydney Entertainment Centre.
June 1971 - The Kinks
May 1971 - Deep Purple/Free/Manfred Mann/Pirana
August 1971 - Pink Floyd
October 1971 - Elton John
February 1972 - Creedence Clearwater Revival
February 1973 - The Rolling Stones
http://mapage.noos.fr/beatlesarchives/19751108c.htm