Innovators: Manager Jonathan Dickins On The Brilliance of Adele’s Munich Pop-Up Stadium Shows

What Adele and her team accomplished last August at Munich Germany’s trade fairgrounds was astonishing: A temporary pop-up stadium with a capacity of 80K running for ten days that going forward could be a peripatetic model for the live industry. The event, which also included “Adele World,” a festival in its own right, with F&B, a Ferris wheel and carousel, was helmed by Adele’s team, which included the artist herself, manager Jonathan Dickins, and WME music head Lucy Dickins along with Klaus Leutgeb of Leutgeb Ent., Live Nation GSA’s Marek Lieberberg and designer Florian Wieder among others. Pollstar caught up with Jonathan Dickins to find out more about this groundbreaking initiative, how in their right minds they executed such an ambitious initiative and why Adele is ultimately a “punk rock diva.“

Pollstar: What Adele and your team accomplished in Munich with the pop-up stadium for 80K for ten days was a game changer. How was it for you? 
Jonathan Dickins: It was actually really enjoyable and I thought it wasn’t going to be.

Why?
The idea was a brilliant and brought to Lucy (Dickins, Adele’s agent, WME’s Global Head of Contemporary Music and Touring,  and Jonathan’s sister) by Klaus Leutgeb. But an idea without the execution is meaningless. When I went to this soulless car park in the middle of what was basically an exhibition center in Munich to sort it out for the first time in June, I was like, “What the fuck have we gotten ourselves into here?” (laughs). What I kept trying to impress on people was when you think of a show, you generally think about what is happening inside the arena you’re playing in.  So if you go to SoFi, The Forum, O2, wherever, you just have to worry about what happens inside the walls of that venue. What I was trying to impress on everybody from the very start was that as soon as they enter this venue, it’s a reflection of Adele.

And, also, you want the walls to stand up…
You want the walls to be there for sure. I was at the Euros in the summer, I’m a big football fan, and England got there and I went to the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. The fan experience was an absolute shithole. It’s fine inside the venue, you go in and it’s like portaloo toilets outside, there’s no real experience. With us, as soon as the fans went through the door, it wasn’t just a stadium, I wanted people to feel that we’re trying to do something that was curated, felt special, felt considered.

Fan experience is crucial, but a pop-up stadium seems like an oxymoron, you never hear those two words together. What convinced your team that this vas viable?
Klaus, it was his idea. Then he went to Marek Lieberberg to help him promote it because he couldn’t do it on his own. Klaus was passionate, I really liked him, thought he was a cool guy. He’s an original. He had a designer with him called Florian (Wieder) who was a very experienced German designer

Is he with Stufish?
No, there was a person who designed the actual stadium and there was somebody that designed the show within. Stufish designed everything within the stadium. I was shown the drawings for how the stadium was going to look and they were very convincing. It looked great. And then Adele World, what we put around it, that was designed by Florian in consultation with myself, Lucy and Adele.

How was that process?
You know the cliché you learn more about yourself in times of stress than you ever do in success?  Las Vegas informed the show because through the tribulations of the start of Las Vegas and how brilliant that turned out, we had put together an absolutely crack team. What’s even more impressive about that team was that we lost our production manager Richard Young, who we toured with in 2016 and 2017, he died very suddenly of cancer. He would’ve been our production manager. Then we went through a couple of others on the way who had great CVs, but for one reason or another couldn’t handle the pressure.

So who did you hire?
We ended up promoting Paul English, he was our stage manager, and Maya Gas, who was production assistant. They had never done the job before. They have, in my opinion, pulled off two of the most ambitious shows ever. That’s a testament to us promoting from within and getting that right and the pressure we dealt with when that show canceled. We were just so focused, so eyes on the prize and it felt good because I knew we had the team that would execute.

What was Lucy’s role?
Lucy’s not involved in Vegas, but Lucy’s like me, we’re similar, we’re attention to detail people. She, in fairness, is my sister, and what I like about her is that anyone can book dates, booking a tour does not make you a genius, she gives attention to detail and is very, very good. Obviously it’s great ‘cause she’s my sister and we work very well in tandem. We can do things from different ends. So the team that I put together, Lucy’s attention to details as the agent, and how much both Florian and Klaus cared, and how much (Live Nation’s) Merrick cared, Robert (Bürgermeister-Fülöp) and his team cared and Stephan (Pichel) and his team cared –  this takes a village and all those people were integral ultimately in providing the environment in which Adele could thrive.

Did you have a proof of concept that this would work?
I do now.

So when you go to Adele and say, “Guess what, we’re doing a pop-up stadium show that’s never been done before and it’s going to be 80,000 people there for 10 shows…”  is she right on board with you or was she like, “What the f talking about?”
She’s right on board. Believe me, Adele doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to do. Let’s make that clear. There ain’t no puppet in this situation. She loved the idea and she had an instinct for it and was very very involved with Adele World. The reason we got the (massive LED) screens, which I think is the Guinness World Record—which was incredible and that was hard—is because she wanted to feel like she had her arms around the audience and because again we were building a stadium for her performance.

I promise you, you have never ever heard sound in a venue that big as good as where we had it because it was absolutely tailor made for the performance. Touring has becoming so generic because it’s becoming the only place where artists actually make any money for themselves, so everybody’s going out and everyone’s going through the same venues, the same city and it’s the same show wherever you see it, in Paris, Berlin, Rome, Bangkok, New York or Austin. And that’s fine, that’s great, but and I think we’re at saturation point. You’ve only got to see how bad the festivals are to tell that it’s all going to need a little bit of a rethink. I like when artists innovate and that’s why as a kid I always looked up to U2 and (former manager) Paul McGuinness

Oh my God, The Claw 360 Tourm, Zoo TV and later Sphere…
It culminated with Sphere because they were the first people to do it, but they’ve always been really innovative in how they thought. It’s just nice where you don’t just repeat because you want them to be successful, but also you want to try and be inventive.

So by every measure, Munich was wildly successful and now you have a proof of concept, is this now a template for others to follow?
That’s for others to decide. I know what we’re going to be doing, but that that’s for them to decide. You can probably do it on different levels. There was a level of expenditure because of how big an artist she is that you couldn’t do as a smaller artist. We’ve always had to try and find new ways to tour.

In what ways?
What I learned working with Adele is most people view touring through the eyes of a man. Very few people view touring through the eyes of a parent who has young children where they don’t want to homeschool their kids and don’t just want to traipse around the world and how that works was informed again by Vegas because it was a way in which she was able to perform and still be an active mother and that’s important to her.

Do you think you could take this pop-up stadium concept and do it anywhere, say Hawaii or Italy, anywhere in the world?  
Yeah, absolutely. Obviously you wanna make sure wherever you decide you want to do it there’s the right infrastructure to do it, but beside that yes

So with 80,000 a day turning out and this big huge beautiful board you put together, I’m sure Adele is stadium ready, is that the next step? Are you doing a stadium tour?
No, absolutely no. Not anytime soon, it’ll come when it comes.  Adele and I have an 18-year relationship. She was an 18- year-old kid without a record deal when I started managing her. So the fact is that Adele will decide, it’s very very important  to her that everything she does feels true to her, relatable to her. She doesn’t want to do things on a whim. She wants it to be meaningful and in touch. I don’t know if you can fake that stuff. You go to the show and she moves you. You come out of that show and you feel something and that’s because she doesn’t just bend to all of the little things that people say you need to do in the current music business.

She’s incredibly authentic and honest, curses like a sailor and has the voice of an angel.
She’s exactly who she is. There was one night and there was a lot of big people in town because the Olympics (in Paris) just happened. And she played and it rained like you would not believe, it was torrential rain and she performed in the rain at the end. She threw her shoes off and was wearing sneakers and she performed and was drenched and it was just magical, because you don’t expect that either. You expect the diva not to get wet. But there’s punk rock to the diva. Richard Russell (XL Recordings head) called her the punk rock Barbra Streisand and I don’t think anyone’s defined her better.