THE O2 Arena in London has been named the top arena in the world at the Billboard Awards. The awards honour the music industry’s top artists, professionals and venues based on the Billboard Boxscores chart. This is the first time the North Greenwich landmark has won this award, taking the accolade from Madison Square Gardens in New York which has won for the past five years.
The award follows the London venue being crowned the world’s most popular arena just a fortnight ago by Pollstar, which showed The O2 had sold nearly 1,600,000 tickets so far this year. On receiving the reward, Chief Executive and President of AEG Europe David Campbell said: “Thank you to the entire AEG family for helping create the world’s most popular music venue in London. “The O2 has generated more than 2,500 jobs in London and this award is for those people. “We are a bit biased but we think The O2 is a very special place, and we particularly want to thank the 600 artists who have played since we opened just over two years ago. “In otherwise difficult times it’s great that music, and particularly live music, can make a positive difference to so many people.”
David Campbell is talking about the O2 Arena when he calls it “The Dome”. He moves to correct himself, but hesitates. “Actually,” he says, “after all this time I think we can go back and talk about The Dome now. There was a silly period when no one would talk about it at all. Then there was a period when it was only ‘The O2’, we couldn’t say ‘The Dome’. Now it’s called the tent.”
It has been called a white elephant, too, and an £800 million flop, but the Government’s once-maligned Millennium Dome has, finally, after years of growing pains, come of age.
The O2 Arena is one of Britain’s best-known venues and arguably the world’s most popular, having sold almost four times the number of tickets of New York’s iconic Madison Square Garden last month. Audiences have been drawn by live acts as varied as Coldplay and Bon Jovi, the rock bands, to Andrea Bocelli, the tenor, and Michael McIntyre, the comedian.
But for Mr Campbell, the O2’s chief executive, the success story can be greater still. “We’re trying to get into more and more different areas,” he said. “The key to making a building like this work, and making money out of it, is being highly flexible — you’ve got to be able to adapt for everything.”
That means, inevitably, the Olympic Games, looming ever larger, in 2012. The Olympic Park may be going up in Stratford, on the other side of the Thames, but the gymnastics and basketball events will be staged in Mr Campbell’s tent. Moreover, AEG Europe, the owner of the Arena, has an ambitious programme of expansion being embarked upon in the lead-up to the Games. There are plans for a “first-class” hotel on the site, providing what would be the capital’s largest conference and banquet area. There is a foray into opera next May, with the O2 set to stage three performances of Carmen.
There are plans for further “spectaculars” of the ilk of this year’s Ben Hur and Star Wars and the hope of launching more original productions that then can tour internationally. And more live sport, to follow the forthcoming ATP World Tour Finals. Mr Campbell hopes that eventually the venue will host an NBA basketball team, a London equivalent of the New York Knicks, Chicago Bulls and LA Lakers.
“We already host one game a year but our next stage is to try and get regular season NBA games here [much like the NFL at Wembley], before then getting all the way to having a permanent team. If you think about it, the distance between East and West Coast America isn’t as different as the distance between London and New York.”
The O2 is still suffering its setbacks, albeit no longer self-inflicted. Summer 2009 was supposed to the season of Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, starting out on the comeback trail from a certain corner of South East London. As it is, Mr Campbell is sincere when he describes Jackson’s death, which occurred only two weeks before the singer was set to begin a 50-date tour, as a “tragic loss”, but he points out, too, that the O2 Arena is far from crumbling as a result.
“We did 140 event days last year. This year we’ll have 177. That’s a 25 per cent increase year-on-year — and that’s without Michael Jackson. He would have hit it out of the ballpark.” But it was a “bit of a lonely summer”: only three of Jackson’s first 27 dates could be filled. Prospects are better for the final 23 dates, which begin in January: “We’ll fill the majority of those, they’re easier because its seven or eight months away.”
Mr Campbell prefers to look forward and a 450-room hotel is foremost in his mind. AEG hopes to gain final planning permission by the spring and have it built in time for the Olympics.
“At the moment, we are a great generator of bed nights for all the other hotels in this immediate vicinity and up and down the Thames. We’re not benefiting financially out of it and we’d quite like to. “The tent, or The Dome, is such an iconic structure. It’s on the opening title of the X Factor. It gives us a great opportunity with a hotel. It will be a flagship.”
Another key preoccupation is to highlight the importance of the O2 Arena, along with other entertainment venues, as a driver of the capital’s economy. Mr Campbell is clearly frustrated that the Labour Government and Boris Johnson, the capital’s Conservative Mayor, “don’t have a real sense of our economic value … People travel here and they stay — they spend money in shops in London, they spend money on hotels in London, they spend on restaurants in London, on transport.
“That’s a lobbying message to try and get forward in the next six months. I don’t think there’s an appreciation of that.”
He wants more support from the political arena. The O2 recently hosted the world gymnastics championships, but Mr Campbell said that he was “disappointed” that he received little promotion from the Olympics’ organising committee or from City Hall.
“That is the first Olympic sport in an Olympic venue, in London preOlympics. That’s just a complete missed opportunity.” It is not the kind of mistake that Mr Campbell intends to allow to be made again.
