The Paul McCartney Concerts That Had Organizers Trying To Control the Weather in Unusual Ways

Paul McCartney’s impact (and, in a sense, control) of the musical realm has been a tangible phenomenon since the 1960s, but in 2004, McCartney’s music ended up taking control over the weather, too. In an effort to stop poor weather conditions from literally raining on McCartney’s parade, organizers for the ex-Beatle’s performance at St. Petersburg’s Palace Square in Russia implemented environmental control technology dating back to the 1940s.

Only a few days later, McCartney’s team used the same rain-stopping methods in British skies ahead of the musician’s headlining set at the Glastonbury Festival. While advocates of this technology cite little to no evidence that these rain-diverting methods have harmful effects on the environment, other scientists disagree.

How Paul McCartney’s Production Team Managed To Control The Weather

When rain threatened to interfere with Paul McCartney’s St. Petersburg June 2004 performance, Russian-based SAV Entertainments employed three jets to dump dry ice into the clouds. This technique, called cloud seeding, freezes water droplets in clouds into light and airy ice particles that remain in the atmosphere instead of falling to earth as rain. SAV Entertainment’s efforts were successful, and there was no rain by showtime.

“It was p***ing down beforehand,” recalled McCartney’s spokesman, Geoff Baker, via the Guardian. “Then, it became so sunny that Brian Ray, the guitarist, had to get one of his roadies to fetch his shades.” All in all, the three jets cost McCartney’s production team around $55,000. Not long after, Glastonbury organizer Michael Eavis used a similar methodology with different tools after receiving a phone call from McCartney’s production team asking what he would do to prevent the rain. Instead of jets like in Russia, Eavis used a cloudbuster.

Austrian psychologist and cult figure Wilhelm Reich invented the cloudbuster in the early 1950s at the request of a Maine blueberry farm struggling to keep its crop amid a lengthy drought. The cloudbuster looks like an anti-aircraft gun that absorbs orgone, a pseudoscientific energy Reich coined two decades earlier, to help cause or prevent the formation of clouds. Cloudbusters stay on the ground and use water to attract and absorb orgone, much like a lightning rod, which will attract atmospheric electricity groundward.

Scientists Use This Technique For More Than Just Putting On A Good Rock Concert

While Paul McCartney’s event planners utilized this interesting weather control technique more than once, preventing concert cancellations isn’t the only purpose of this technology. Environmental scientists also use cloud seeding to help areas experiencing severe drought in arid climates around the world, like the American Southwest and the United Arab Emirates. Although rain or snow typically occurs after this practice, some scientists argue the phenomenon is more of a placebo effect than practical science. 

Nature’s unpredictability makes it impossible to reliably test whether cloud seeding actually caused the rain or if it was just a coincidence. Scientists can’t recreate the exact same environmental conditions without cloud seeding to compare the two results. Moreover, some scientists who do believe in the efficacy of cloud seeding also argue that it could be damaging the climate and putting global populations at risk.

Just three years before McCartney was using cloud seeding to keep the weather at his shows favorable, scientists linked the technology with a deadly flood in the U.K. that ended in 35 drowning deaths. Nevertheless, the technique seemed to work for the “Good Day Sunshine” singer, and after all, as they say in show biz—the show must go on, right?

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