Rock in Rio: Brazil's totemic event that brings the entire country together

If there’s a bigger show on the planet (outside Glastonbury anyway), Mark Beaumont has yet to come across it. He speaks to its founder's daughter, Roberta Medina, about the festival's raucous history, and what makes it such a draw for both music fans and the artists who perform each year

Rock in Rio festival in 2015 (Getty)

Overhead, four members of Argentina’s Fuerza Bruta circus theatre grapple on a spinning globe hanging from the ceiling to the sound of dance beats dropped by Napoleonic DJs. In a neighbouring arena, gamers queue to play sci-fi VR team games or life-sized human Pac-Man. Over in NAVE, an Olympic velodrome repurposed as the world’s largest projection screen, festival-goers bounce on trampolines beneath gigantic hanging rocks, engulfed in video-mapped images of floods and sandstorms as part of Natura’s incredible multimedia statement on climate change.

At Rock in Rio 2019, the sideshows threaten to upstage the superstars. Out in this spectacular blitz on the senses, constructed in a ring around Rio De Janeiro’s Olympic Park, Rock Street pounds to the sound of local bands recreating classic hits from the festival’s history and the Favela Space hosts musicians and DJs from the city’s famous slum districts on a stage itself designed as a cartoonish favela. A small village, complete with bar and wedding chapel, has been constructed at Route 85 and punters scream around the 360-degree loop of the festival’s especially built rollercoaster. It takes a world-beating line-up to compete: this year Bon Jovi, Foo Fighters, Muse, P!nk, Drake, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Iron Maiden headlined Rock In Rio’s seven days to a combined audience of 700,000. Each act gasps at the sight of zip-wire riders speeding over the main stage crowd and each is followed by a gigantic firework display to put any Chinese New Year to shame. If there’s a bigger show on the planet (outside Glastonbury anyway), I’ve yet to come across it.

This year Muse steal the show by bringing the VR Eighties world of their latest Simulation Theory album to life with cyborg dancers, stampeding warbots and gigantic inflatable xenomorphs rising from the stage, while Red Hot Chili Peppers, Foo Fighters and Bon Jovi knock Rio for six with good, old fashioned stadium rock wallop. The Foos even interrupt their three-hour set to allow a crowd-member to propose to his girlfriend with a sign he’s holding upside down. For the Cariocas (Rio residents) that attend the festival, and the family that run it, though, Rock In Rio isn’t just about big stars and bigger bangs. It’s a totemic event that brings the city – nay, the entire country – together, and a vision of how Brazilian life could be lived.

“What I see here is a town with a hundred thousand people that works,” says Roberta Medina, executive vice-president of Rock in Rio and, as daughter of founder Roberto Medina, Brazil’s answer to Emily Eavis. “We don't have fights. We don't have any big issues, the team and the infrastructure now is at such a high level that things are being managed in a soft way and people are really happy. I'm looking for what happens here that doesn't happen outside. Why here do we respect everybody? We don't have problems with gender or race, things work. If you treat people for good, they will react for good…If you behave that way, life will be better for everybody else and you in your day to day.”

Roberta was just seven years old when her father staged the first Rock in Rio festival in 1985, but she knows the legend by heart. In her portacabin office in the backstage production compound, she recalls how her family were desperate to leave Brazil, a country suffering economic hardships in the early Eighties under the yoke of a military regime. Her grandfather, however, had raised his children with a sense of dedication to their home city, so before they left Roberta’s mother convinced her father, Roberto Medina, to do something for a city as a parting gift.

“My mother, who always wanted to leave Rio, said ‘You cannot leave without doing something for your city’,” she says. “So he was really mad and instead of going to sleep he spent the night awake, and in the morning he had invented Rock In Rio.”

Most new festivals start with a few annual shindigs in the promoter’s back garden before graduating to the international big leagues. Medina, on the other hand, went in big. He was an advertising guy rather than a festival promoter, and in his head he saw a rock’’roll Disneyland. “He wanted to create a space where young people could feel free to talk whatever they want,” Roberta explains. “And he wanted to promote Rio abroad to generate tourism and economical impact. He understood that music was the perfect language to unite people, and bringing the big names of music that wouldn't come to Brazil at that time would be the perfect way to promote Rio abroad. The only reference we had before that was Woodstock. So he understood that for the United States, for England, to respect something that would be born in Brazil, it had to be something very special and very different… It had to be huge.”

So on January 11, 1985, the gates opened on a newly built City of Rock arena and 1.3 million people descended over 10 days to watch the likes of Queen, AC/DC, Rod Stewart and Yes headline the first in In Rio event, all using Queen’s lighting equipment. McDonalds sold a record 58,000 burgers in one day, 200 million people watched on TV and Queen’s set the world record for the biggest paying audience at that time, with 500,000 people turning “Radio Gaga” into a legendary synchronised clap-along.

“The concert itself was that magical moment that we see in the movie,” Roberta remembers, but all wasn’t quite as celebratory backstage. “Freddie Mercury was really a star and the Brazilian acts wanted to see him passing through. But he said that nobody could watch him passing in the corridors of the backstage. So the Brazilian artists got so mad that they went to his dressing room and destroyed all his stuff.”

Another 1985 headliner, James Taylor, had an even worse time. “He came to do another concert for us here in 2011, a private one,” says Roberta, “and he told the story that he was so scared to play to that big amount of people [in 1985] that he got drunk, and he played drunk. So he thought he did the worst concert ever. He left the City of Rock planning to kill himself when he gets to the hotel, but he was so drunk that he got tired and he slept. The next day, people were shouting for him in front of the hotel. And that was the moment when he realised that that was a great concert.”

With a civilian government being restored in Brazil after 21 years of military reign that same year, for Brazil the original Rock in Rio was a defining moment inexorably linked with a return to freedom and democracy. “It became a historical moment to the country,” Roberta says, “because, together with the election of the President, with the direct vote for the first time, that became a flag to a whole generation.”

For Medina himself, though, the festival left a sour taste. Spending power in Brazil was poor and at $12 a daily ticket, even with his Brahma beer sponsor on board, he lost a vast sum. “Even selling 1.5 million tickets,” Roberta claims, “which was his objective, wouldn't pay the bill.” And to add insult to injury, the day after gates closed, Medina had to watch his dream of holding the event annually literally torn to pieces.

“The mayor at that time got concerned that Roberto could be also politician,” Roberta explains. “And the only way he would allow Rock In Rio to happen, and we are talking about three months before the event took place, was if Roberto allowed him to destroy the City of Rock the day after the event.”

His dream turned to rubble: it would be six years before public demand – and fresh sponsorship from Coco-Cola – convinced Medina to revive Rock in Rio. The second event, in 1991, saw Prince, Guns N’ Roses, INXS, George Michael, A-Ha and New Kids on the Block take headline slots at Maracana Stadium, and made somewhat unreasonable demands.

“At the first Rock in Rio, dressing room requests were really crazy because Brazil was closed to international products,” Roberta says. “So any Evian water, we’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, how do we find that?’ Sushi. ‘What?’ At the second one Prince requested 500 white towels. So one of the backstage team ran around all the motels and hotels of Rio collecting towels, and he never used them. I grew up with towels in my house.”

The second event didn’t have the same spirit, however. “Maracana was not Rock in Rio,” Roberta insists. “Maracana was a line of concerts. It's not about concerts, it’s about spending time together and making people have fun. It was not even good business so we stopped and we decided not to do it anymore.”

Ten more years passed before Rock in Rio returned in 2001, back in its original site and now focusing on social issues under the slogan Rock in Rio for a Better World. Axl Rose was inspired to reignite Guns N’ Roses in order to play (alongside Sting, REM, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Iron Maiden again), and the new ethos drove Roberta to get involved in the production. Although she wouldn’t get too hands-on when Nick Oliveri of Queens of the Stone Age was arrested for performing naked. “The producer opened my door and said ‘what do we do?’ I don't know, you go onstage and put trousers on this guy! It was not me, who was 22-years-old, that would go and put trousers on him, right?

Axl Rose performing with Guns 'N Roses at Rock in Rio 2011 (Getty)

Still, regular events remained financially unviable in Rio – but not, as a Portuguese promoter suggested, in Lisbon. So Rock in Rio arrived in the Portuguese capital in 2004, the first of a regular series of international Rock in Rio events in Lisbon, Madrid and Las Vegas. Maintaining the original’s triple-A standard of headliners and supports, and its exotic air of Ipanema extravagance, these shows were a hit and the Lisbon event now alternates with the Rio one, which returned in 2011 and has since been expanded into the site of the 2016 Olympic Village.

To this day, though, with its joyous atmosphere, monumental sideshows and even a signature theme song played along to the fireworks to close each night of the festival, it’s the Rio edition which has the scent of legend about it. “If you talk to talent,” Roberta says, “they don't consider Lisbon Rock In Rio, they consider this one Rock In Rio. Many of them say they grew up imagining the first edition. They always wanted to play here.”