Metallica to Play Antarctica
Metallica are heading south for the winter. “After 30 years as a band, we have been unbelievably fortunate to visit just about every corner of the earth. . . except for one,” the band said today on their website. “That is all about to change as we are set to travel to Antarctica, the only continent that Metallica has never played on until now.”
The metal group announced that on December 8th, they will play near the heliport of the continent’s Carlini Argentine Base. The audience will consist of fans from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica and Mexico who enter a contest through Coca-Cola Zero. Winners will receive a round-trip ticket on an Antarctic cruise that will leave from Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of South America, on December 3rd.
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“We’ll be playing inside a dome on the base and in another twist, the show will be transmitted to the audience via headphones with no amplification. . . a real first for us,” said the band. To win, fans must demonstrate what they’re willing to do to attend the concert and share their experience through the soda maker’s Twitter account. The trip will last 10 days, during which contest winners will be able to see the continent, attend lectures and receive environmental information.
The show will also stream live for the band’s Latin American fans and will be filmed for audiences elsewhere to watch at an unspecified later date. To promote the contest, the cola maker made a commercial in Spanish promoting the event.
Previously, the only concert to take place in Antarctica was Live Earth, according to Pollstar, which held festival concerts on all seven continents in 2007. Only one band played — Nunatak, an indie-rock quintet comprised of members of a science team investigating climate change — and their audience consisted of 17 people.
For more information, in Spanish, the group has set up a website. Qualifying fans (meaning fans who live in the countries listed above), may enter to win the contest on this website.
Recently, Metallica had been promoting their IMAX 3-D movie, Metallica: Through the Never. “Once we saw that we were financing it and how much it was gonna cost, I started thinking, ‘We better make this pretty special,'” frontman James Hetfield told Rolling Stone about the film. “I don’t know how many times we’re going to be able to do this in our careers, but let’s go the extra distance.”