Bryan Adams

Rockocko Festival 1992 Budapest

Bryan Adams ‘Waking Up The World Tour’

with Extreme, The Radios, Chesney Hawkes, No, Deák Bill Blues Band

Tickets: $ 10-14 USD

Attendance: 5,000

Capacity: Approx. 80,000

Bryan Adams’ first-ever concert in Budapest was a classic case of a great concert surrounded by a spectacularly poor turnout.

The show, part of the Rockocko Festival, took place at Budapest’s Népstadion, a venue capable of holding around 80,000 people and still remembered for Queen’s legendary 1986 performance. But there was never any danger of Bryan Adams approaching those numbers. While the standing area on the field was reasonably populated, the enormous seating bowl was almost completely empty. Only an estimated 15–20 rows in the central section facing the stage contained spectators. Contemporary estimates put the total crowd at roughly 5,000 people.

The emptiness was particularly striking because Adams was hardly an unknown artist. He was at the absolute peak of his international popularity, with his Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves ballad dominating charts around the world. Just eight days earlier, he had played a sold-out Wembley Stadium show. Yet in Budapest, tens of thousands of seats remained empty.

The problem was less Bryan Adams than the Hungarian concert market of the time. Following the fall of the Iron Curtain, Hungary was suddenly being flooded with major Western rock acts, and promoters appear to have overestimated how quickly the local audience could—or wanted to—support stadium-sized concerts. The clearest comparison was Guns N’ Roses, who had filled the same Népstadion with around 70,000 fans only two months earlier, in May 1992. The novelty of seeing huge Western stars in Hungary was colliding with limited disposable income and an increasingly crowded concert calendar.

The result was an almost surreal setting for Adams. An artist capable of filling stadiums across Western Europe was performing in front of a few thousand people inside a stadium designed for tens of thousands.

And yet, the concert itself was anything but a failure.

The Rokoko Festival featured an unusually eclectic bill. Hungarian blues-rock legend Deák Bill Gyula represented the local scene, alongside the Hungarian rock band NO, whose sound reportedly drew comparisons with U2. British one-hit wonder Chesney Hawkes followed, best known internationally for his massive hit The One and Only. Belgian band The Radios came next, before American hard-rockers Extreme took the stage.

Extreme were particularly well known at the time for their acoustic ballad More Than Words, and their appearance gave the festival another major international name before Adams’ headline performance.

Despite the embarrassing attendance, Adams and his band apparently refused to treat the evening as a throwaway gig. They delivered a full-length, highly professional performance lasting around two and a half hours, playing to the dedicated few who had actually made their way into the vast stadium.

At one point, during preparations for Adams’ appearance, the organizers even announced over the public-address system that spectators could move down from the stands into the field area. It was an attempt to make the enormous empty sections of the Népstadion less conspicuous—but it could not disguise the scale of the disappointment.

There is something strangely memorable about the whole episode. Bryan Adams was one of the biggest stars on the planet, fresh from a sold-out Wembley Stadium, yet his first Budapest show was witnessed by only a few thousand people in a venue built for more than ten times that number.

For those who were there, however, the empty stadium may have made the experience even more extraordinary: instead of being one anonymous face among 70,000 people, they were part of a remarkably intimate audience watching a global superstar perform a stadium-sized show in a practically empty stadium.

A commercial disaster, perhaps—but for the 5,000 or so people who attended, quite possibly a once-in-a-lifetime concert.

Setlist:

Bryan Adams

1. House Arrest
2. Kids Wanna Rock
3. All I Want Is You
4. Hey Honey – I’m Packin’ You In!
5. Can’t Stop This Thing We Started
6. Is Your Mama Gonna Miss Ya?
7. Cuts Like a Knife
8. It’s Only Love
9. Touch the Hand
10. Heaven
11. (Everything I Do) I Do It for You
12. Run to You
13. There Will Never Be Another Tonight
14. Thought I’d Died and Gone to Heaven
15. Summer of ’69
16. Straight From the Heart
17. Somebody

Extreme

1. It (‘s a Monster)
2. When I’m President
3. Play With Me
4. Pornograffitti
5. Suzi (Wants Her All Day What?)
6. Rest in Peace
7. Flesh ‘n’ Blood
8. Guitar Solo
9. More Than Words
10. Hole Hearted
11. Decadence Dance
12. Drum Solo
13. Kid Ego
14. Help! (The Beatles Cover)
15. Get the Funk Out