Scott Johnson moved to Hickleton, a centuries-old village of about 100 houses in northern England, with his parents when he was still in school so they’d be closer to Electro Music, a shop in nearby Doncaster. He’d gotten a job working there on Saturdays, which changed to full-time after he graduated from college. Scott had started drumming when he was 11 years old and playing in bands at 15, eventually contributing a surf-rock instrumental to a spy film’s soundtrack as a member of a Sheffield group called the Special Agents. Later, as a drum tech, he toured the world with Robyn, the Killers, Keane, and eventually Radiohead.
On June 16, 2012, a stage collapsed before Radiohead’s scheduled concert that night in Toronto’s Downsview Park. Scott, who was 33, was crushed to death. Three others were injured. Radiohead wrote that they were “shattered by the loss,” and the entire band and its crew attended Scott’s funeral in Doncaster. No less a music-business icon than Elton John phoned the family to offer his condolences, and the tragedy prompted industry soul-searching about how to end what had become a sadstreak of stage-related accidents. But more than a year passed before authorities in Canada filed charges against Live Nation, the concert’s promoter. These days, the case’s lack ofvisibility in the music world at large seems to mimic a Radiohead song: “How to Disappear Completely.”
Scott is still gone, though. And the trial, at the Old City Hall Courthouse in Toronto, continues. In fact, the trial has dragged on so long that, absurd though it may seem, Live Nation is using its length as a defense. On October 14, Justice Shaun Nakatsuru is scheduled to hear a motion from the defendants that the case violates their constitutional right to a speedy trial, despite their role in delaying the trial at several turns.
Scott’s father, Ken Johnson, calls the motion a “stunt” and a “trick.” He wonders whether, if the defendants had put as much time and effort into simply building the stage, the collapse would’ve been avoided in the first place. “It just seems so frustrating that the trial seems no longer about Scott’s death,” he tells me via Skype, emotion welling in his voice. “It’s more about: How can we avoid any responsibilities?” Live Nation declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.
An aerial view of the collapsed stage. (Photo by Tara Walton/Toronto Star/Getty Images)
On June 7, 2013, after a year-long investigation, Ontario’s Ministry of Labour filed charges under the province’s Occupational Health and Safety Act: four against Live Nation Canada, four against Live Nation Ontario Concerts, four against scaffolder Optex Staging & Services, and one against the independent engineer Domenic Cugliari. (A phone mailbox for Optex was full; Cugliari didn’t return a phone message prior to deadline.) At the time, Live Nation issued a statement denying any wrongdoing and vowing to “vigorously defend” itself.
In the courts as in sports, running out the clock can be a vigorous form of defense. Two years later—and three years after Scott’s death—the trial was finally set to begin. Ken Johnson says he booked plane tickets for the June 2015 hearings, but the dates were canceled a couple weeks before, partly because Optex still didn’t have a lawyer (Optex president Dale Martin ended up representing himself). At last, in November 2015, the court heard testimony from Radiohead’s crew members and management. Ken flew to Toronto for the proceedings.
After about 15 days of hearings last November, the court agreed to hold another roughly 15 days of hearings scattered throughout 2016, and Ken Johnson again booked a June flight to Toronto, figuring he’d be seeing the last three days of the case. Then, shortly before he was supposed to travel, the defense asked for another 15 days to present its side of the case. Ken canceled yet another trip. “I can’t afford to be flying back and forth, and I can’t afford the time away from work,” he says. “So I’d already decided the best I could do was to be there for the summing up.”
The continuing trial dates are scheduled for December 5, 7, 8, 12-16, and 19-22, along with January 25-27, 2017. Then, before the end of June, the defense argued to the judge that the prosecutor’s evidence wasn’t sufficient to convict on all 13 charges, Ken says, calling the move another “trick.” The judge agreed that the three of the charges might’ve been difficult for him to bring to a judgment, based on the evidence presented. Two of the charges against Live Nation were dropped, and one against Optex. That leaves six charges against Live Nation, three against Optex, and one against Cugliari. “This weekend I thought if they keep complaining maybe they can try to get one charge reduced at a time,” Ken says, “and it will probably get resolved long after I’m gone, I’m afraid.”
In recent weeks, Ken and Scott’s mother, Sue, got another shock. In July, the Supreme Court of Canada overhauled the rules for a criminal defendant’s right to be tried within a reasonable time frame. Now, on October 14, Live Nation and its fellow defendants are set to argue that this ruling applies to their case. “They’ve already caused most of the delays,” Ken says. “There was nothing new in the evidence that the prosecutors presented that they hadn’t already had prior to the case starting.”
Another heartbreaking irony in the case is Ken’s profession. He has been on the technical committee of the UK’s National Access and Scaffolding Confederation for 20 years, working for the last half-decade as an advisor on health and safety matters as well. He has managed scaffolding-related businesses on a global level, so he knows better than most how to avoid the type of accident that killed his son.
So what went wrong? Ken says for him the first red flag would have been a dramatic increase in labor; the workforce almost doubled in the last few days of finishing the stage, with subcontractor riggers working 18-hour days, he contends. A curtain at the back had also dropped down about six inches, an amount indicating the scaffolding had been deformed, he says. Finally, Ken says, although the scaffolding company boasted that it had built this stage about 24 times previously, the scaffolder had never actually built this stage with the weight of Radiohead’s equipment on there. And that weight would’ve been significant: The show was for The King of Limbs tour, which had extensive visual elements and required 11 trucks to transport. “It won’t make any difference, to be honest, if I knew all the bloody answers to the questions,” he concedes. “I just feel that they’re not being fair on Scott.”
Ken Johnson fully recognizes that nobody meant for the stage to collapse, that there’s a legal process that has to be respected, and ultimately, that the defendants’ lawyers are just trying to do their jobs. He’s more upset by what he sees as Live Nation’s single-minded focus on deflecting blame. “To me, there’s all this corporate stuff, and it seems to lose the fact that Scott lost his life.”
Scott Johnson’s second home, onstage.
Scott was an only child. As Radiohead wrote in 2012, “He was a lovely man, always positive, supportive and funny; a highly skilled and valued member of our great road crew.” Radiohead drummer Philip Selway, who dedicated his 2014 album Weatherhouse to Scott, told the Doncaster Free Press last year, “When you’re on tour, you spend so much time together and to be with somebody whose company you enjoy that much is worth its weight in gold.” (Radiohead also dedicated A Moon Shaped Pool in memory of Johnson.)
By all accounts, Scott left behind a life that had been blessed. “He enjoyed working with all these bands and traveling around,” Ken says. “Not everybody gets the opportunity to do what they want to do in life.”
Scott’s death brought about an immediate outpouring of support from the music community. Ken credits two U.S. Radiohead fans, Maria Carullo and Inez Rogatsky, for raising almost £3500. On top of church collections and donations from family totaling £1200, the band Keane also donated the royalties from a special charity EP. He and Sue used the money to create the Scott Johnson Bursary Fund, which has now bought and distributed 17 electronic drum kits to schools and teachers, with help from Yamaha and Electro Music. Last year Selway, New Order’s Stephen Morris, and Elbow frontman Guy Garvey presented a drum kit in Scott’s honor to the Manchester Central Library. “It certainly made us feel we were not as alone as we had thought,” Ken says of Radiohead fans’ support.
The trial’s implications go beyond achieving some small measure of resolution for Scott’s family. Radiohead’s 2012 stage collapse in Toronto followed a wave of of similar mishaps in the prior year, from an Indiana State Fair catastrophe that killed seven to a disaster at Belgium’s Pukkelpop that left five dead. Anecdotally, at least, the prevalence of concert disasters seems to have decreased in the years since, though a 2014 stage collapse at a Luke Bryan concert hurt four crew members, and a concert railing collapse at a Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa show this past August injured a total of 42 workers and concert attendees.
Has safety improved? “Yes and no,” says Peter Tempkins, managing director at Hub International and a concert-insurance veteran whose clients have ranged from AC/DC and Arcade Fire to Warped Tour and Bonnaroo. Far more major promoters are requiring “wet signatures”—an actual signature from an engineer that the stage meets safety specifications—and “not just the rubber stamp,” Tempkins tells me. But this precaution is by no means universal. It doesn’t hurt that awareness of the risks has increased more generally, including within bands’ own camps. “At the end of the day it’s your artist that’s standing on that stage,” Lars Brogaard, Rod Stewart’s production manager since 1985, tells me. “If you don’t feel good about it, don’t sign off on it.”
It’s worth noting that a civil suit is also ongoing in the case, though Johnson says, as the parents of an adult, he and Sue don’t expect much compensation under Canadian law. And that’s fine, Ken says. He and Sue plan to remain in their home in Hickleton. “Scott’s buried here in the church. We don’t have any personal needs. The house is already full of stuff. We’ve never lived a life of excess, and we wouldn’t have expected to be having any payments from Scott. He would have been getting on with his life.”
For the Johnsons, what remains is a grief that Ken says they’ve almost made a meal out of, and that alcohol has failed to relieve. They cry every day. “We want people to know that we thank them for the support, but equally they all have to get on with their lives,” Ken tells me, his voice starting to quiver again. “And for us, we don’t expect that to be the case. Life is on hold. I don’t see that changing, and I think that’s just something that we have to accept. The closure of the case is a milestone. But even that probably doesn’t really make a lot of difference at the end of the day. It’s the fact that you’re not going to have family—you’re not going to have grandchildren, that sort of thing.” There’s no expiration date on bereavement. No other parents should have to go through what these two have.