Kiss pledged to set a record with their Kiss 2020 Goodbye New Year’s Eve show in Dubai, which they said would cost more than $10 million to present.

The band provided some details of the Dec. 31 production, which will feature a COVID-safe audience of several thousand while being livestreamed across the world. They said they’d play on a 250-foot stage with 50 cameras following them - like their current End of the Road tour set up "on steroids" -  with a backdrop to include the biggest-ever pyro display in history, which they hope will set a Guinness World Record. Tickets to view the stream will start at $39.

“The best way to shut everybody up and get everybody to enjoy life right now is to make a big resounding noise and shake the heavens with some pyro,” Gene Simmons told Rolling Stone in a new interview. He added: “We play big. There’s not a lot of subtlety in what we do. He predicted the fireworks show would be the “biggest” but not the “baddest” because “just random explosions everywhere and 300-foot fireballs going off, you can’t tap your foot to that or sing along. You want to have something that has coordination.”

Show director Dan Catullo confirmed that the cost was in eight figures, with the pyro along costing more than $1 million and COVID compliance for over 400 workers costing more than $750,000. Arranging the stage itself involved a custom deal, while the lack of available equipment in Dubai meant that arrangement had to be made to ship 37 cargo containers. “Forget about a pandemic — we’re doing the biggest production in Kiss’s history,” he reported. “Now you add in the pandemic, and trying to figure out how to do it safely and the logistics of getting 400 people and all the equipment and gear there safely, that adds another 15 layers.”

He estimated that his team would undergo 6,000 coronavirus tests during the production, with crew squads split into isolated units of 25, each wearing chipped wristbands to monitor movement and potential infection. Catullo himself will quarantine for 24 hours before meeting Kiss. “[W]hen I say this is a monstrous undertaking, this is a behemoth,” he said.

Additionally, the band members will only meet during rehearsals, even flying in separate private cabins. “We’re taking all the protocols needed,” Paul Stanley said. “Obviously, the first thing we had to say was ‘Can we pull this off safely?’ and we’re making sure we’re doing that.” He added: “I wasn’t interested in doing a stream on the level of Live at the Troubadour in L.A. Not that those aren’t good, but they aren’t Kiss. Either we do this right, or we don’t do it. For us, size matters. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel; we invented it and it runs real well. We’re just making sure it’s on a scale and a size that does justice not only to the situation we’re in, but that it makes the people watching at home feel like they’re a part of it.”

 

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