Music at -30: The world's coldest gig

Charlie Simpson, the lead singer in Fightstar, has earned a place in the record books by playing a concert in one of the coldest populated places on Earth.

He braved temperatures of -30 to entertain a small crowd gathered in snowy Siberia.


It took the musician and a three-strong support team four days to reach Oymyakon, which is apparently the coldest permanently inhabited place on the planet. Once there, he played a fifteen minute set of songs from his debut solo album, ‘Young Pilgrim’. There’s perhaps a mild irony in the fact that almost the entire original stock of that album was destroyed in the Sony DADC fire just prior to its release in August 2011.

Simpson told CMU: “This has been a trip of a lifetime and a gig unlike anything I thought I’d ever experience in my career. The town has no TV or radio, so they’ve had little to no contact with rock music before. This was definitely a world first in many respects!”

He continued: “It was unbearably cold and playing guitar with gloves on wasn’t an option.