The Rock Orchestra have performed to more than half a million fans worldwide and topped the official UK Rock And Metal albums chart. Now they are bringing their most ambitious production yet to arenas across the UK and Ireland this October. Arenas Of Fire promises fire, pyrotechnics, a full choir, a full orchestra, and reimaginings of some of the greatest rock and Metal songs ever written, and Nathan Reed, creative director and producer for The Rock Orchestra, has promised this is the most explosive version he has ever created.
Until the end of last year, performances had been to around 2,000 people. “Our first show, The Rock Orchestra By Candlelight, was great for creating that kind of haunting, ghostly atmosphere that is just under the surface of most rock and Metal songs and can really be brought forward in that environment.
But intimacy has its limits. What candlelight cannot conjure is raw, unleashed energy and that, Nathan says, is exactly what Arenas of Fire is built to deliver
“The thing that we weren’t able to bring to life quite so well in that environment was the energy and the high octane, the fire, for want of a better word, that lives within music. We’ve had a long relationship with the likes of the Fuel Girls performing with them over the last 10 years, and we thought we could really bring this to life in a whole different way by adding this pyro and a performance element to the show, and it just really works.”
This promises to be a spectacular symphonic mosh pit of an evening. The Metallica M72 World Tour featured 14 flame units per show. Arenas Of Fire use 20 per show. With 50 pyro items per show, 60 litres of flame fluid and over 120 cans of gas per show, you get a feeling of the scale of this production.
But for Nathan, the real challenge is not logistical. It is artistic. “Everything that we’re trying to do is elevate and embellish,” Nathan said. “We want to show the music in the best light that we possibly can, and everything is there to complement that. That is absolutely always our centrepiece, and we’re trying to creatively do things that bring out certain flavours or moments or sounds with that visual accompaniment.”
These are evenings that will be an emotional journey for the audience. If the show is designed to move people, then the order in which it does so matters enormously. The setlist, it turns out, is as carefully constructed as the arrangements themselves.
“Absolutely. We get a lot of tears in the show. There’s something about classical music and strings in particular that is just so emotional.
“What’s so amazing about a lot of the music that we play is just how incredibly well-written the original songs are. There are so many incredibly beautiful or sentimental or sad or angsty moments in there, reimagined in this more classical way. You really feel the emotional hit of them.
“Then that’s juxtaposed by that insane wall of sound and the absolute power of war horns on top of extremely distorted double bass, and cello riffs which complement each other. Because without the other, you don’t get to see the context of how beautiful the other thing or how powerful the other thing was.”
I love the description of war horns. Given that the fire and pyrotechnics are out of this world, health and safety on the stage must be a challenge; the amount of planning that goes into it has got to be immense.
“Absolutely,” Nathan says. “Because this is an artistic endeavour in terms of the 360 degree, the wardrobe, the stage set, the pyro, it is like playing Tetris. Every inch of the stage is being used for something somewhere.
“That means we’ve got to be meticulous in terms of our planning and our safety and making sure the right people are in the right places at the right time, because inherently fire is dangerous.”
Behind the spectacle lies months of meticulous planning. But all that precision serves a singular creative vision, one Nathan describes in unmistakably cinematic terms. The recent release of Thunderstruck, featuring Daria Zaritskaya and Mia Asano, along with a video, perfectly illustrates his aim. The film has surpassed 430,000 views on YouTube in less than two weeks.
“In terms of cinematic, I think that video’s the thing that we’ve done that feels closest to like a little movie,” Nathan says. “It doesn’t really have an explicit narrative, but there’s some sense of what’s going on with the horse, the woods and the lightning. We worked with a CGI artist to get all of that in there.”
I was taken by the violin on top of the castle and all the fog. The violin solo is a goosebump moment. Thunderstruck is a beautiful watch, and with 42 musicians credited, that really emphasises the scale of the project.
“We try to be as ambitious for it as possible,” Nathan says. “Not least because we’re dealing with what we perceive to be the canon of rock and Metal, the most legendary, the most famous rock and Metal songs of all time, and that is a responsibility, if you’re gonna take that on.
“I have to give real credit to the original artists in the music, so you’ve gotta try and do it justice. This is a completely independent project that we promote ourselves, we release our own music, and we fund and create, edit and produce our own music videos. It’s not cheap to put it together.
“But as a passion project, as something that we just deeply love, we just wanna do it justice. It’s worth it. It hurts the pocket, but you can sit back at the end and go, yeah, OK, great.”
The Arena Of Fire evenings promise music from Metallica, The Rolling Stones, AC/DC, System Of A Down, Linkin Park, Motörhead and Iron Maiden, to name a few. Holding all of that together symphonically is no small feat.
“Growing up, I’ve been in Metal bands since I was 12 or 13 years old,” Nathan says. “I lived through what would have been the new Metal scene coming through, and that happened to a backdrop of Metallica who were huge at the time, Iron Maiden were still big, Guns N’ Roses were still really big.
“You had the likes of Linkin Park and System Of A Down and people like that coming through. Then, beyond that, the more emo era came out. When you’re covering rock and Metal, it quickly becomes apparent how expansive that is. In terms of expectations for the public at large coming and seeing The Rock orchestra, it’s genuinely very difficult to try and get something in there for everyone.
“So what we try to focus on is songs that we feel inspired by in terms of their potential to be symphonic. My Chemical Romance is a really good example of that. You might find some rock and Metal fans who are not huge fans of emo or that kind of style. Not everyone loves every subgenre of rock and Metal.
“But that song [Welcome To The Black Parade] symphonically is amazing to work with, and it’s just got so much potential and is such a popular song live. Whether people were big fans of that before they came into the room or not, it just really connects. It’s a challenge.”
Nothing Else Matters is maybe the most orchestra-ready Metal song ever written. Is that a blessing or a curse when arranging it?
“It’s a really good question,” Nathan says. “Obviously, Symphony and Metallica predate what we did by God knows… decades and decades. To some extent, it makes it something that people can imagine before they go.
“When we’re looking at music that we can reimagine, we have a view that we really love the sense of sadness in this song, and we wanna bring that out more. Or we really love the power in this, and we wanna bring that out more. We’re trying to make sure that we can do something worthwhile.
“If we don’t feel that we can add something or bring something out in it, we would try to stay away from it. With Nothing Else Matters, although there was already a symphonic version of it that exists, it’s got so much emotional clout, that song.
“What we wanted to do was bring in the sopranos and have that lift that middle eight section, which is actually a very relaxed section in the original. It’s quite chilled. We built in this huge soaring soprano section in there just to really drench it in sad drama. That was our view on it. But in general, if something is already classical and symphonic, there has to be a good reason for us to take it on.”
Not every rock classic lends itself so willingly to the treatment. For every Nothing Else Matters, there are songs that resist the symphonic reimagining entirely, and Nathan has learned to recognise them quickly.
Many Red Hot Chili Peppers song are in major keys, which adds a level of difficulty. “What becomes quite apparent quite quickly is that songs that really depend on a certain vocal delivery from the original lead singer can make life quite difficult if you’re trying to arrange them symphonically,” Nathan says. “Actually, which song it was escapes me now, but we just listened to it, and we’re like, this just sounds so bloody happy.”
Talking to Nathan, you can sense the excitement and desire to bring out the emotion in the songs and pick the right instrumentation or voices to really push that through.
Is there a kind of cultural gap between classically trained orchestral musicians and the world of Heavy Metal? Is there ever any kind of tension?
“I wouldn’t say there’s tension,” Nathan says. “We have a phenomenal group of musicians that we work with, and that’s really taken us some time to build together with some of the most in-demand touring musicians out there on a classical level.
“There is a huge difference between being a classically trained musician who can come and sight-read and just play the notes on the page and one who has a really good understanding of the feel of the emotion of the original that they’re trying to improve on.
“We’re really lucky to have brilliant musical directors who are super-tuned into that. They’re massive fans of the original works and making sure that the way everything is played is correct.
“I would also say that certainly in the early days of The Rock Orchestra, some people who had a big classical CV, maybe their peers were looking down on their involvement. Then, over time, as it’s become such a huge thing, we’re constantly doing 150 to 200 shows a year and 350,000-ish guests a year, I think that view has changed. There’s some prudiness for sure.”
You feel there is a difference between standing there, playing the notes and actually feeling the notes and moving and interacting with the notes.
The musicians have found their common ground. But what about the people filling the seats? The audience The Rock Orchestra attracts is perhaps as unlikely a blend as the music itself.
“I do think it’s a mixture of people that love both,” Nathan says, “and actually, in a funny way, especially classic rock and some of the earlier Metal, I feel like that music is quite closely related to classical. Especially if you’re looking at Zeppelin, or even Guns N’ Roses and that linear song format where the melodies really evolve throughout the songs.
“Stairway To Heaven is a great example. Honestly, it’s quite classical. On the flip side of that, you have Gustav Holst, who created what you could argue was the first ever Metal track, Mars, The Bringer Of War. It’s heavy.
“But in terms of our audience, I would say that we’ve got a really broad appeal. I think it tends to be people who are definitely rock and Metal fans. I think the appeal The Rock Orchestra has is if you were an avid gig goer 10, 20, 30 years ago, you want to hear it reimagined in a slightly more highbrow way in a comfy chair.”
That broad appeal did not emerge overnight. To understand where The Rock Orchestra’s love of fire and spectacle truly comes from, you have to go back more than a decade and to a very different kind of show.
The Fuel Girls will feature again on this tour, and that relationship goes back over a decade to when Nathan created The Festival Of The Dead, a circus/cabaret/carnival in a standing environment.
“We would have huge Batalá drum sections, people on stilts, giant skull floats going through the audience, circus performers up on stage, and the Fuel Girls doing their pyro sections. We toured for eight years around the UK every Halloween. We played some awesome shows, but that was where my love of the performance side, the kind of circus skill performance side and especially fire came from.
“I think what quite a few people don’t know about The Rock Orchestra is that when I was first creating the show, it was as a Festival Of The Dead show. We were in COVID, and I had wanted to create a rock orchestra for a long time. Having come from a rock band where we had a cellist, I just felt that synergy.
“It was when everything was still socially distanced, and so we thought, right, OK, let’s create The Rock Orchestra and let’s do it as Festival Of The Dead’s Rock Orchestra. The theming, the skulls and the gothic vibe is all from there. We quickly realised that it was far more exciting and it had far more potential than Festival Of The Dead, and we just formalised it into its own thing.”
Nathan says they are working on a new EP, focusing on rock versions of classical songs, with plans underway for a Classics Volume 2 towards the end of 2027.
For now, the excitement is building to this two-hour spectacle combining a full orchestra, choir, iconic rock anthems and large-scale pyrotechnics.
For Nathan, his dream collaboration would be Serj Tankian from System Of A Down. “My selfish pick,” he smiles. “He’s a classically trained singer, and you can really tell in his voice he has amazing, operatic power and is one of the greatest Metal voices, in my opinion, of all time. I think there is so much fun that he would have in the show.”
Nathan promises a fiery night. Given 60 litres of flame fluid, a full orchestra, a choir and 20 flame units, that may be the understatement of the year. Arenas Of Fire do not do things by halves.
This is symphonic Metal on the grandest scale imaginable, and Nathan Reed is just getting started.
2026 UK Arena Tour Dates include Leeds, Liverpool, Bournemouth, Belfast, Dublin, Cardiff, Birmingham, London and Brighton. Tickets start from £38 and are available now via the official website.
