THE Rolling Stones will be making a new kind of record this week when they rock Rio de Janeiro with the largest pop concert the world has ever seen, writes Maurice Chittenden.

The Brazilian authorities predict that when the band hit the stage decorated with a 45ft-high motif of palm leaves, there will be 1.5m people stretching two miles down the golden sands of Copacabana beach.

The Stones predict that they could attract as many as 2m people to the free concert on Saturday, which marks the halfway point in their Bigger Bang world tour — already the largest grossing tour in history, having made £93m in North America last year, when the band played to a total of 1.2m people at 42 dates.

The concert is 10 days before the official start of carnival, which marks the beginning of Lent, but by last night 97% of Rio’s 85,000 hotel rooms and holiday apartments had already been booked. The normal occupancy rate for this time of year is 70%.

Up to 10,000 police will be on duty with 3,000 of them policing the beach area. The organisers have hired another 900 private security guards. There are fears that gangs of children from the favelas, Rio’s shanty towns, could rush through the crowd stealing bags and wallets.

A similar gig last March by Lenny Kravitz, the American rock star, drew about 1m people to the same beach. The Stones are spending £1m on staging the gig and may recoup £10m from sales of the DVD. The Rio authorities are contributing £500,000, aware of the concert’s boost to tourism.

A footbridge is being built across the beachfront road at a cost of £250,000 so the Stones can walk from the hotel to their backstage dressing rooms. Kravitz warned them that it took him two hours to drive through the crowds.

Sir Mick Jagger is thought to have a personal reason for choosing Rio to show off the band’s prowess after 42 years together. It will be the first time that his son Lucas, 7, whose mother is Luciana Gimenez Morad, 36, a Brazilian model and television presenter, will see “daddy” at work. Lucas, the youngest of Jagger’s seven children, will stay in a suite with its own pool at the Copacabana Palace hotel. He will be joined by Elizabeth and James Jagger, the oldest of the singer’s four children with Jerry Hall.

Additional reporting: Tom Hennigan

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