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Louise Thomas
Editor
We live in a society of rules. Mostly, these are the big ones, the hard and unwithering dicta written and codified by men in old-timey judicial wigs. You cannot steal; you cannot burn down a police car; you cannot bludgeon your landlord with a trowel. These we know. It is the law. But beneath these, nestled discreetly in our psychosocial cortex, is another set of rules: that slippery, malleable thing we call etiquette. And for all the hullabaloo made about the supposed Great British politeness, nowhere is the dubious and disposable nature of this etiquette more apparent than at music concerts.
To use a particularly egregious example: last weekend, at the London day festival All Points East, photos emerged of young revellers who had arrived early to see the headliner (indie sensation Mitski), only to spend the afternoon camped out on the floor by the frontal barricades, watching Netflix on their phones while the lesser-known support acts took to the stage. How these people avoided being buffeted underfoot or soaked with the “accidental” spillage of a reproachful pint is a mystery. (Many would say they were asking for it.)
Mitski has previously lamented the rampant etiquette infractions at her concerts: excessive screaming and creepy and overfamiliar yelling – “Mother is mothering!” being a particularly popular off-kilter catchphrase. It’s likely this was a factor in her choosing to perform her recent tour to seated crowds. It can be tempting to write off these obnoxious behaviours as a problem specific to Gen Z – the gaucheness of a demographic whose understanding of how to behave in public was fritzed by the social-skills EMP device that was the Covid pandemic. But it’s more than this. Everywhere you look, everywhere you go, people are breaking the unwritten rules of concertgoing. It is fast becoming a lost language.
Part of the problem, perhaps, is that these rules are by their very nature unwritten. A few, of course, have a hard and fast consensus. Smoking, for instance – acceptable in the thick of an outdoor crowd, but indoors, strongly frowned upon. (Not to mention illegal.) A decade or two ago, holding aloft your mobile phone to capture video footage of a concert would have been a definite no-no; now, shifting demographics and technological ubiquity have made concert camming utterly, placidly accepted in most audiences. Whether you see it as a massive vibe-killer or a harmless means of preserving a live performance to later re-enjoy, is moot – it’s too widespread to curtail at this point.
Yet many other etiquette norms exist in more of a grey area. Intermittent talking is mostly tolerated, particularly during support acts – but talk too loudly, too persistently, or too near the stage, and you might be courting a stern shushing. Tall people are of course within their rights to stand wherever they so wish, but the taller you are, the more peeved off the people standing behind you are going to be – so if you’re a hulking 7ft adonis, you might do well to avoid the front, fairness be damned.
One particularly muddy issue concerns the optics of pushing one’s way towards the front of a concert crowd. We’ve all been there – leaving your spot to visit the toilet or bar, and having to meekly nudge, sidle and “um-excuse-me” your way through a throng of people to return to wherever your mates happen to be standing. (If you’re planning on drinking a lot, it’s polite to avoid standing at the very front of the crowd, to minimise the amount of laborious to-ing and fro-ing.) But oh! How different everything looks from the other side – when you’re standing, sardined into a horde of people, enjoying a position you rightfully claimed, when some boorish chancer comes squeezing through willy-nilly. The “right of way”, as it were, of the whole endeavour, involves a complicated (and almost entirely sub-conscious) mental rubric, taking into account crowd density, proximity to the stage, and other myriad minor and subjective factors – if you’re holding a tray of pints, for example, or trailing five people behind you in tandem.
All of this depends, too, of course, on the style and sensibility of the music that’s being staged. At an acoustic indie set, audiences might come to expect a certain pin-drop atmosphere; at a heavy metal concert, or a punk gig, violent jostling and frenzied yelling is not only OK, it’s probably encouraged. In some cases, it’s ruder not to mosh.
There has to be a degree of flexibility in the enforcement of etiquette at any live event. Most of the rules are born not of some life-or-death necessity but of basic human consideration; as such, gig crowds – which do, after all, comprise broadly like-minded people – have traditionally done a good job of policing themselves. To some extent, it boils down to something as simple and innate as this: don’t be a d***. If everybody could just heed that, the music scene would surely be a better place.
