It seems barely a month goes by without some viral tweet or news story on the cost of, and resultant lack of appetite for, arena gigs. At the end of May, the Black Keys cancelled their autumn US arena tour amid reports of disastrously low ticket sales. Around the same time, Jennifer Lopez also cancelled her arena tour, citing personal reasons – though she too was struggling to shift seats. And there was concern that Charli XCX’s joint tour with Troye Sivan might go the same way – though the arrival of brat girl summer seems to have alleviated those fears a little.
That was followed this week in the UK by a spasm of outrage over the cost of tickets for Billie Eilish’s six-night residency at the O2 as part of her Hit Me Hard and Soft tour. A hyperventilating Daily Mail article suggested that Eilish had failed to sell out the dates after “fan outrage” over £388 tickets. That angle was quite misleading: those £388 tickets were for the plummest of plum seats, and when I looked there were tickets in less desirable blocks of the arena available for the slightly more palatable (but let’s be honest still pretty hefty) sum of £107. Overall, Eilish’s residency seems to be selling fairly steadily, especially given that it’s still more than a year away.
Perhaps the mania around Taylor Swift’s Eras tour has conditioned us to expect any major pop star’s tour to sell out in minutes, which seems pretty unreasonable. Still, there’s definitely growing fan anger around arena gigs, with annoyance at high prices, vampiric resale sites, underhand booking fees and all manner of other ancillary charges. We’ve grumbled about many of these before in this newsletter, and elsewhere in the Guardian – hopefully, Labour’s plans to rein in some of the industry’s worst excesses (which have annoyed all the right people) will come to pass. But I would like to throw another reason into the mix for this bubbling discontent: watching a gig in an arena is a truly horrible experience.
The arena is the single worst place to see a band. Compare it with any other setting for a gig – from the grottiest toilet venue to the most gigantic of stadiums – and it loses out. Last month, I travelled 100 miles from London just to see a gig (the Smashing Pumpkins and Weezer – yes I’m a geriatric millennial, nostalgic for a 90s alt-rock scene that I was just too young to enjoy at the time, guilty as charged) in somewhere that wasn’t an arena. Instead, I got to see Billy Corgan bark “the world is a vampire” in that adenoidal voice of his inside the walls of Cardiff Castle, which – even though it rained heavily – was far more memorable than seeing it in an airless, nondescript tub that could have been anywhere from Plymouth to Dundee.
In contrast to, you know, an actual castle, just about every one of the UK’s arenas is notable only for just how bland it looks; squat, a flat-packed cattle pen sharing few characteristics with the area around it. Even when there’s an exception to this rule – the O2, for example, with its cartoonish Millennium Dome exterior, or Glasgow’s enjoyably daft-looking Hydro – it tends to be a superficial one: inside you’ll find the same absence of character as at any other arena. Compare that with the art deco grandeur of somewhere like the Manchester Apollo (pictured at the top hosting a Phoebe Bridgers gig), and … well you can’t compare it, really.
Arenas tend to be big enough to feel cold and impersonal, unlike the sweaty closeness of a smaller venue, but lack the eye-popping massiveness of a stadium, where part of the spectacle is taking in the sheer swell of people above, below and around you. Compared with music hall-style concert venues, where most people stand, arenas tend to be majority seating, leading to a more sterile atmosphere, and some of the seats are so far from the action you feel like you’re watching events from a different postcode.
Instead of generating atmosphere, what these arenas are entirely geared towards – and really good at – is generating cash, from those much-discussed ticket prices to the concession stalls, where the likes of Manchester’s Co-op Live are inching closer to the £10 pint (they’re at £9 at the moment, but just give them a few years). They’re almost always attached to a dour retail park, full of chain restaurants you only go to when you’re stuck at a dour retail park. Corporatism is baked into these arenas from the name downwards: Co-op, O2, Motorpoint, First Direct. (At least with older venues you can simply drop the branding and call the place what it used to be known as before everything needed a sponsor.)
Defenders of arenas will point out that, while they might not be much to look at, they provide better sightlines and sound facilities than other older venues. Fair enough, but why does the rest of the experience have to be so soul-destroying? Those defenders would also note that they provide the only workable space for those artists – huge but not Taylor or Beyoncé huge – who require venues into the 10,000-plus seat range.
To that end, eight arenas have either just been built or are in the process of being built across the UK. But this focus feels a little misplaced: we are arguably in an overheated moment for gig-going, with audience appetites for live music still high after the pandemic, and the attention and money being thrown towards arenas might be better directed towards the UK’s struggling grassroots venues. If arena ticket prices keep climbing and the experience continues to be numbingly beige, then cancelling your tour might not be less “target for social media users’ schadenfreude” and more “stark reality of being a mid-tier pop star in 2024”.
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