At first glance, the news that two New York concert-goers are suing Madonna for arriving on stage two hours late for a show at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center is hard to read without an involuntary roll of the eyes. There’s something about the terms in which their discontent is expressed that feels faintly pathetic. Hang on, you went to a gig and got upset because it finished late, you “had to get up early to go to work the following day” and, worse, faced “limited public transportation” en route home?
It is not an argument destined to cut much mustard with anyone who – like the claimants – is old enough to remember a time before golden circles, cordoned-off glamping areas at festivals, corporate packages, VIP suites, lounges and viewing platforms, “ultimate bars” and all the other latterday additions that have turned gigs into a branch of the hospitality industry. A time when a degree of discomfort and inconvenience was part of the gig-going deal. It seems to speak rather loudly about an entitlement on the part of the audience; a tendency to treat artists as though they work in a branch of the service industries: “I’ve paid my money, you had better do exactly what I want or else.”
So there’s a certain irony about the fact that a considerable chunk of the Madonna show that occasioned the lawsuit involves a recreation of the arty, post-disco early-80s New York demimonde from which the singer sprung, complete with a dancer in character as Jean-Michel Basquiat and a mockup of the entrance to the Paradise Garage club. It seems doubtful that anyone who attended a show by Basquiat’s noise-rock band Gray, or turned up to hear the Garage’s genius but drug-addled resident DJ Larry Levan, ever considered getting the lawyers in because a late start meant they faced “limited public transportation” home.
Then again, no one who attended a gig in the days when discomfort and inconvenience were standard paid the astronomical sums people are expected to cough up for tickets these days. The cheapest seats for Madonna’s London shows were £50, the most expensive were £432.25, and that is assuming you didn’t miss out on the hugely oversubscribed initial sale and end up taking the resold tickets route: one site, Viagogo, was advertising tickets at £1,870 each. And this, it should be added, is not uncommon pricing for big arena shows. Nothing generates a sense of entitlement like spending the best part of a grand on a couple of gig tickets, and if attendees have to leave before the end to catch the last train home, they’re going to feel short-changed and angry. There, one suspects, lies the nub of the problem: it isn’t really a matter of latterday gig-goers not knowing they’re born or making unreasonable demands on an artist, it’s a simple question of economics.
