Gigs starting late:
Obviously this is the one area of the musical arts in which Justin Bieber excels. But in fairness, Canada’s gobbing munchkin isn’t alone. In fact, rock shows never begin on time; the questions is, why? We know the band isn’t being choppered in and the ‘copter is stuck in LA’s smog. For one thing, there’s a bloody great bus outside with their name on a card in the windscreen. And for another, we’re in Stoke On Trent.
We know the rig is humming and ready to go, because we saw the chief roadie flash his torch at the chief sound roadie. What’s more, we couldn’t be more aware of the fact that the talent is still sitting around in their groupie festooned dressing room, knocking back lager tops and smoking roll-ups. So, for goodness sake, won’t someone fix this debacle? Believe me, touring bands, if I’m not home in time for Newsnight and Family Guy, I’ll never rip your material off Pirate Bay again.
Thank-you credits on albums:
Admittedly this has become less of a problem since we all started downloading and Spotifying albums. Mercifully, no act has yet bothered to speak an interminable list of people about whom you couldn’t give a sliver of a hoot, as an extra MP3 track (unless you know better). Nevertheless , on the occasions we haul out an old CD or vinyl platter, there’s an unmissable and alarming tendency for the artists to fill an unreasonable amount of jacket space with a roster of folk without whom that mediocre filler track, halfway through side two, would never have been possible.
I’m not a monster. I think a cheery show of appreciation to the band’s backroom crew is a nice touch. Hell, knock yourself out – include the management. It may count for something when you spend six months glowering at them across a court room. But rolling out a short novella which embraces everyone from the percussionist’s mum and dad, tour manager’s pets and the window-cleaner, to fictional characters, neighbours, chiropractors and a selection of deities, is horribly mawkish, massively egocentric and wholly unnecessary.
Bono’s sunglasses:
I own a couple of pairs of sunglasses. There, I’ve said it. I even have some Ray-Ban Wayfarers I received as a promotional gift from Cadbury (true). And you know when I wear them? Go on, have a guess. Right! I wear them when it’s sunny. Which is usually abroad, what with the UK having an average of 7.6 minutes of sunshine annually and everything. Otherwise, I tend to keep them in a drawer. Because I’M NOT BONO.
I assume Paul Hewson woke one morning, leaned over to Mrs. Hewson and announced with a flourish ‘Mrs. Hewson, I am Bono. I am the lead singer of international music combo U2 and as such, am a bona-fide rock star. Therefore, all the rules of taste, decorum and optical physics no longer apply to me. Henceforth I shall wear sunglasses at all times. It’s my job.’ Then, I assume, Mrs. Hewson said ‘That’s nice dear…’ before attempting to grab a precious lie-in. Then, I assume, she saw the massive, orange-tinted, wraparound spectacles to which her husband was referring. And pulled the entire duvet over her head.
Ticketmaster:
It began quite innocently. Sometime in 1976 Albert Leffler and Peter Gadwa were relaxing in the Arizona sun (the perfect environment for sunglasses, Bono please note) when they hit on a neat idea. They’d buy a bottle of cold pop and have a dip in the pool. Then they hit on another, much bigger idea. Why didn’t they quit their college jobs and flog gig tickets instead? They’d add a little fee on top of the tickets’ face value and that would provide a profit. ‘Not a bad business model’, thought they. ‘We could call it Ticketmaster’. And they were right. On both counts.
Nobody knows when the bad stuff begun. Or if they do, they’re not telling. But it’s clear that, before long, someone (not necessarily Albert and Peter, lawyers please note) started to add other little fees. Y’know, when no-one was looking. What harm could it do? It could be called something like a ‘handling charge’ or ‘holding costs’. Who’d really notice, eh?
Tragically, as is so often the case, these little indulgences soon ran wild. The temptation became overpowering and those little fees escalated to frightening proportions. Before any intervention could be arranged, there were astronomical ‘booking premiums’, ‘international document taxes’ and ‘call and collect additions’. Specialists were called to effect a cure, but to no avail. It was too late. The world would have to accept it would no longer be possible to buy tickets to a rock show and pay only for the ticket. From now on, we’d have to pony up scores of pounds in extras we didn’t want and don’t particularly understand. The only people with the power to change this hideous turn of events were the bands themselves, who could easily sell their own tickets and by-pass Ticketmaster altogether. Unfortunately, they didn’t give a monkey’s.
Audience delegation:
I blame Robbie Williams and Freddie Mercury. They didn’t start it, but they did take it to the extremes we see today. When I first set out on my gig-going career, the most the band asked of the crowd was some enthusiastic bouncing up and down. Then, sometime in the early eighties, I noticed the odd group suggesting we sang a line of a chorus. They even pointed a microphone at us (which didn’t work because it was too far away). It was just a bit of fun, very enjoyable, no problem there. Not until Live Aid anyway.
For some crazy reason, it’s often tagged the highlight of the Live Aid show (it wasn’t, that was Sade’s back). Any road, halfway through Queen’s set, F Mercury esq. took it upon himself to bellow nonsense at the crowd. Sounding very much like Stan Freberg’s comedy version of ‘The Banana Boat Song’, he went ‘Day-O!’. ‘Day-O’ the people hollered back. To be honest, I can’t really bear to take you through the rest of the routine – you know it anyway. The point is, Fred had persuaded the good folk of Wembley stadium to do a bit of his job for him. That is to say, singing. I think they were probably quite dehydrated, so the crowd must remain blameless, but Freddo had lifted the lid on Pandora’s box and there was no retreat.
Thanks to those irresponsible high jinks, we now live in a world where a chancer such as the aforementioned Robert Williams can avoid a hefty 90% of his performing responsibilities by simply giving us the first half of an opening lyric ‘I sit and wait, a dozen angels …’ before chiming in with ‘Now you sing!’. At which point he clears off for a cappuccino and Silk Cut while the hall sings the rest of the song to themselves. Bob then pops back for the roaring applause.
What’s worse, that very same audience has paid Ticketmaster the best part of a collective month’s salary for the privilege of doing Williams’ work.
Obviously this is the one area of the musical arts in which Justin Bieber excels. But in fairness, Canada’s gobbing munchkin isn’t alone. In fact, rock shows never begin on time; the questions is, why? We know the band isn’t being choppered in and the ‘copter is stuck in LA’s smog. For one thing, there’s a bloody great bus outside with their name on a card in the windscreen. And for another, we’re in Stoke On Trent.
We know the rig is humming and ready to go, because we saw the chief roadie flash his torch at the chief sound roadie. What’s more, we couldn’t be more aware of the fact that the talent is still sitting around in their groupie festooned dressing room, knocking back lager tops and smoking roll-ups. So, for goodness sake, won’t someone fix this debacle? Believe me, touring bands, if I’m not home in time for Newsnight and Family Guy, I’ll never rip your material off Pirate Bay again.
Thank-you credits on albums:
Admittedly this has become less of a problem since we all started downloading and Spotifying albums. Mercifully, no act has yet bothered to speak an interminable list of people about whom you couldn’t give a sliver of a hoot, as an extra MP3 track (unless you know better). Nevertheless , on the occasions we haul out an old CD or vinyl platter, there’s an unmissable and alarming tendency for the artists to fill an unreasonable amount of jacket space with a roster of folk without whom that mediocre filler track, halfway through side two, would never have been possible.
I’m not a monster. I think a cheery show of appreciation to the band’s backroom crew is a nice touch. Hell, knock yourself out – include the management. It may count for something when you spend six months glowering at them across a court room. But rolling out a short novella which embraces everyone from the percussionist’s mum and dad, tour manager’s pets and the window-cleaner, to fictional characters, neighbours, chiropractors and a selection of deities, is horribly mawkish, massively egocentric and wholly unnecessary.
Bono’s sunglasses:
I own a couple of pairs of sunglasses. There, I’ve said it. I even have some Ray-Ban Wayfarers I received as a promotional gift from Cadbury (true). And you know when I wear them? Go on, have a guess. Right! I wear them when it’s sunny. Which is usually abroad, what with the UK having an average of 7.6 minutes of sunshine annually and everything. Otherwise, I tend to keep them in a drawer. Because I’M NOT BONO.
I assume Paul Hewson woke one morning, leaned over to Mrs. Hewson and announced with a flourish ‘Mrs. Hewson, I am Bono. I am the lead singer of international music combo U2 and as such, am a bona-fide rock star. Therefore, all the rules of taste, decorum and optical physics no longer apply to me. Henceforth I shall wear sunglasses at all times. It’s my job.’ Then, I assume, Mrs. Hewson said ‘That’s nice dear…’ before attempting to grab a precious lie-in. Then, I assume, she saw the massive, orange-tinted, wraparound spectacles to which her husband was referring. And pulled the entire duvet over her head.
Ticketmaster:
It began quite innocently. Sometime in 1976 Albert Leffler and Peter Gadwa were relaxing in the Arizona sun (the perfect environment for sunglasses, Bono please note) when they hit on a neat idea. They’d buy a bottle of cold pop and have a dip in the pool. Then they hit on another, much bigger idea. Why didn’t they quit their college jobs and flog gig tickets instead? They’d add a little fee on top of the tickets’ face value and that would provide a profit. ‘Not a bad business model’, thought they. ‘We could call it Ticketmaster’. And they were right. On both counts.
Nobody knows when the bad stuff begun. Or if they do, they’re not telling. But it’s clear that, before long, someone (not necessarily Albert and Peter, lawyers please note) started to add other little fees. Y’know, when no-one was looking. What harm could it do? It could be called something like a ‘handling charge’ or ‘holding costs’. Who’d really notice, eh?
Tragically, as is so often the case, these little indulgences soon ran wild. The temptation became overpowering and those little fees escalated to frightening proportions. Before any intervention could be arranged, there were astronomical ‘booking premiums’, ‘international document taxes’ and ‘call and collect additions’. Specialists were called to effect a cure, but to no avail. It was too late. The world would have to accept it would no longer be possible to buy tickets to a rock show and pay only for the ticket. From now on, we’d have to pony up scores of pounds in extras we didn’t want and don’t particularly understand. The only people with the power to change this hideous turn of events were the bands themselves, who could easily sell their own tickets and by-pass Ticketmaster altogether. Unfortunately, they didn’t give a monkey’s.
Audience delegation:
I blame Robbie Williams and Freddie Mercury. They didn’t start it, but they did take it to the extremes we see today. When I first set out on my gig-going career, the most the band asked of the crowd was some enthusiastic bouncing up and down. Then, sometime in the early eighties, I noticed the odd group suggesting we sang a line of a chorus. They even pointed a microphone at us (which didn’t work because it was too far away). It was just a bit of fun, very enjoyable, no problem there. Not until Live Aid anyway.
For some crazy reason, it’s often tagged the highlight of the Live Aid show (it wasn’t, that was Sade’s back). Any road, halfway through Queen’s set, F Mercury esq. took it upon himself to bellow nonsense at the crowd. Sounding very much like Stan Freberg’s comedy version of ‘The Banana Boat Song’, he went ‘Day-O!’. ‘Day-O’ the people hollered back. To be honest, I can’t really bear to take you through the rest of the routine – you know it anyway. The point is, Fred had persuaded the good folk of Wembley stadium to do a bit of his job for him. That is to say, singing. I think they were probably quite dehydrated, so the crowd must remain blameless, but Freddo had lifted the lid on Pandora’s box and there was no retreat.
Thanks to those irresponsible high jinks, we now live in a world where a chancer such as the aforementioned Robert Williams can avoid a hefty 90% of his performing responsibilities by simply giving us the first half of an opening lyric ‘I sit and wait, a dozen angels …’ before chiming in with ‘Now you sing!’. At which point he clears off for a cappuccino and Silk Cut while the hall sings the rest of the song to themselves. Bob then pops back for the roaring applause.
What’s worse, that very same audience has paid Ticketmaster the best part of a collective month’s salary for the privilege of doing Williams’ work.
