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Concert Etiquette – The Do’s and Don’ts Of Gig-Going

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I was listening to the magnificent Goodbye Cream LP today (on vinyl, natch) and as Eric, Jack and Ginger brought the mammoth 9 minute white hot solo of I’m So Glad to a screaming, shuddering halt, steam coming off the brake pads and rivets straining on the engine room boiler, a few people actually began to applaud during the few moments of ensuing silence. Yes APPLAUD. What were they thinking? Didn’t these lightweight fans know that this was just a temporary halt in proceedings before the band launched back into the main theme of the song and the closing vocal verse?

All of which brings me to concert etiquette. Have you ever noticed that there are several levels of gig-going fans? There are those who applaud the instrumental introduction to a song, presumably to show how clever they are. Then there are others who wait until the opening vocal line before the penny drops, at that point it’s safe for THEM to applaud. Still others wait until the very END of the song to clap, which is just as it should be,

Alternatively, some people like to applaud specific passages of a song. For example, Dylan’s It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding contains the line “Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked” and boy, did that single line draw some applause, especially during the Nixon era.

Likewise, Bruce Springsteen’s crowds all-but tear the roof off the sucker at the merest mention of New Jersey. Similarly, when Leonard Cohen (ironically) sings “I was born with the gift of a golden voice” the punters go mental in an orgy of self-congratulation.

So, to sum up. Clapping in the wrong place. Applauding yourself for recognising the song, or for simply acknowledging a certain line. It’s all grist for the concert-going mill. I’m sure you can think of others. Laughing way too loud at Randy Newman’s mildly funny betwixt song anecdotes for example. That’s other one. Or whooping like a demented gibbon as the Americans love to do, I’m sure we can’t get enough of that one. Or how about eating hot smelly food and drinking beer during the show? Mmmm, nice.

But enough of my yakking. Let’s hear some examples of concert etiquette that really wind you up. Or perhaps they don’t?

http://i.imgur.com/nF9ZOp7.jpg

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Comments

  2. Clapping solos is the one for me.

    As I understand it some bloke stood up at a Carnegie Hall concert in the fifties, entranced by the solo and clapped. Could have been jazz or classical . Anyway that started it.

    Jazz concerts are the worst – every , I mean every, solo applauded. I mean a lot of jazz performances are a series of solos. Stand out performances yes. Not all of them.

  5. It’s a funny one this but I am quite a social person but my experiences when going to see a band with someone else is hardly ever good., so I have often gone the sad Billy Nomates route. The problem is I worry too much about whether the other person is enjoying it. Also when a friend starts talking in your ear mid-song about other things. I had that with a really good friend of mine during a Kraftwerk gig. ShurrUP!

  6. (As an aside – I have never heard the track in the op, but how do three people play a solo?)

    I saw the Bunnymen live shortly after the release of their first album. Mac said something like ‘this next one’s called Pictures on my Wall’ and the guy standing next to me shouted ‘ Woo! Side two track three!’ What’s the opposite of civilian? Knobhead?

  7. Clapping along. Don’t do it. This ain’t play school. People who clap along to songs are incapable of finding the beat. Get ten people clapping together and the gap between the first premature slap and the last lazy flop is half a bar. I don’t go to see a band just to have their best song ruined by the sound of someone shovelling wet cardboard into a skip.

    At a gig in Paris last week some enthusiastic clappeur started up, but on the on beat. Others joined in, but they were confused by the urgency it created, as were the band. It sounded like James Brown stranded on the bridge. Some of us tried to counter it with a bit of swing clapping, just behind the snare, but then it just sounded like applause. Short answer; do not clap along unless you are musically trained, or in the band.

      • Well then they deserve everything they get.

        Singing along is a grey area. Or a grey aria… Of course there are points at which it’s fine to bellow along to a glorious chorus and coat the back of the head of the person in front of you with a bucketload of spit. That’s all part of the fun. But singing in the quiet bits… there’s usually someone who wants the rest of us to know that he knows all the words, but to do that he has to be slightly out of time with the singer, or we won’t be able to tell. No!

        • A few years ago I sat next to a woman at a Leonard Cohen concert who sang along with every song, even during the quiet bits. She knew all the words, too.

          Her blind, unconditional love for Leonard seemingly overriding any concern for the enjoyment of her fellow concert-goers.

          • I went to Gillian Welch and David Rawlings recently, you know largely quiet sensitive stuff. Mrs Wells loves em. she also has a lovely voice but it was not what I came to hear. I can hear her singing along at home and that’s fine. I considered suggesting she desist and there was no way I was going to be anything other than dead meat, so I was leaning forward ,twisting sideways, surreptitiously putting a finger in the ear. Didn’t work.

    • Don’t ever watch the Weld DVD. The audience will put you right off with their grotesque gurning, and manic air drumming and air guitar. Not to mention the sweat patches under Neil’s arms. Should be heard and not seen.

  9. I once went to a gig by the Tibetan singer Yungchen Lhamo.

    For one song, she urged everyone on the audience to make a low nasal droning sound, while she wailed over the top of us. Normally, I’m unwilling to sing while in the audience at concerts, because that’s not the sort of thing that a good Afterworder does. But I gave this droning sound a go – as did everyone else. We sounded like a herd of yaks braying the Albanian national anthem.

    Ms Lhamo, not surprisingly, didn’t seem too impressed. “That was OK … I suppose,” she sighed.

    • I have a story about Llamo (that’s what she calls herself when you meet her, it’s like Indian and Pakistani cricketers, the second name is often like what we call the Christian name).

      Anyway, many years ago, before she was famous, I was asked by a mutual friend to produce a demo for her of one of her songs. She came to my studio and put down a vocal and I was supposed to do some kind of backing track. Because she was singing some weird scale I had great difficult finding appropriate chords to play behind her, until I had the brilliant idea of changing the scale on my keyboard – they always give you all these options which I’d never used until now – Tibetan, Indian, whatever. Anyway I discovered that one of these scales was exactly right for Llamo’s singing, did the demo, and all was fine.

      Some weeks later I embarked on a tour of Fiji and Samoa (and that’s another story) with my band, and I took my keyboard with me. For the first couple of gigs everyone sounded out of tune – the saxophone player had great difficulty playing in tune, we thought it was Something In The Air, or maybe all the bowls of kava we’d drunk the night before (kava being a fabulously mind and mouth-numbing drink that Fijians pass around on social occasions).

      Of course I eventually worked out that the problem was my keyboard was still tuned to the Asian scale I had used for Llamo’s demo. Totally red-faced, I admitted this to the band the next day. They were of course relieved, and I was mortified and embarrassed, of course.

  10. The last time I went to see The Pogues, they played And the played Waltzing Matilda brilliantly, and most around us were just standing there listening other than a couple who danced as if they thought it was waltz; stupid and not clever. It wasn’t just me, others felt the same.

      • Yes, but as a dancer myself, may I draw a distinction between songs in waltz time, and dance tunes? Just ’cause a song has those audible three beats, that doesn’t necessarily invite a dance.

        Dance tunes, on the other hand, make mandatory that the floor is moving to the beat. I am talking in a folk context here; there is something rather suppressed about a polite audience sitting motionless, while the band trips out an on-your-feet jig or a reel. Most folk artists appreciate the complement of a whirling couple waltzing the aisles.

  11. Hasn’t concert going just gone the way of popular music in general i.e. everything seems so precious now. Heaven help the person who hasn’t invested in the 50 CD box set or, shock-horror, doesn’t have it all on virgin vinyl that’s weighs a particular amount.

    Two things put me off concerts/gigs – ticket price (10%) and audience (90%).

    I regularly pass a pub in Newlyn with a….erm….reputation that seems to have local groups on every Friday night. Now that doesn’t look precious. If I thought I’d get out alive I might try it out next week.

  12. A couple of these “rules” get broken here.
    The audience are singing along, they know the words and they are pretty much in tune but they get the timing a bit wrong at about 2m40s, much to the singer’s amusement. Later, they are singing away again at the same bit of the song and the singer conducts them to make sure that this time they get it right, for which the audience applauds and cheers.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkBZ7qpJxCI
    It’s still sounds and looks magnificent, so WTF?

  13. Does anyone remember “Lambchop” the Dylan fan who went to all the London shows in the early 90s? I had a few boots of those and, not to put too fine a point on it, this guy was nuts.

    As Dylan came on, he would yell at the audience “Stand up! Stand up for Bob!” usually from the front row

    Then, at intervals, he would shout out “Thanks for coming Bob!” over and over.

    In fact, one of the Hammersmith Odeon boots I had is titled Thanks For Coming Bob!”

    Here’s some info about Lambchop from one of the Dylan blogs:

    http://www.expectingrain.com/dok/who/l/lambchop.html

    • I can state, with absolute certainty, that Dylan attracts the greatest amount of bonkers obsessives, bar none. IIRC, he once stopped making tickets available to the public for the first couple of rows when touring the UK, so he didn’t have to look out at the same nut jobs every night.
      I’ve been to gigs of his where he was clearly out of his gourd and introduced each song by wheezing away tunelessly on his harmonica. No matter – the diehards kept howling in recognition. Which was puzzling, as the backing band clearly hadn’t a clue themselves what was coming next.

  15. I did the sound at a private party / Vienna Ditto gig on Sat night from a mixing desk in the middle of the floor. In front of me was dance floor, behind tables & chairs. It is easy to dance to VD, a sort of drum and bass AC/DC.

    The party guests – not gig-goers – all sat behind me during VD’s set and talked. Continually. So I turned it up. And they continued. By the end of their set, the PA was cranked up all the way to 11. “It’s a bit loud”, one of them yelled in my ear. “You asked for it”, I muttered to myself.

    They were all up for a dance, just not to live music. I kicked off with ‘Loaded’ – not exactly ‘Dancing Queen’ – and there was not an occupied seat for the next 90 minutes. And nobody talked over the CDs.

    The general public are a bizarre lot.

    • There was a piece in The Word about artists that play for corporate dos and private parties. A few won’t do it but most have their price, although the specialist booker being interviewed was at pains to point out that some audiences, particularly the corporates, don’t care who the turn is, illustrating this with the tale of Stevie Wonder being slow hand clapped by a bored crowd who were more interested in necking the free booze.

      • I don’t think Vienna Ditto are in the asked-to-play-Russian-oligarchs-private-parties set. Not yet, anyway.

        There’s definitely a difference between an audience at a gig, even by an unknown act, and an audience at a party at which there is a live act.

        My next DJ set is an end-of-year-6-leavers’ party. I’m bricking it.

  16. Audiences are usually knobs,that’s taken for granted, but the bands who want the clap (sic) as mentioned should be shot, as should those who point the mike out into the audience for group choral cacophony. Ian McNabb is a shocker for this, basking so content in his own glories that he forgets many came to see him sing, not have a sing

    • Spot on there. Some bands seem to forget they are they to perform for you, mass sing alongs are tolerable maybe on the chorus of their best known song, but not repeatedly – We came to hear you sing it mate. AC/DC excepted.
      And the pointing of the microphone to the audience is , for me, only marginally better than encouraging mass clapping along – which has the effect of drowning out the performance.
      again, tolerable for the opening riff, but no longer. I suppose if you’re on stage you want to get the feedback and the feeling you’re performing to a ‘live’ audience, but IMO they can do all that in between the songs.

      • I feel the same way about comedians who engage audience members in conversation which inevitably ends in ridicule for the audience member.

        Basically it’s helping them do their job. I feel like saying, “perhaps you’d like to come down the workshop tomorrow and help me change the gearbox in that Mondeo?”

        • Yes – in the early 90s I went to a sparsely-attended open mic night in New York. The two people sitting at the nearest table to the stage were talked to/ridiculed by just about every stand up. By the time the 6th comic opened his act by asking the same table “so…where you from ?” – he was booed immediately.

          There were so few people there (less than 20) I felt brave enough to explain to the comic what had been going on – because he looked stunned and confused and I felt sorry for him. The comic took that as a heckle and started to pick on me, which was a bit harsh. I didn’t bite and just smiled back. Then a brilliantly loud shout erupted from a guy behind me – “YOU SUCK!” . A few more boos and he was off.

    • Really disagree with this. A bit of audience participation can make the whole gig feel so much more communal and inclusive. The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn is a master of this stuff: clapalongs, singalongs etc. That’s what I *want* at a gig: joy. A party. I don’t want to hear the record. One of the reasons I don’t go to more gigs is that most bands just rock up and play the songs: how is that adding any value?

      • I see no problem with audience participation if the performer encourages it or if it’s a genuine outpouring of joy.
        Many years ago Donna and I trotted off to see Ronnie Scott. The almost entirely middle aged audience sat silently and politely through the whole performance. All except my lass who reached a point of such exasperation with the staid atmosphere got up and started to dance. Our fellow audience members sat rigidly ignoring her. I got up and danced with her.
        Ronnie Scott stopped playing and expressed his relief that not everybody in the audience was dead from the neck down.

  17. Singing along is a craven sin. At my first ever Who concert an 18 yr old Dai was so overcome by excitement that he started singing, nay shouting all the lyrics to Substitute from the front row . Guy next to me told me to shut up and in 700 or so subsequent shows I have not done it again.

  18. I once went to see Steve Earle , think it was Hammersmiith and the downstairs was all seated. Very little atmosphere, he launches into ‘The revolution starts now’ 60s something bloke gets up to dance and security have him in back in his seat in seconds
    made me laugh anyway

  20. I really think that gigs are always ruined by other people being there. Which is why I prefer listening to the records. It really takes a lot for me to go and see a band/artist live. I think I’ve only been to twelve gigs in the last five or six years.

    And they were nearly all ruined by other people doing things that annoyed me.

    • Yup, that’s me too. If I manage to carve out some space to stand in, I either become the vanguard for the route to the bogs / bar, or some over refreshed arses will appear just after the band has come on and block my view / dance like loons / crash into me / bellow to each other through out each song. So now mostly I don’t go.

      • Terrible sound, out of tune singing, awful people banging into you, huge queues at the bar, at least twelve songs you don’t want to hear and the sheer discomfort and inconvenience of actually getting there. Plus, for the price of a ticket you can probably buy three or four second hand LPs.

  21. I like to whoop and holler during the story introducing the song because that means not only do I know all the songs but I’ve seen the artist live before which clearly makes me superior to the saps who only know what the song is from the title or the first few bars.

  22. Johnny’s point about the two levels of intro clapping really annoyed me last year when we went to see Jackson Brown.
    There is a third level – pre-intro clapping. That is the elite who can tell from any tuning that precedes a song, what is coming up. Doesn’t happen with JB because he has a guitar tech and a different guitar for every song.
    But on the subject of JB, he does have some annoying fans. During his song These Days, when he sang the line “Don’t confront me with my failures, I had not forgotten them” he got a round of applause from a section (possibly followers of D Hepworth who seems revere that line).
    The first time I saw JB some woman screamed out “Jackson, Jackson, I want to have your babies” followed sometime later by “Jackson, I still want to have your babies”.
    At another gig a dickhead in one of the boxes leaned over the edge, waving his arms yelling “Stand up, stand up. Show the man some respect”. (maybe it was Lambchop, mentioned above). Me, I feel shelling out a sizeable sum of money is respect – anything else has to be earned through performance, not simply presence on the stage.
    The Camden raised glass – I’ve only noticed this at gigs in Camden, but it may happen elsewhere; here people hold their drink up as high as they can for an entire song or longer. Now I know about raising your glass, but that should be over in seconds. This goes on for ages. As irritating as people holding up mobile phones.

    • That’s all good stuff Carl. I’d forgotten about the pre-intro clapping, sometimes prompted by a bit of noodling or, as you say, tuning.

      I’ve never heard of the Camden raised glass thing. That’s something worth investigating.

  23. Thanks to the prior request/warnings by the great lady herself about not using cameras or phones, the Kate Bush shows were probably the most delightfully polite gatherings of fanatics I’ve ever witnessed. Most of the performance was watched in a stunned, reverent hush, interspersed with manic applause at appropriate junctures. The only time the audiences truly went wild and joined in communal singing was on the final ‘Cloudbusting’. Not your average gig-going experience, but then it wasn’t your average gig.

    Prince falls into two camps: he’s very much anti-phone/camera and for the best reasons – he asks fans to live in the moment and enjoy the experience through their own eyes; and he’s also very much an ‘audience participation’ artist, encouraging everyone to sing along, but because he is so skilled a performer, he is able to make this an integral aspect of the show, and no-one would ever come away feeling that they’ve been short-changed by a Prince performance.

    • Dunno.

      Thought the Kate Bush audience was too reverent & fawning. At least it was deserved though. I had to walk out of Joanna Newsom with all the sad middle-aged men giggling and swooning over her coming in and saying “Hello’. Why is that funny?

      Why do people laugh at whatever the artist says?

      As for Prince – yes, I’ve been short-changed. I didn’t pay to hear long tuneless ‘funky jams’ with a medley for the hits.

    • I had the opposite experience and an audience member pretty much ruined it for me.

      I’d been so looking forward to it and was really excited but we were rather up in the gods about two rows from the back and an enormously drunk woman across the aisle from me was tunelessly howling her way through every song in the first half, swearing her head off at everyone who told her to shut up.
      She was so loud that I couldn’t hear Kate.

      She was chucked out about three songs into the second half but I’ll never get 60% of that really special gig back.

  25. At Fairport Convention shows there is inevitably a few fearless extrovert couples who get up a treat the audience to a display of “traditional” folk dancing in the space between the front row and the edge of the stage.

    They invariably look painfully self-conscious and wooden and it distracts from what’s happening on stage.

  26. My pet hate is when I’ve found a great spot and some (usually very tall) guy comes wading through the crowd, I take a step back to let him through and he immediately takes my former spot and stays there!
    This annoys me so much that I’ve simply stopped being polite about letting people through. If they want my spot, they can fight me for it…
    Drunk people waving cigarettes and beer glasses near me (outdoor concerts) – that’s when I move to another spot.
    And artists inviting audience members on stage…99 times out of 100 it’s an embarrassing exercise for everyone.

    • I maintain the position like a rock in a stream so the traffic flows around me, often with elbows just slightly out. If someone parks in front of us who is taller I ask if we can stand in front of them .Mrs Wells is even shorter than me but, importantly ,is quite a looker so this approach works best when she is with me.

      • I went to a stand up gig with some friends one of whom is at least 6′ 5″. He wasn’t the tallest person there, the tallest person there stood in front of him, his angry reaction was hilarious, it was a new experience!

  27. At televised outdoor festivals you’ll always see the inevitable extrovert couple. That’s the bloke with his bird sitting astride his shoulders. If they are really extrovert she’ll whip her top off and if she’s attractive the camera will home in on her and she’ll get as much TV coverage as the band

    They’ll be standing blocking everyone’s view next to the twat with the “Hello Mum” flag fashioned from a bedsheet

      • Re: Stagger Lee

        He’s an almost mythical figure in the literature and music of the American West, isn’t he?
        He seems to crop up in so many songs and tales, and in a wild variety of spellings, e.g. Stack-o-Lee, etc.

        I’m sure I once read an essay about the history and manifestations of the Stagger Lee myth. It might’ve been by Greil Marcus or someone…

        • A popular American folk song about the murder of Billy Lyons by “Stag” Lee Shelton in St. Louis, Missouri at Christmas, 1895. The song was first published in 1911, and was first recorded in 1923 by Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians. A version by Lloyd Price reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959. (Wiki)

    • ‘The camera will home in on her’ – only in less enlightened countries, JC. The Beeb would instantly cut away – don’t want to be seen as objectifying women.

      • That’s always been the way for as long as I can remember. I remember a female streaker at the cricket being studiously ignored by Benaud and the BBC team, who despite the whooping crowd noise and the interruption to the game, concentrated on some interesting stats.

        Meanwhile, over to TMS on Radio 3 and Johnners is in full flow, reminiscing about the similarity of the lady to an old flame when he was a youngster…

    • Two F*ckwits absolutely ruined Calexico at Shepherds Bush last year, despite being told by several people to shut the f*ck up. To add insult to injury, I’d driven from Cardiff, having paid for extra help so I could get away from a job promptly and negotiated a closure of the M4. I was feeling pretty pleased that I’d only missed a couple of numbers but these two numpties talked bollocks to each other all the way through.

    • At a Dylan concert many years ago I sat in front of a bunch of people who chatted away among themselves for around the first 30 mins or so. To add insult to injury they were South African.

      The world’s worst accent is annoying enough in any circumstances but at a Dylan concert it only rubbed salt in the wound. Thankfully, they lost interest after a while and simply got up and left.

      I can only assume they had free tickets and didn’t pay good money to sit there and chat.

  29. Didn’t we have a thread about this stuff way back in the day on one of the old sites?

    Someone referred to the audience mongrels as “the fuckwits” and it kind of stuck for a while.

    Or am I just dreaming….

  30. I prefer theatre gigs to enormodomes or clubs. At theatre gigs I am often sitting behind the fan who has to do their dance. Clearly they don’t dance often, and it is generally to “the hit”, or the most famous track. Whats wrong with “clapping” or even a “woo-hoo”? Club gigs stuck in my craw after one too many early punk gigs where idiots were throwing glasses, gobbing, and generally being more into thuggery than music therapy. They were also for people who didn’t have to get up in the morning, could afford club prices for a drink, and obviously didn’t have to struggle to get home. My perfect gig was King Crimson in Brighton last year; 50-somethings sitting in their seats and sensible enough about their prostates to have a double whiskey so not needing too many comfort breaks, clapping at the right time, and respecting Robert Fripp’s advice to enjoy the moment. Cant remember any clapping along, or audience participation during “Starless and Bible Black”.

  31. Told this before about the one and only time I saw Kraftwerk. It was at Brixton about a decade ago and I was incredibly excited to see them. Near the end, I’d even managed to score a spot in front of the stage. My state of bliss was destroyed by an ear-splitting blast of a ‘party horn’ from about four inches away. Startled, I turned to find an Italian bint and her idiot boyfriend grinning away. I, angrily, told her to put the damn thing away and to stop blasting it in my ear. ‘We’re only enjoying ourselves’, she protested, clearly angry that I should think of interfering with their New Years Eve-style antics. She gleefully continued to accompany the band. I, manfully, resisted the temptation to use their horn on them as a suppository and had to retreat from my prized spot, blind with rage.

  32. There’s an extra level of fuckwit that seems to appear at gigs in bars, at least around here – the “request shouter”. These tend to shout out requests at the end of every song – and to make things worse then never actually shout out a song title, but only the name of an artist or genre, most of it totally inappropriate for the current performer, who may be playing a set of their own material anyway.

    One local pub tried putting on live music on a Sunday last year, but after being inundated with these “request shouters” for two weeks running they simply gave up.

    • The “request shouter” is the bane of many a smaller venue too (from small sweaty club up to probably O2 Academy size).
      They will shout for obscure/seldom played tracks from the back catalogue.
      Why?
      Point 1 – they probably can’t hear you
      Point 2 – Most (all?) bands work to a setlist so are unlikely to chuck in a very early B-Side on a whim
      Point 3 – If they haven’t played it after your first request, they are unlikely to so stop shouting for the bloody thing.

      Audience members who think they can “out funny” the stand-up comic with some witty heckle/put down also occupy a similar gene pool

      • I once went to a Thea Gilmore gig where she was playing with a band. If it’s just her and Nigel they will sometimes indulge requests at the encore, but this time several people shouted different song titles and Thea replied, ‘Those are all excellent suggestions, but we’re going to play something we’ve rehearsed if that’s ok with you.’

  33. The worst behaviour I ever witnessed at a gig was a bunch of drugged-up fools actually getting up on the stage and fucking around with the instruments and yelling for forty minutes before being booed off. That was the Pink Fairies for you.

  34. Remember that horrible old Wordism? FPO?

    Well, I think this thread is ample proof that no fun prevention officer will ever be required at a heavily Afterword-attended gig. 😉

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