Camera phones at gigs: how to spot an arsehole in a matter of seconds

Many years ago, I stood in a field at Glastonbury listening to The Waterboys and wishing I had a lighter with which to mark yet another interminable Celtic folk sing-a-long.

In the half-light, the small flames swaying in the air looked quite magical.

I was, as you can imagine, absolutely rat-arsed at this point, and full of Glastonbury spirit (cider) therefore keen to see the magic in everything, even the portaloos and the goths vomiting snakebite and black outside my tent at 4am.

Having got hold of a lighter, I swiftly realised that marking a ballad with fire isn’t remotely magical, especially when the skin on your thumb starts melting and you realise you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere without any plasters.

Fast-forward a few decades and the new ‘ballad lighter’ on the block is the camera phone and it’s not just used during ballads, it’s used throughout entire gigs.

 

'I used to use my eyes. But they were shit.'

Last week, I somehow found myself partaking in the grime revolution at the request of my daughter, who is a budding urban princess with an iTunes library packed with N-Dubz, Tinchy Stryder and Dizee Rascal.

Apologies if I’ve lost 95 per cent of you. For those in the dark, I’ll spark up a lighter: grime is an amalgamation of UK garage with a hint of drum ‘n’ bass, a soupcon of punk and a splash of hip-hop for added flavour.

No? It’s marginalised youths shouting really fast while wearing ill-fitting trousers. That just about covers all (drum ‘n’) bases.

The moment Tinchy Stryder exploded on stage (not literally. That was poetic license) the camera phones were in the air. Rather than watching the gig, half the audience were recording it on equipment that made my archaic home video camera look state-of-the-art.

Without exception, the footage they were recording was as clear as the water in the aforementioned Glastonbury toilets.

It appeared that a huge number of people were intent on recording a pirate-quality gig they were supposed to be watching with those other high-tech lenses – the ones implanted in our skulls.

One girl next to us recorded five minutes of blurry shapes moving in the far distance and then excitedly told her friend she was sending it to her Mum. She’d have done better to wait until she got home, where she could have drawn a hasty picture with some crayons and passed it to her old girl while shouting about getting her gums whipped (it’s grime slang. Keep up, granddad/grandma).

Even worse, one of the amateur lens-women next to me had the worst BO imaginable.

Every time she raised her arm in the air to capture another pointless, blurred shot of other people’s arms in the air waving camera phones it was as if she had raised the lid on hell’s sewage treatment works.

At some points, all I could see was LCD screens waving in the air: it was like that scene in Clockwork Orange when the Minister of the Interior clamps open Alex DeLarge’s eyes and forces him to watch disturbing televisual images in order to de-programme his violent, sociopathic tendencies.

This is ironic, because after the third or fourth blast of camera phone BO, I was feeling both violent and sociopathic (I almost said something, but the woman in question was quite burly. And agitating her may well have increased the BO).

I don’t remember this sea of LCD at the last gig I went to, which – as memory serves – was the Happy Mondays.

I first saw the Happy Mondays at Manchester’s infamous Hacienda club when I was at university in Liverpool and they were at the height of their anarchic, chaotic brilliance.

Fifteen years and an industrial quantity of controlled drugs later – the band, not me (I’m a journalist. I have to put my alcoholism first) – they sounded tired and jaded, much like the 30-something audience they were playing to: there’s a certain irony in singing ’24 Hour Party People’ at 10.30pm in order to finish in time for an 11pm curfew.

Holding a mobile phone above your head in the Hacienda days would have involved a bionic arm, anabolic steroids and a reckless disregard for muggers.

Holding it above your head at the comeback gig would have meant you were searching for a signal so you could send a text to the au pair reminding her to make Grace take her Omega-3 tablets before bed.

Maybe I’m just too old. Maybe memories really are better if you download them to FaceBook or maybe I just realise that if I’d tried to capture N-Dubz and Tinchy Styder on my camera phone I’d have been stuck in a sub-menu trying to work out how to use the zoom until the house lights were up and everyone had gone home.

Not captured on my camera phone. This is N-Dubz. And no, apparently he's not being 'ironic'.

**** Life keeps getting in the way of blogging. My work has ‘relieved’ our freelance cover (got rid of, rather than sexually pleasured) and I am now working even harder than I did when I worked really, really hard. Interview went well. I felt your vibes. Even the slightly dirty ones from Tannerleah. ****