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Soundtracks of Our Lives week ending 7 October 2012 CE
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IanB
IanB
6761 posts

Edited Oct 09, 2012, 09:11
Re: Soundtracks of Our Lives week ending 7 October 2012 CE
Oct 09, 2012, 09:05
machineryelfYou live in London, where audiences are [or wer wrote:
generally more blase than elsewhere, go see Saxon in Whitehaven, it will restore your faith in the ability of rock n roll to gather the scum together to celebrate the joys of dionysian excess to a level that would make any sane mortal run for the hills [which is probably a bad idea as that is where most of the audience have justed arrived from, the hills indeed do have eyes], it would seem your going to the wrong gigs in the wrong place ;-)


Could be a London thing. I have not been to a proper Metal show in a very long time (I am not really counting Kiss in that category and their Wembley crowd were a bit blah tbh). Since Dio died there is no one I really want to see. ACDC maybe but not in a field or a hanger.

Generally I find that Jazz and Classical concert audiences are still there for the music. You can feel that there is a two-way exchange of energy.

Rock audiences at anything above club level seem to be there, as you say, for the event and to tick a box in their profile. As are a lot of Opera attendees in my experience. They have a lot in common with stadium / arena rock crowds as it happens and not just a tolerance for ruinously high ticket prices. You can tell when 2500 people are really paying attention and when they are just being passive consumers or fulfilling a social / tribal / class obligation.

Perhaps there is something in your Springsteen comment that is true for fans in general. A lot of avowed fans don't seem to do the deep catalogue thing any more. They know the hits and highlights but not much else. What they do seem to have is a more superficial knowledge of a wider range of music. The quid pro quo is that their passions don't run very deep. Even the few people I know who went to see LZ at the O2 came back with reports of ther being a great many "tourists" tapping away on their mobiles for much of the show.

Last three or four Black Crowes tours had the old school atmosphere of a room full of people abandoning themselves to music. Spiritualized and Magma at the Barbican a couple of years ago and the Dammers Arkestra thing at RFH were also transcendent experiences. In a different way from the Crowes but they had that heightened buzz factor even in auditoriums (auditoria?) as un-rock as those two. Can't think of too many other shows in the last decade or two that did have that sense of collective lift-off.
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Re: Soundtracks of Our Lives week ending 7 October 2012 CE (machineryelf)
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