U2 show overshadowed by drunk crowd behaviour: Cameron Adams

If you’re paying hundreds of dollars to see your favourite artists or bands the last thing you want is to have someone pull an umbrella, or worse, be urinated on, writes Cameron Adams.

Concerts unite thousands of people who love to watch music performed live.

They also bring out not just the worst in people, but some of the worst people who have no concept of concert etiquette.

A few recent stadium shows have highlighted the equation: more people, more problems.

A friend at the U2 Melbourne concert was happily enjoying the band showcasing The Joshua Tree when she felt something wet on the back of her leg.

It wasn’t the rain, but rather than some drunk gronk whose neanderthal brain figured that they’d just urinate on the GA area of Marvel Stadium (which, being a concert with 60,000 people in attendance, was full) rather than waste precious time using the actual toilet facilities.

Another U2 fan had somehow smuggled an umbrella past all the bag checks and patdowns (that’s another alarm bell ringer for another time) and decided it’d be fine to open it when the rain started, without a thought about the people behind her whose views were blocked. The precise reason umbrellas aren’t allowed at concerts.

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Luckily, Marvel Stadium has a party trick where its roof can close, so Mary Poppins could relax and her gig neighbours could see the show.

Maybe save your conversation for after Bono is done? Picture: Simone Joyner/Getty

No one’s saying you shouldn’t enjoy a drink while enjoying your favourite band, but it’s always curious watching people so inebriated they wouldn’t know if they were watching a U2 show or a U2 cover band.

Shout out to the drunk couple trying to crowbar themselves into the end of seated aisles rather than head back to the standing room floor, filming the top of peoples’ heads, spilling their drinks on punters and singing the wrong words loudly. That footage is going to be fun to watch back.

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And let’s not forget the loud talkers. OK you may not have seen your friend for a while, but is a U2 concert really the best place to literally shout updates on your kids’ toilet training victories to all in earshot during the quiet emotional build up in With Or Without You? Or should we ask Bono to keep it down so you can have your conversation?

The U2 crowd had all the hallmarks of people who go to one gig every five years and left their kids, and their gig manners, at home.

Then there was the RNB Fridays concert at the same stadium. Much younger fanbase, just as rotten in parts.

You know things are grim when, at 6pm, someone outside is so sozzled their girlfriend is literally manipulating their legs in a walking action to appease police who clocked them as cooked.

Things at RNB Fridays got messy for some punters. Picture: Kamil/Mushroom

Inside was no better. There was some seriously impressive power-boozing on display – a cynic would call it binge-drinking – with the small crowd necking their $15 cocktails.

More shout outs: the diminutive lady who found a chair, somehow knobbled the legs off it to make it stool sized, and propped herself on that all night, building a fort of jumpers and empty cans around it. She also showed respect for her fellow gig goers by whipping out the nicotine vape she’d got in (the mind boggles) and creating indoor clouds. Classy.

And we haven’t even got into phone use at gigs, a new technology but already an old bugbear.

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While there’s now a handful of artists (Jack White, Madonna) who are banning fans from bringing phones into concerts, it’s now a given you’re going to see two shows at a concert – the actual gig and a sea of phones filming a shitty version of it in your eye line.

More hilarious are the boomers dragging iPads along to concerts (just … no) and the people of all ages who simply must take selfie after selfie (still and video) of themselves at the concert. And then watch it and retake it. And then again.

There’s more concert etiquette issues – the sit or stand dilemma, space invaders.

But at gigs, as in life, the general rule applies – don’t be a dick.

Cameron Adams is a national music writer.

Originally published as U2 show overshadowed by drunk crowd behaviour: Cameron Adams