Can’t Get This Out of My Head

Yes, I’m riffing on the monster Kylie hit of (sort of) the same name.  But there’s a good reason for that.  I’m going to talk about a Kylie concert I went to this Bank Holiday Monday just gone.

My friend Matt and I paid an extortionate amount (I won’t say how much, or you’ll fall off your chair in shock) for a full-on VIP service with front-row seats at the O2 in London.  We did that not because we’re actual VIPs, but because we were desperate.  We’d been online-queuing for tickets for hours, hanging on the phone to each-other in a white-hot frenzy of stress.  First, the system kept mistaking me for a bot and throwing me out of the queue.  Then Matt had tickets in his basket but forgot his Ticketmaster password.  By the time he recovered it, the tickets were gone.

It was all too much, so we went VIP.  Our credit cards would just have to suffer.

A couple of weeks before the date, I read an article about how annoying it is when people keep getting their phones out to film gigs.  I couldn’t have agreed more.  My husband and I spent our first ‘proper’ date at a The Darkness gig, during which Justin Hawkins stopped ‘I Believe in a Thing Called Love’ right in the middle.  With spitting rage, he demanded everyone put their phones away and “just fucking enjoy the moment” before re-starting the song from the top.  It was glorious, especially as I don’t film gigs anyway, so I also got to feel nice and smug.

That all changed at the Kylie concert.  Being in the frontest of front rows, within actual touching distance of the stage, compelled me to whip my phone out immediately.  Then I kept snapping and filming different portions of the gig, essentially watching the best moments (like Kylie striding right past me!) through my screen.  So did everyone else.  It was both soul-destroying and completely addictive.

We were THIS close. (Yes I’m bragging, what of it?)

In the article I linked to, the author mentions filming for an “ephemeral internet buzz” and that he hasn’t watched any of the concert clips he captured.

None of those things apply to me.  I’m not on social media, so I didn’t share the clips or the photos – well, apart from the ones I’ve used here! – and I have watched them again and again.

I wish I hadn’t felt so compelled to take them, though.  I wish the rest of us hadn’t either.  Even as I pointed my phone at her so ravenously, I wondered how Kylie – how any entertainer – must feel, performing to people so desperate to capture the moment for later, they’ve forgotten to revel in its unique, here-and-now wondrousness.  It feels deeply disrespectful.

(I’m also reminded of a surprise 21^st birthday party I went to for a friend’s daughter.  When we all greeted her with the obligatory “surprise!”, she couldn’t see our faces.  Just the backs of a dozen lit-up phones, all filming her reaction).

“The backs of our heads are popping up so much!”

The other thing about filming at concerts is that you’ll end up in other people’s myriad pictures and videos on social media.  I know this because Matt messaged me the day after the concert, saying he’d seen “at least 15 videos of your hair bouncing and my ‘good’ finger pointing!” (Don’t ask about his ‘bad’ finger).

I don’t know how I feel about strangers watching me pogoing to Get Outta My Way in a glittery haze of sweat and make-up, but I can hardly complain about it.  Especially not when half a dozen strangers’ heads and hands feature in my own videos.

(God, it’s all just so grubby and weird, isn’t it?)

Put it this way: I won’t be doing any more filming at gigs. 

Yes, I’ve watched all the videos I filmed at the Kylie concert.  But none of them come close to capturing the awe and wonder I felt at being that close to an icon I’ve loved since I was 12.  There used to be a superstition that taking photographs would steal a part of your soul, and as I looked at my videos, I sort-of got why.  In taking them, I’d erased part of the actual experience. In those moments, I wasn’t really there.

You can’t film a feeling; or at least I can’t. So, from now on I’m going to hang back and “just fucking enjoy the moment”.