Results tagged “Santana” from Birmingham Mail - Is It Just Me

I was at the NEC at the weekend for Santana and maybe I am just becoming a miserable old git but why do people pay large wads of cash out for tickets for seats and then stand. We make football stadiums all seater and threaten to expel people who stand at matches or suspend licences of the clubs concerned but when it comes to concerts, in the dark, with loonies flailing arms around and gyrating about in some sort of trance, in once case at the NEC to a completely different rhythm to the music, no one bats an eyelid.

Now I was fortunate enough to be on the front row but that becomes an irrelevance when people with tickets for seats somewhere on the other side of the airport drift to the stage in the interval so that long before the show restarts the barrier is packed making front row seats redundant unless you like to watch bums and backs.

I often wonder if I am in the minority in actually preferring to sit and watch an act in relative comfort rather than standing for two and a half hours. I have a suspicion though that perhaps the minority are the ones who have never quite mastered the art of sitting and appreciating an artist at work. Maybe it is an attention deficit thing, hoping to be noticed by the celebrity, rather like the ones who have to cough or shout out when they know a live recording is being made or maybe they just don't have the attention span to sit still for a complete song, who knows?

Once a few stand then those behind them have no option if they want to see anything and so the domino effect spreads. One irony was that security came along, when the barrier was already heaving with people ,to say the front row had priority at the barrier. If they had cleared the barrier of interlopers the front row would not have had to stand and nor would the second row, nor the third row . . . starting to get the picture?