Honey, they shrunk Mick and Keith . . .
SEEING THE STONES? TAKE BINOCULARS!
When I was seven, I used to enjoy playing with tiny little Airfix soldiers, which were roughly the same size as the puller on a zip.
Some were running, some kneeling down and shooting, and others falling over backwards, having just been shot.
You’d get about 100 in a box, each of them attached to a central plastic twig.
A little twist would release the individual soldiers from the twig, and then you’d be ready to start laying them out on the floor for the battle. I have ve some idea that you were meant to paint them, but I never bothered. Memories of these tiny soldiers came to mind as I sat in the Olympic Stadium in London last week, staring at the little figures on the stage hundreds of yards s away, and struggling to work out which Rolling Stone was which.
Placing my y thumb and forefinger s at arm’s length, I worked d out that Mick and Keith and Ronnie were exactly the same height as my old Airfix men. I wasn’t even sitting in the most distant area of the stadium: at least a third of the audience of 80,000 were further away from the stage.
I’d guess that barely a tenth of the whole audience were close enough to the stage to be able to tell which was which. In fact, without the vast screens to reassure us, most of us could have been watching The Bay City Rollers or The RolyPolys miming to old Stones tracks and we would have left the stadium none the wiser.
It is, of course, these screens that make all the difference. Like largescale CCTV cameras, they serve to convince you that what you see is what you get, or rather, that what you would have seen is what you would have got, had you been wealthy enough to buy tickets 200 yards closer to the stage.
At the Stones’ concert, these ‘premium’ tickets, for the ‘ Gold Circle Standing Area’, cost £249.95 each, or £282.45, including the booking fee. even the cheapest craneattheback tickets were priced at just under £100.
Such moneyspinning was only made possible by the invention of the huge screen with a live relay, which is now as essential to the stadium concert as the electric lift is to the skyscraper. As it is, most of the audience doesn’t watch the concert, but a live film of the concert. In fact, it could as easily be a film of a concert that took place last year, and no one would have a clue. every now and then, I tried to remind myself that I was at a live concert and not an outdoor cinema. I did this by moving my eyes from the screen down to the little Airfix figures on the stage. But what was the point? Without the screen, I had no way of telling whether the little tle c chap at the fron front was Mick Jag Jagger rather than than, say, Kylie Min Minogue or, ind indeed, Jacob ReA ReesMogg. And though th the screens are huge, from a distance th they are no bi bigger than a television. te Yet lots lo of people were pointing their h phones at the distant screens, filming the f film, so that t they could view it later on a matchbox matchboxsized sized screen. scree It was all very odd. This is not to say that the Rolling Stones were on poor form. Far from it: Mick Jagger really does move like a man half his age, and his voice is exactly as it was 37 years ago, when they last had a topten hit.
FOR
his part, Keith Richards strands there perfectly contentedly, and, if he can’t be bothered to play all the notes, most of the audience are so far away they probably won’t notice.
It was not their fault the acoustics of the London Stadium are hopeless, making even the most perfect performance sound like the din from next door’s garage.
Once it was over, 80,000 Rolling Stones fans threaded their way back to Stratford Tube station buzzing with the excitement of it all.
Was I the only sourpuss, the only one left thinking that I could have had the same experience for free by sitting in a field watching the Stones on television through binoculars held the wrong way round?