Sanitised concerts are just not the same thing
• Thanks to Covid-19, expect cleaner and safer live music gigs, but they will be pricier and audiences will be muted
Sanitised is a pejorative in the arts. It signals something safe and dull, a performance or piece that has stripped out the dirty, risky parts of life. But if the concert played by Travis McCready last week in the US points to the future, then the sanitised gig is about to become a staple experience.
McCready, a roots-rocker, played the first US licensed live show since the coronavirus pandemic hit. It took place in Fort Smith, a city in Arkansas.
The southern state has been among the least stringent in applying lockdown, but its entertainment venues were shuttered as elsewhere. Critics of the decision to permit the staging of McCready’s gig decried it as cavalier. Others welcomed it, not least in the live music industry which faces a possibly existential threat from Covid-19.
The venue, TempleLive, normally holds 1,100 people but made only 239 seated tickets available, most of which were sold. Groups of gig-goers sat apart in “fan pods”, leaving swathes of auditorium empty. All had to wear masks, apart from McCready and his band, positioned at a safe remove from their sparse audience.
A video shows a desolate scene of the near-empty venue, with a smattering of people boogying grimly and trying the odd muffled whoop through their masks. The company that owns the venue made no profit, and is not planning another gig until August.
“It’s clearly not a financial decision that we did this,” its president told the New York Times. But financial decisions will have to be faced when the live music industry tries to reopen.
Temperature checks, invigilated toilets, social distancing and safe queuing for drinks and merchandise will have to be incorporated into events. Gig-goers must prepare to find themselves in a gathering marginally jollier than a wake and possibly less well-attended.
Ingenious alternatives are being trialled for live music. Online gigs and performances in video games such as Minecraft have opened up digital dimensions. Drive-in concerts are being staged, with punters sitting in their cars and listening on their radios to the show as it unfolds on a platform in front of them.
But none of these ventures can adequately replace the sense of being with other people at a musical event.
Audiences are crucial to live music. Not always in a good way — the tall person who contrives to stand in front of you; the group yakking loudly during your favourite song; the louts who think it a jape to throw vessels full of unsanitary liquid over people: all these can induce feelings of the most profound misanthropy.
But that is the price to pay for the subtle ways in which public and performer interact at concerts, the degree to which each shapes the course of the evening.
The best concerts are an exercise in communication at multiple levels, collectively and individually. Until the pandemic is over — curtain down, no encore — the sanitised gig will be the way for venues to hold concerts. Ticket prices will increase to make them viable. A trend towards high-end experiences will be amplified.
Construction on the MSG Sphere in Las Vegas has been halted indefinitely by the crisis, but this $1.66bn arena, with state-of-the-art audiovisual technology, may come to symbolise a trend towards luxury gig-going, an individualised version of a mass event.
In the UK, ticket prices for gigs have been rising in the past decade. So too has the number of illegal raves: there were almost 700 in 2017, an increase of 10% on the previous year. Young people are least at risk from the coronavirus; they are also less likely to be able to afford the high prices that sanitised gigs will require.
Unlicensed events will surely proliferate, a shadow live circuit to the official one. The sanitised gig will breed its illicit opposite, organised according to the generational divide that Covid-19 has brought so starkly to the surface.
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