Lazy pop stars shouldn’t ask crowd to sing

Despite dwindling CD sales, being an international pop star is still a very well-paid profession. Even those who fail to bestride the international stage tend to do pretty well for themselves and most money these days is earned through live performance.

So it’s good when performers actually make an effort in exchange for these sums of cash.

That includes singing the words yourself, rather than getting the audience to do it for you.

Just because the crowd is bellowing along to a particular song, there’s no need to stop singing yourself and lazily hold the microphone in their general direction.

The audience has paid to watch you sing, not the other way round. And any singer caught ‘conducting’ the audience should be struck off immediately, if only pop stars could be struck off for malpractice, like doctors.

While it may be good for your rock star ego to hear loads of people hollering your song back at you, it invariably sounds rubbish to the rest of us. If we wanted to hear a muffled and tuneless rendition of a song, we’d play it on a cassette that’s been left in direct sunlight for 30 years.

Give them a stage and microphone and, sadly, most celebrities will share their ill-considered world view with anyone who’ll listen. I once heard one of those lame, pseudo-philosophical lectures that pop stars insist on giving between songs about the importance of being an individual, never following the herd and not allowing ‘the establishment’ to tell us what to do.

Said pop star then proceeded to demand everyone wave their hands in the air like a bunch of sheep, brilliantly demonstrating how no one had been listening to a word they were saying.