Wednesday columnist Zella Compton was shocked at behaviour when she took her daughters to a music gig

It’s been a long time since I was covered in beer, but that’s what happened on Saturday night when I took my daughters to a gig in Portsmouth. It’s hugely important that young people get to see live music, and experience the absolute and extreme joy of being in a crowd choir, of sharing a bigger experience.

It might not be the coolest thing to go with your mother, but on the other hand, if she’s paying, providing transport and also buying the coke (cola), that factor is fairly easy to get over.

But I honestly thought that there was no need to prep ourselves for beerthrowing. Isn’t that a thing of the past?

The only times you see it these days is surely the extreme few at festivals who are away from their parents for the first time, have chucked a roll of toilet roll (how they’ll regret that in the morning when they find out portable loos aren’t as well stocked as their home’s bathroom) and have a crazy notion to rebel by winging a plastic cup?

Seriously, I honestly believed that the world had moved on.

Perhaps it was because it was a tribute to the Stone Roses that some members of the audience thought they were back in 1989 when beer-chucking was all the rage.

I suppose back then it was a mating ritual as boys weren’t able to express their emotions with anything more than a grunt or an act of ‘comedic’ violence.

I’m trying not to think it was because they were idiots.

When bottled water and a buffet of drugs took over we all hoped it was the end of the lager-spraying louts for a while – well, for 30 years until The Total Stone Roses came to Portsmouth’s excellent Wedgewood Rooms and somehow the audience was incited into regressive action.

At one point I thought beer was actually being poured into the back of my boots. The lady next to me was about ready to punch someone if she’d found the perpetrators – and quite a few of those in my vicinity were going as her wing-women.

And as for the prat in front of me who thought he’d get a high-five for his beer-spraying finale, filmed by his mate? You’re an 80s idiot.

At one point I thought beer was actually being poured into the back of my boots.