Gay pride Britney fans endure rail misery
Train operator accused of putting concertgoers’ safety ‘in jeopardy’ at overcrowded station
THE organisers of Britain’s biggest gay pride event have accused a rail firm of causing chaos that left thousands of revellers stranded after a concert by Britney Spears.
Chaotic scenes outside Brighton station meant many people were unable to get home from the event held in Preston Park on Saturday.
A Brighton Pride spokesman criticised Govia Thameslink’s insufficient services on its Southern line which put “people’s safety in jeopardy”.
“On one of the hottest Saturdays of the year, many Pride-goers and visitors to the city were unable to get home to London and other destinations, due to insufficient train services,” he added.
“People’s safety was put in jeopardy by GTR and the station’s failure to plan for adequate train services.”
Alex Milsom, 20, who was in the station trying to get home to London after the event, said he saw three people collapse and four or five others experiencing panic attacks. “It was really scary, I was crying and I was a shaking mess,” the university student said. “There was absolutely no movement and it was managed so badly.” Mr Milsom said the disorder caused him to have a panic attack, which resulted in his almost being split up from his friends as staff tried to put them on different trains.
Geraldine Carr, 38, another traveller, said she arrived at the station at 11.50pm hoping to catch a train back to London, and described the situation as a “shambles”, finally getting home at 5am. “The queue was insane. When the barriers opened, people were slowly being let in, but this of course led to people being pushed and shoved,” she added. “I saw one woman have a panic attack and could not see any paramedics around to help.”
Crowd control measures were also implemented at Three Bridges station in Crawley, where some passengers changed for trains to London. More than 100,000 people arrived by rail on Saturday which broke the record for Brighton station by almost 40,000. After the event, many people were said to have given up trying to travel and headed to the beach instead which led to the police calling in coastguards as fears grew that people would be pushed into the sea. Peter Kyle, the MP for Hove and Portslade, wrote on Twitter: “I’m truly sorry to people who are unable to return home tonight due to lack of transport. We will learn from this, it will not happen again.”
A Govia Thameslink spokesman said: “We ran 15 extra trains yesterday in addition to the plan agreed with the event organisers to cope with the unprecedented visitor numbers. The police closed access to Brighton station for a period to manage crowding in the town, after which our extra trains helped clear the station steadily. We are talking to the organisers and police about whether we need to enhance today’s timetable with extra capacity.”
GTR, which runs Southern Rail, overhauled its timetable for its Thameslink franchise in May in order to run more trains each day, resulting in dozens of cancellations. Earlier this year, Southern was rated the worst rail service for the third year running in a Which? survey, with a customer satisfaction score of just 28 per cent.
Pop
Britney Spears Preston Park, Brighton
Last week, Britney Spears made the headlines. Not for having a public meltdown – those days are long behind her – but for laughing during her Piece of Me Tour. Before uttering her famous catchphrase, “It’s Britney, bitch” in Gimme More, a fan shouted “WHO IS IT?” and Spears’s polished shell was cracked. The same thing happened in Brighton on Saturday, the opening leg of her first UK tour in seven years. It was a lone moment of personality, a chink in her showbiz armour.
Footage of the Las Vegas residency that inspired this tour – and completed the resuscitation of her career since its head-shaving nadir in 2007 – has been online for years, along with the set list. There were no surprises in this Pride Festival headliner.
Instead, Spears delivered an oil-slick rampage through her back catalogue. While her microphone headset has become a trademark – fans had made their own from pipe cleaners – the focus was not on singing. Rather, Spears’s famously overproduced vocals drifted into the air, competing with the crowd’s frenzied screams, as she gyrated in a seemingly endless variety of spangled bodysuits.
Twenty-five songs were crammed into less than two hours, broken up with fade-to-black flashes that, for the briefest moment, left the whites of Spears’s eyes and perfect smile gleaming in the dark. Her dance moves felt somehow too fast for the juddering beats they accompanied. A fan came on stage; Spears walked him on a lead like a dog, then magically signed a T-shirt and sent him packing within the space of 30 seconds.
To watch her perform is to witness a remarkable feat of athleticism – it telescopes time and leaves one feeling vaguely exhausted.
The fact she doesn’t sing it all is well-known. As one of her managers said when her residency opened: “There’s no way you can dance and sing the entire time.” What actually came out of Spears’s mouth that evening remains a mystery – the cameras never zoomed to her face, but kept her pulsating body perfectly framed for the entire show.
And while this felt like a simulacrum of a pop concert, it was also undeniably fun. Spears usually performs to 2,400 people in a theatre in Nevada; on Saturday she played to 57,000 devoted fans who had been drinking all day. What was lost in the subtleties of her ribbon dance was compensated for in sheer, giddy adulation. I can imagine watching giant video projections of Will.i.am singing Scream and Shout – Spears didn’t appear on stage for this song – must be hollow anywhere other than in Preston Park, where it was just another number to dance to.
Inventive twists were given to well-loved songs to keep the crowd hanging on through yet another dance break. Toxic was prized out with a tantalising glockenspiel build-up, ...Baby One More Time was updated with heavier guitar licks and stadium drums.
In this context, it’s easy to see how much of her production-heavy, personality-lite pop has filtered into the work of recent artists. Spears’s fingerprints are all over the stadiumsized bombast of Taylor Swift’s Reputation Stadium Tour, for instance, and in the heft of Lady Gaga’s club hits.
The process of seeing Spears live remains more of a bewildering experience than an enchanting one. We’ll probably never be allowed to see her soul on stage, nor the vulnerabilities that can transform pop into an addictive art form. But who can blame her? After 20 turbulent years in the spotlight, it’s amazing that there are any pieces of Britney left to give.