I love going to gigs, but a new trend has recently been ruining my nights out. It's not flags (which have now been banned at festivals), and I'm not sure exactly when it started creeping in, but I was most recently afflicted by this new nuisance standing in a drizzly Berkshire field at Reading Festival.
Anticipation for Radiohead's show began the moment they were announced as headliners back in the spring. But months later, as the set opener, Creep, fluttered in, and Thom Yorke's lips parted to expel the first line, things went ever so wrong. The sun-scorched guy in the Day-Glo wife-beater beside me stopped poking the air and started SHOUTING the lyrics. I ducked, thinking someone would throw their pint at him. A few seconds passed, but there was no beer shower, and I began to realise that Yorke's voice had been replaced by a hoarse rabble, because everyone around me was singing as loudly and proudly. I moved around the crowd in search of Yorke's falsetto, to no avail. This supermassive gig, from the most important band of my generation, with a voice that breaks angels' hearts, was drowned out by the very people who came to hear it.
This self-absorbed sing-along was sort of a given with Blur's recent Hyde Park show, as their songs feature pub chants and have long been club anthems, but why do this with Yorke's vertiginous croon?
Like most things, I blame the internet. The web has been responsible for the democratisation of many things, but karaoke is one of the weirdest explosions online, with people believing the world would be a better place if they uploaded their webcam rendition of Britney's Toxic to the dung heap that is YouTube. When looking for tracks online, I've discovered many of the videos are of people playing the 18m-selling SingStar, a computer game that involves mimicking your favourite singers. I was shocked to discover at a recent party that amid the X Factor favourites, my friend could even download Radiohead, but the drunkest guy at the party didn't dare sing along to Karma Police. A few weeks on and atonal noises are leaving the mouths of those around me like we're at a Singalonga.net musical, "where you, the audience, are the stars of the show".
Maybe I'm a killjoy, and perhaps it's wrong to expect that if you pay £175 (for a weekend ticket, or £70 for a day ticket), you will actually hear the headliner. I'm all for crowd participation, and I'm not saying gigs need the same rules as the cinema, but surely something as sacred, special and increasingly expensive as live music should be treated with a degree of respect? At the very least, in this on-demand, added-value era of extreme choice, the segregation of crowds, like quiet train carriages, isn't unreasonable, is it?
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If promoters offered premium areas for those who want to wave flags/crowd surf/be a 7ft nudist, they could easily do that. Hell, why not go a step further and ask bands to play instrumental sets for those impersonators who want to see the band and sing along. Meanwhile, I guess I'll have to make do with the iPlayer version of the show.
Sean Adams is editor of the website Drownedinsound.com