Thursday, 5 November 2009
Consuming A-Ha
07:05 | 
Posted by
Agi Bergman
We've been to an A-Ha concert on the 3rd of October, at the Manchester Evening News Arena.
Photographically speaking, since I am not a press photographer by any stretch of the imagination, I only had my Canon Ixus 980 IS with me which got pushed to the limit. Or rather it pushed me to the limit. I took quite a lot of shots, battled terrible camera shake as I could not bump up the ISO without risking significant loss of image quality. I could have gone up to ISO 1600 but even then shutter speed did not improve significantly. After ISO 400 the camera really struggles and forget any post-processing.
I set the camera on multiple shots mode to be able to fire several shots in quick succession and increase my chances of actually getting one decent one without much camera shake. That's one way of dealing with low-light conditions, if you've not got a great camera or a tripod with release cable attached to it. Equally, since we were seated relatively far from the stage, I had to use the top 15x digital magnification facility of the camera. I have managed to take few memorable shots, but they are a far cry from what any old DSRL could do, in fact they remain a visual interpretation rather than actual pictures.
Musings...
To explain the title of this post. The concert was advertised for 7:30 and we've arrived just on time. There were no standing places, just neatly placed seats. And this is crucial. People are not allowed to stand in the middle squashed like sardines any more and just dance and sing and accord their undivided attention to the event.
We had a treatment from the Donkey Boys, a Norwegian band of some 20 something foetuses with 80s revival music. They sounded good and their music was inventive, fun yet had a familiarity to it. It is retro to them but home turf to you and me over 40! This was the first time I've ever heard of them ,and I am sure I was not alone in this. After about five songs we've had a 15 minute intermission which brought us to the hour and a half mark before finally A-Ha made its appearance. The gig was great, visually captivating with well designed, colourful sets and live video projection unto huge screens. They played as anyone would expect, although I found the performance a bit tempered, in part I assume it is due to the unfamiliarity of some of the material played, but generally it has been well received by the audience. There were some well placed 80s A-Ha hits and the encore with three of their biggest numbers from the good old days injected life into the audience. The sound system failed noticeably twice but what the heck! It's A-Ha.
What really bugged me is how a large proportion of the audience have treated this occasion as if they were watching TV at home. The place reminded me of a busy bus station rather than a concert hall! People kept on walking up and down during the concert, everybody was eating, drinking alcohol, and mainly beer which has the unfortunate consequence of a.) being of large volume and b.) running through your system like a freight train, thus people needing a pee shortly after consumption, which means, yet again, another occasion to make the whole row of people stand up twice. Mad! These people have the attention span of a chipmunk! And because they paid their way, in their mind it entitles them to the God given right to behave as they did; like spoiled, petulant children. Members of a sexually repressed and orally fixated nation, whose drinking and eating habits are notorious for their excesses, who can not spend a TV programme or a concert without stuffing something into their orifices. In a popular culture dominated by the visual media and a large part by television, people forgot how to behave at a live performance. Not only to honour the artists who do their best to entertain but to respect others who just want to watch the show.
Take the couple behind us. They came in the middle of the first band playing balancing a full pint of beer and a wine glass. The guy got up few minutes later to refill, another pint of beer and a tiny bottle for the lady of what smelled like a vodka shot of some sort. Then the woman went out to pee, I presume, and when she returned few minutes later the guy went out and brought back another beer. And when A-Ha were into their fourth song they just got up and left for good, maybe to beat the traffic well ahead everybody else?
There is actually a certain logic and choreography to an organised event like this that becomes an “experience”. Note the word: organised. They are not dissimilar to a cruise holiday, a theme park or a shopping centre in the UK and it is not dictated by people’s free will but rather by retail psychology. And this is where being seated becomes important. You have to be seated in order to be disciplined and passive. A concert like this has become just a background noise for the people whose cultural education and horizon does not stretch further than the wall-to-wall flat screen TV in their living room. But it is not only about that. Deeply we are all conditioned into behaving like spoiled children indulging to excess. Thus, on the surface the Pavlovian reflexes to stimulus manifest themselves in the inability to resist the temptations presented in the form of alcohol, food and merchandise. The event is invisibly choreographed into a well-rehearsed routine delineated by the geographic design of the place and you, the consumer is tactfully guided through the process, at the end of it, you have your belly and your mobile's memory card filled, your eardrums throbbing, your head spinning and in your hand a plastic bag proclaiming "been there, got the teeshirt". And so the great A-Ha is consumed, becomes something that is part of what is being ingested in many senses, not least by the many who record the memorable occasion on their mobile phones or on their Ixus 980 ISs...
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