If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?
This thought experiment is centuries old, loosely linked to 18th century writings by Irish philosopher George Berkeley. It’s been itching brains ever since, forcing questions of perception, experience and awareness.
One, two, skip a few and it’s late 2025 and here I am to crudely and unacademically pose an updated version: If you go to a concert and don’t get a video, were you really there?
There are two big gripes about modern-day concert going, phone use and talking. I’m firmly anti-yapping. Last summer I bought a very last-minute solo ticket to see Stevie Nicks in the 3Arena and unfortunately stationed myself beside a woman who gabbed away through most of the set, proclaiming with her full chest how much of a Stevie fan she was and loudly worrying that she might “miss it” if she went to the bar or the toilet. “It” was the song Landslide, which anyone could have told her would be the last one of the show. In fact I did tell her that, before finally deciding to move away from her through the tightly packed crowd. I’m not ashamed to say that when the opening bars of Landslide played out at the end of the concert I did fervently wish that she was in a soundproof toilet cubicle.
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Phone use at shows is something I’m much more easy-going about, and I view it as audience and artist dependent. Modern crowds consume their culture via their screens. They’re used to holding their phones aloft and zooming in to watch what’s on stage. Posting content to social media is part of the experience. Artists depend on viral moments and concert memes. Sanctimonious hand-wringing about a doomed generation’s failure to live in the moment leaves me cold.
Earlier this month I went to a gig that explicitly asked for no phone use. It was the hottest ticket in town, the Fred Again show in the RDS. Fred Again, aka Fred Gibson, is an English DJ and producer. Gibson only gave a few days’ notice of the Dublin gig, part of a series of 10 pop-up gigs around the world. He and his team instigated a no-phones policy at all of these gigs, informing ticket holders that they would be provided a sticker upon entry to cover the camera on their device. A message read; “There’s a level of togetherness we can get to when our cameras are away and we’re all present.”
Despite my largely neutral stance on phones at gigs, I was thrilled with this ban. I know, it’s only a sticker, and in a crowd of 7,000 people there was nobody enforcing the request but as a rule follower and a phone addict I knew that my lickarse tendencies would outweigh my urge to video the show. I accepted my sticker with gusto on the way in. The best girl.
I sometimes worry that I might only be doing things so I can capture the sight or event or moment with my phone. So I can have a clip to perhaps add to an end-of-year Instagram montage. So people on the internet think I’m an interesting person with varied interests. God, how depressing. My phone use at a concert usually depends on the artist and the venue but, no matter what, I’ll at least snap a photo to “prove” I was there. At Fred Again the no-phone rule being the status quo took that option out of my hands. By not filming I proved that I was there, in the moment. Except that I posted about it on Instagram before and after.
Fred Again played for a marathon three hours, joyous thumping music with crescendos and beat drops. As the time went on more and more phones were held aloft. I’d guess that maybe 10 per cent of people removed their stickers, many to just grab one quick sliver of evidence that they were there. As Fred said in his pre-show message, “I wanna create a space where we can all be under one roof together for a few hours”. In the next breath he reassured fans that the show was all being professionally filmed for Apple Music, whose sweeping microphones and many cameras were infinitely more distracting than the phones. Now, if someone could just ban me from using mine on the couch or in bed, that would be fantastic.
