Is crowd behaviour worse than ever? There’s certainly plenty of evidence that behaviour is thoughtlessly unpleasant from all across society. Theatres are reporting audiences regularly ignoring the stage and looking at phones, even talking to people on them during performances or shouting things out at performers, even during a play.
Others turn up to those popular musicals drunk and start fights or start screaming the songs at the top of their voice to everyone’s chagrin.
Then there’s the gig filmers. The people who do it are seemingly the only ones not annoyed by it, to the extent that many artists are banning phones because people just ignore verbal pleas. The need to document rather than live life seems irresistible to them. And then there’s the talkers for whom the gig seems to be getting in the way of their conversation.
Then there’s the abuse, most recently seen at the Ryder Cup. Imagine behaving like that? I know Americans who were embarrassed by such thick-necked, crude, stupid behaviour. Not that some of our football fans are any better. The flare-up-bum was only the extreme end of it. Crowds of coke-snorting men, shouting abuse at whoever, is the norm. We’ve all seen it at every level.
I was caught up in an Edinburgh Oasis crowd and it was just like football. Heedless chanting, banging on passing cars, pissing in gardens. It was like the ’70s all over again.
Some ascribe it to people seeking to impress on social media, others to the division culture wars bring, others yet to the prevailing political atmosphere of intolerance and aggression. Certainly, I wouldn’t hesitate to name the hideous big-mouthed, frog-faced skid mark on the country’s underpants as a deliberate provoker and enabler of nastiness and intolerance. I’m constantly amazed that some can’t see through the duplicitous nature of an obvious charlatan and despair of the media’s failure to scrutinize him. He and those like him have made things worse than they were for us all, but then, far more clever, less self-obsessed, bigger bigoted brains have walked the same path many times before and garnered similar reactions. It’s nothing new. We’ve fought it before and will do it again.
It’s tempting to think it’s all a modern affliction and there are certainly modern manifestations which find expression exclusively in this rather fraught era. But the fact is some in crowds have always behaved horribly, wallowing in the anonymity of them, as any amount of stadium tragedies will testify to.
Going to a match in the ’70s was like joining a frontline battle unit in Vietnam. You took it completely for granted and thought nothing of it because the working class lived harsh lives full of aggression and abuse every day. You learned to run fast and plotted getaway routes and ‘safe’ areas. Pints of Cameron’s Strongarm instead of cocaine might have been the intoxicant of choice but it provoked aggressive behaviour all the same.
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Where things have changed is in what I call ‘hey, we’re here too’ behaviour. Frequently reported as people acting like they’re not actually in public but are in their front rooms. It’s speculated that a post-Covid generation of people forgot or didn’t learn how to respond in a public environment and so conduct everything with little regard to anyone else. ‘Screen individualism’ is so de facto the norm, where you and only you matter and are at the heart of every situation, that it leaks out into dysfunctional socialisation.
Then again people were shouting “Judas” at Bob Dylan 60 years ago and there were many examples of crowd behaviour getting out of hand, as anyone who has seen the film of the Stones at Altamont in 1969 can confirm.
And let’s not forget, the vast majority aren’t behaving atrociously. We’re here as well.
The reason it feels so new is, I think, because by and large, we have gone through a less oppressive situation in the last 30 years. Things had gotten better – with a few notable exceptions. But in recent times, people who apparently “want their country back” are setting fire to hotels in the name of free speech, though seem unable to say what they protest so vigorously that they can’t say and are the most passionate of flag-shaggers, have seen their chance to revert to the values of 1973, their preferred reality. And dreadful, self-loathing types like Joey Barton nakedly seek to stop hating themselves by monetising hate and miserabilism. They think we don’t see through the grift. They now feel liberated from the grip of 40 years of ‘political correctness’ which had inhibited them from abusing who they liked, when they liked. And they call that oppression.
So in other words, the usual selfish, ignorant twats. It’s just a phase, it’s all just a phase. This too shall pass.
