I pay to see a performance. I drive there, I park, I wait wait wait while the performers fucks about back stage. I listen to the sound guy saying ‘check 1-2’ eight hundred and fifty times. I get pushed and repositioned by strangers. My nose gets assaulted with booze, cheap colognes, weed, sweat, flatulence and halitosis. I wait some more…
I blast through my iPhone battery its ridiculous. Why? Cuz I am still waiting for the act to come out and entertain me. When you do finally show up what I chose to do with my fucking phone is up to me. I dont care if you find it rude (how bout you showing up on stage on time? Wanna talk rude?) or distracting (be real asshole you cant see past the front couple rows of the audience under the blazing lights.) How about you shut the hell up and let me do what I want and I will shut the fuck up and pay your bills.
Ian Astbury is a gigantic asshole for his Florida rant and even with this quality explanation- a serious fucking idiot. Why did the guy bother to go to the show? Who the hell cares-he is there, he paid up and you have no right blowing your snot water down on anyone you has been piece of shit.
Here’s his verbal vomit
“Initially the guy was filming the whole show — he was filming everything,” Astbury tells Vanyaland.com. “It’s kind of a disease that we have where people aren’t present and after while it kind of trips you up, it becomes a distraction. Usually you don’t let things like that trip you out, but when it’s right in front of you doing it… one guy was sitting on the side of the stage eating cake [laughs] and that tripped me out too, but I went over and ate his cake.”
“When you have habitual filming going on, it’s disruptive to the performance,” continued Astbury. “When you’ve got someone visualizing the show through a cell phone, that action spreads out through the crowd. And this genius, first of all, I politely asked him to stop filming; I don’t mind if you take pictures, that’s cool, filming little bits – but don’t film the entire set; enough’s enough. At first I was kind of amused, but the next thing, he’s texting during a song. That’s incredibly disruptive, watching people in the front row so disconnected from the process — not even present. You might as well stay at home.”
“I commented to this guy, ‘Will you please stop texting?’ He didn’t pay attention,” Astbury explained. “I had water in my mouth, I sprayed it right next to him, and he just exploded — exploded; trying to climb over the barriers, trying to get into a fight with me, he’s flipping me off, he’s screaming at me, ‘Fuck you…’ And I was just like, ‘You’re rude. This is our house, you’re behaving disrespectfully, you’re disruptive, you’re affecting the functioning of the whole evening, and you’re disconnected — so why bother coming?’”
“Initially when we walk out onstage, pretty much 60 percent of the audience had a phone up,” says the singer. “That’s pretty much just the way it now, upfront, and that’s cool, we have no problem with that. But when it bleeds into the entire show and you’re doing songs like ‘Embers’, for example, which is a very intimate song, a very revealing song, and people are just really disconnected and it does break the spell. It’s like a cancerous cell of disconnection in the room.”
Try a better stage presence- I promise you if you’re worth watching- they will watch