ETIQUETTE · FIELD NOTES
Three editions in, we can say: the no-phones rule doesn’t need enforcing. It just needs asking.
People expect us to police it. Security at the door, stickers over the lens, angry volunteers tapping phones out of hands. We don’t do any of that. At the beginning of every set in the Main room, the MC walks out, holds up a phone, and puts it in their pocket. That’s the whole rule. The crowd does the rest.
What we’ve learned is that most people don’t actually want to be filming. They film because other people film. If one person puts their phone in their pocket, the person next to them does too, within about ninety seconds. Within three minutes, the whole front row has followed. By the time the first real climax of the set arrives, you can’t see a single screen, and the lights hit skin instead of glass. It changes everything.
“The thing you get instead of a video is the memory of what it actually felt like. That used to be what everyone got.”
There are exceptions. We ask people to film the first two minutes of the opening act, if they like, so we can see the crowd from the stage. We ask everyone to photograph the festival bookmark printed in the programme and send it back to us (about 300 people do, every year, and we post a grid of them afterwards). We are not against images. We are against the image being between you and the thing.
What we’ve also learned: the rule matters more in small rooms than in big ones. In the Vault, where 600 people can get very close to each other, a single phone light in the crowd is visible from the stage. One screen pulls the whole room out of focus. So that’s the room where we’re most serious about asking — and the room where we’ve never had to ask twice.