Is it acceptable to have a genre of music in existence named after the only venue in which you can fit enough people to absorb the appalling blandness

This refers of course to the horror that is ‘stadium rock’. Pretty much every band I want to see comes under the heading of ‘the smaller the venue the better’ in my book. I don’t want to watch Tony Joe White on a screen on a stage from half a mile back, and even the Corn Exchange here seems a little cavernous for some bands, so why you would pay £50 a head to stand amongst 65,000 other people being distracted by the fact that the music and the images don’t synch up because it’s all happening SO far away? It’s not that I haven’t been to gigs in these venues – when I was 12 my Mum took the unprecedented decision (probably based on lies that I told) to allow me to go to see Metallica at the Milton Keynes Bowl, supported by Megadeth and Diamond Head. But my friend Annabel and I were right at the front, in an area presumably reserved for blindingly underage pre-teen girls who would otherwise have been crushed in the melee, so there was no need to watch the screens. The Boy Wonder and I did also see BB King at Wembley arena, and whilst we were really glad to be there as it was his last gig in this country, it was all seated and we weren’t that close (which was a blessing when Gary Moore was parading his unfathomably ugly mug around, playing for too long so that BB King had to cut his set short – a desperately poor show for a support act and something for which he will never be forgiven), and we were in no doubt that if we could see him in the US in a smaller venue, the atmosphere would be awesome more on its own merits rather than the pleasure we personally got from seeing him at all. Thinking about it though, I think I can understand the appeal of going to see a band like U2 in a stadium as it reduces the chances that the crushingly identical sound of every song won’t actually embed itself into your very pores like skunk stink. If I was forced to go and see U2, I would be grateful for every extra yard that I could be away from the stage, and I can’t think of a better use for a U2 fan than a human shield. I know that stadium rock originated with bands like Boston, Foreigner and Journey, who have now reached the point of almost cult status amongst people who accept that ‘More than a Feeling’ is a classic of its time but wouldn’t really buy a Boston album. But I am talking about the middle-of-the-road aural fluff that now bears the name as though there needs to be no other information about the music than that thousands of people are stupid enough to like it. Throughout the years genres of music have been named to give some idea of what you can expect – the blues was the blues before it even became synonymous with a musical style, country and western needs no explanation, and if you can’t form a rough idea of what to expect from a death metal band, then you probably shouldn’t listen to any. But ‘Stadium’ or ‘Arena’ rock seems such a low standard to reach for musically – the idea that a genre exists because the music buying public are too lazy to really listen to music and make up their own minds, a music buying public who can tell you their favourite song (a test I always find separates those who really have an interest in music from those who only own albums by top 40 artists), and those who buy the output of an artist they like indiscriminately and will like whatever they get. The very notion of classifying an act based on the kind of venue they play is ridiculous and surely shows that those who enjoy that kind of music are by nature crowd followers. (Please note, this does not apply to circuits – they are genres within genres, and should be considered separately). This is not to say that I think that the kind of music I like is the ‘right’ kind – for a start there is a very wide gap between some of the genres that I would choose as my favourites – just that if you like music, you should like it for more than the fact that everyone you know likes it, for more than the dreaded ‘you should see their stage-show’ lameness, it should be about making you feel something, not involving you in conspicuous displays of success on the part of that band. Whenever I have said that I don’t like U2, I am met with incredulity: ‘How can you not like U2 – everybody likes U2’ but nobody has ever come up with any real reason why they like them. When the Boy Wonder expounds his thoughts on The Grateful Dead, he can give you a million reasons why he likes them, with no minor reference to the fact that a lot of their output was toot as well, and then, if you’re still awake he will give you a million more, and then play you some of their songs, and if you don’t like the first one he plays, he will find another one which might be more your thing and so on until one of you falls asleep usually. But we, and most of our friends have reasons for liking every song, not necessarily logical reasons, but if someone can’t understand what you mean by ‘it’s so funky it hurts’ then the chances are you need to move on. In conclusion, I am mostly annoyed by the identikit blandness of the music available at the moment; I would like to be able to go to one good gig in my local area a month, rather than having to fork out to go to London every so often just to see someone half decent; I would like to have conversations with people about music that don’t end up with me saying ‘You can’t say Guy Clarke’s * crap just because you haven’t heard of him’; I would like to see an episode of Jools Holland where the acts are actually new and talented and interesting and not just a hideous preview of what we can expect from every ‘new’ band we’ll hear in the next 18 months. Is that too much to ask? Possibly… *Insert suitable alternative here