Occasionally, I have witnessed real violence.
Twenty-three years later, I saw a kid leap backwards from a 20-foot high balcony at a Green Day show in San Francisco. In the summer of 1987, I watched in wonder as a young man dived off a towering PA stack at a Suicidal Tendencies concert in London. Throughout my adult life I have shared concert halls with people who are as likely to end their night in Accident & Emergency as in their own beds. Last week, artists such as Bruce Springsteen and Josh Homme sang the songs of Joe Strummer on behalf of the Save Our Stages organisation.īut until now, no one has spoken out in support of the girls and boys who really put in a shift: the slam-dancers, the stage-divers, the crowd-surfers, and the moshers. Earlier this month, an army of roadies marched on Manchester under the banner #wemakeevents. In the UK, the Music Venue Trust lobbies the government on behalf of clubs facing closure. Seventeen days after Stigma endangered his Gibson SG amid a crowd of 19,000 people in an arena in the City of Brotherly Love, the World Health Organization received reports of a virus that would prove a bigger threat to the art of “collision dancing” than seated venues and personal injury lawyers combined.įew people need reminding of the tremendous difficulties facing the concert industry. But I said, ‘Hey, listen, this is life in the pit.’ If you’re going to go in there, this is what it is.”Īctually, it’s what it was. They’re moshing away, moshing away, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘Any minute now I’m going down’. “I can actually feel the wind from their movements.
“I go right into the middle of the pit and there’s five to eight thousand people moshing around me,” he remembers. As the band behind him tore off another strip of New York hardcore punk, Stigma kept playing without missing a note. Performing at the Wells Fargo Center, in Philadelphia, with his band Agnostic Front, the guitarist left the stage and walked directly into the tangle of humanity whirling like a storm front on the dance-floor below. Just before Christmas last year, Vinnie Stigma strode headlong into oncoming traffic.
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