The phone conundrum...

Welcome to anyone reading my posts here for the first time and thanks to all for subscribing to my Substack. If you’re a new reader, I can tell you that you are joining a number of other subscribers from around 60 different countries all over Planet Earth, and if you’d like to help me further in my bid for World Domination, and you’re not already a subscriber, then please don’t forget to:

Pictured below is a small selection of some of the unofficial Porcupine Tree live recordings that I have been given over the years. Memories are unclear, but I might have received these at different times from enthusiastic audience members. But there’s also the chance that one of the band’s old tour managers had confiscated one (or more of these) and then passed them on to me after a show.

I have to admit, if you were caught recording a Porcupine Tree show back in 1990’s or early 2000’s you would likely have been escorted out of the building and your tape (or video) confiscated or even destroyed. We had a few very vigilant tour managers who enjoyed doing this sort of thing, and generally everyone in the band disapproved of those who came to the shows and recorded them without permission, permission generally being denied by default and usually stated somewhere on the actual physical ticket (remember them?) or somewhere in the venue. It’s not just band members who got annoyed, I recall one of our lighting designers getting really upset with someone videoing a show.

As a fan of certain bands, I’ve fully understood the desire to hear unofficial live recordings and watch shaky old footage - Can bootlegs for example, are often as rewarding a listen as the studio albums. But at the same time, I would never have been happy to know some cheeky fucker had a microphone stuffed up his jumper and was going to record the show without asking and share out it for all and sundry. Even more off putting if there was a video camera was in your face in the front row. We were never the Grateful Dead, with their hippy type free for all taping policies, and anyway, what if it was a bad night? The venue might suffer from bad sound, the performance might be off, there might be a terrible sound quality with the PA, some sort of technical failure...and what if this bad representation of me doing my thing is the only thing some people end up hearing or seeing? You could argue the imperfections are just real life, so get over it, but there was always, and still is, a quality control element to the release of live recordings and bootlegging takes away the artists control.

Even worse, if said bootlegger might seek to profit financially with an unofficial physical release. Rare, but it has happened in a few cases. Mostly, it seems to be fan trading, an enthusiastic manifestation of people’s affection for the music, I get that too.

Years on, I’ve been happy to reacquaint myself, and my fellow Voyagers, with some of these old live bootlegs, alongside the officially released recordings, from a sort of from research perspective. So paradoxically, I’ve been happy to have had a selection of these unofficial, forbidden recordings to refresh my memory. I am well aware that there are a lot more out there too.

Thinking about all this, the overwhelming realisation occurring to me now is that, as regards Voyage 35 and the upcoming live performances, one of the many changes since a lot of these songs were performed first time round is that recording, photography or video of any kind was the exception. There isn’t a lot of footage of Porcupine Tree from the 1990’s and most of the gigs weren’t recorded at all. The technology was more expensive, cumbersome and also less discrete, so if you were waving a video camera about, you’d likely be spotted and told to stop. The audience was mostly not seeking to document the performance in any way, mainly because everything happened pre-internet and pre-smartphone, and I am sure it simply didn’t occur to a lot of people to even try. These days, pretty much everyone has the ability to record, video, and even live stream, worldwide. “Watch me react” FFS.

Unprovable of course, but I’m willing to bet it’s likely the audience was far more engaged and present in the moment than it might have been had smartphones existed back in the 1990’s.

I also understand that people are now more used to seeing, audience filmed, rough looking snippets of performance. But please, put the thing away and just fucking enjoy the moment.

“Be Here Now” - whatever you think about Ram Dass or Oasis when you read those words, it’s a perfect thing to bear in mind for both live music and your life in general. Smartphones take away the “Now”, no question.

From the audience perspective, isn’t it incredibly annoying if you’re in the proximity of a serial gig phone filmer? Who wants to watch a show through somebody else’s tiny screen held up in front of them? The audio is invariably awful as well.

Hell Within Your Hands, from my solo album Infinite Regress, concerns our relationship with this ubiquitous mobile technology…and it’s a good few years old now, the issue isn’t going anywhere, and it’ll likely get worse now that Meta glasses are becoming a thing.

With all the above in mind, should Voyage 35 seek to limit, or even ban, smartphone usage at the upcoming shows? It could be said that we’re aiming to recreate, albeit in our own way, a certain period, so why not? As there were no smartphones back in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, we’d be offering a more authentic “period” experience perhaps.

Interestingly, as I was musing about all this constant smartphone use, I came across the following stuck to a lamp post outside the Tate Modern as I was strolling past on the South Bank. In case you’re wondering, I did take the pictures below with my phone….

Radical Anti Smartphone Front! made me think of Radical Dance Faction, or RDF as they were listed here:

It seems that I hadn’t just bumped in to an art installation and RASF, really does exist:

https://rasf.eu/?page_id=69&lang=de

Anyway, from the point of view of the band, I am sure I can speak for everyone if I say we’d rather the audience is with us in the here and now, instead of getting distracted by the portable computer that everyday life now seems impossible to live without.

As a musician, I have had to engage with the internet and eventually smartphones far more than I ever thought I would. I’ve resisted a lot of this invasive technology as much as I could. I was very, very late to getting a mobile phone, although I did have an answerphone, and for some years, rather like some medical staff, I even used a pager. I would receive a message and have to find a phone box to call back whoever had reached out to me for a gig or whatever, an unthinkably slow response time and it sounds absurd even reading this back, but somehow I functioned.

Finally, I was sold on a smartphone after having to solve an urgent plumbing problem at home (..another one!) whilst sitting in a van driving down an Italian motorway. I couldn’t have managed that with any previous dumb phone I had. But hey, for every gain, also a loss, or several even. Spam, non stop surveillance, unwanted opinions, toxic polarised public debates, constant invasive advertising, phishing fraud, identity theft, all features of everyday life now. I’ve even read a few recent articles suggesting smartphones are responsible for plunging birthrates in the Western World, one of which I’ll quote here:

Survey data further suggests that smartphones may reduce sexual frequency in established relationships. A 2017 study by iPass found that 61% of respondents said it would be harder to give up WiFi than sex, and 19% claimed they would choose a good WiFi connection over human contact. Additionally, 7% of people admitted to checking their smartphones during sex, while other research links high social media use to lower marital satisfaction and increased relationship conflict due to "technoference."

So I reckon, if Voyage 35 were to ban smart phones, not only would it make for a better experience for band and audience, but we might perhaps even help save the World from terminal population decline, whilst simultaneously improving the well being, and perhaps even the sex lives of audience members (…no pun intended). I could easily sell the band all over the world to all sorts of promoters if this was an accepted fact.

For now, the Voyage 35 stance on phone usage at shows is under discussion.

Anyway, I’d be interested to read your thoughts - if you care to comment.

If you haven’t already, and you’d like to stay informed with what I’m up to, with a few blasts from the past, then please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

**Given that I’m not a nerd and perhaps even a closet luddite, there’s probably another post in documenting my journey into reluctantly setting up an online presence as a musician.