Chrissie Hynde is done with it. In a letter posted to social media, The Pretenders' frontwoman has attacked concertgoers who film every second of a live show.
Her comparison is brutal. "It reminds me of monkeys wanking in full view of the people standing around their enclosure," Hynde writes. But the target isn't just the phones—it's the entitlement behind them.
Hynde recounts having dinner with Emmylou Harris before catching her perform at the Royal Albert Hall in London, where the conversation turned to phones at concerts. "This is a subject that comes up every time I meet an artist," she notes. "It's become like an unpleasant fug hanging over the heads of all artists."
Venues post signs requesting NO CAMERAS, yet people ignore them. "It's as if people feel entitled, even though the artist clearly has asked them not to do it," Hynde writes.
At Emmylou's show, a fan sitting near Hynde filmed the entire concert and blocked her view. When someone asked him to stop, his response was: "Mind your own business." The same thing happened when Hynde attended Sarah Snook's one-woman show of The Picture of Dorian Gray—a woman in the front row pulled out her phone and started filming.
Hynde praises Bob Dylan for requiring phones to be placed in pouches at his shows, though even that hasn't stopped the problem. She has stopped attending public art exhibitions because people film paintings instead of experiencing them.
"If Jesus Christ were to walk into a room, the first thing everyone would do would be to pull out their phone," she writes. Fair point.
