Royal Blood’s onstage strop was pure entitlement – good audiences need to be earned

A raised middle finger: is there anything more quintessentially rock’n’roll? As a gesture of defiance, it’s as timeless as it is unambiguous. Nothing says “I don’t give a f***” quite like the sight of an erected third digit, aimed in the direction of an authority figure. Think of Johnny Cash at San Quentin prison. MIA during the Super Bowl halftime show. Ricky Martin “flipping the bird” at George Bush over the Iraq war. Of course, doing it to those in power is one thing. But what about when that finger turns on your own audience?

That’s exactly what happened on Saturday, when Mike Kerr, the frontman of West Sussex-based rock band Royal Blood, lost his rag with the audience at BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend in Dundee. Annoyed by a perceived lack of energy from attendees, Kerr began making derisive remarks on stage, branding the audience “pathetic” and suggesting they didn’t know who the band were. At the end of the set, he walked off with his middle fingers raised to the crowd. The strop has already prompted a fair amount of blowback on social media, with some branding the incident “arrogant” and “hateful”. Kerr is far from the first performer to chastise an audience, of course. He’s not even the first performer this month: just two weeks ago, American rapper Lil Wayne was seen abandoning a gig in Los Angeles after just 30 minutes, having seemingly grown frustrated with the lack of enthusiasm shown by the crowd for other members of his rap collective. Kerr’s spiky confrontation was particularly egregious, however, and speaks to a sense of entitlement that misunderstands the fundamental appeal of live music.

Any sort of live performance, be it music, or comedy, or theatre, is a two-way street. A lively, eager crowd can enhance a performer, give them an energy to feed off. But engagement needs to be earned. To some extent, the onus falls on the artist to get the audience going: if the music is good enough, people will pay attention. Even when this is not the case, though, there’s no excuse for histrionics. Musical acts are (in Royal Blood’s case at least) paid to be there, and a base level of professionalism and commitment should be reasonably expected; no such expectations exist for an audience, beyond basic concert etiquette. I’ve seen performers give great gigs in front of lousy crowds, and seen some give shoddy gigs before passionate ones. I once saw Elvis Costello perform before an absolutely insipid audience at Kew Gardens (not the most surprising sentence ever written, I’ll grant you) and he was great despite them. Maybe more performers should see an uninterested crowd for what it is: not an insult, but a challenge.

Of course, there are nuances to this. Unless a musician is being actively objectionable, there are certain rules of audience decorum that qualify as common courtesy. Applaud at the end of songs, don’t talk through the support act, etc. While musicians may be entitled to politeness, though, enthusiasm is another matter. It would be different, too, if the audience were actively hostile – lobbing bottles at the stage, perhaps, like the country and western fans in The Blues Brothers – but this was The Big Weekend. It’s not exactly the trenches, performatively speaking.

The Big Weekend is first and foremost a pop music festival – a fact that casts the crowd’s supposedly enervated response in an even less surprising light. Royal Blood’s frenetic sound was always going to be at odds with a clientele who mostly came for the upbeat pop acts dominating the bill (among them Lewis Capaldi, Niall Horan, Anne-Marie and The 1975).

Kerr’s indignation at not being known by the attendees (“I guess I should introduce ourselves, seeing as no one actually knows who we are,” he grumbled at one point) was also particularly outrageous given the setting. Any festival-type event is inevitably going to attract a good chunk of oblivious newcomers. It’s unrealistic to expect them to familiarise themselves with every act on the bill, and unfair to chide them when they don’t. In any case, you can bet they know who Royal Blood are now – and Kerr may rather they didn’t.

I suppose there’s some small semantic irony in a band called Royal Blood having a confrontation with the masses. It’s a frustration that is, on some level, understandable: slogging through a setlist before a crowd who couldn’t care less is surely a dispiriting chore. But any sympathy shot out the window when Kerr started swearing at the people who were giving up their time to watch him. Just like the real royals, Kerr would do well to read the room in future – especially if he’s singing in it.