Has social media really brought artists and fans closer together?

AP

Nick Cave at Glastonbury 2013

If Glastonbury 2013 had a defining moment it was when Nick Cave strode out across the crowd during a charged rendition of the murder ballad Stagger Lee, to be met by a woman in white perched on a willing friend’s shoulders.
That normally obnoxious and view-blocking staple of festival behaviour conjured a rare connection between performer and fan as Nick took hold of her hand and screamed lyrical obscenities into her face. Meanwhile his band The Bad Seeds were way back on the Pyramid stage making their instruments squeal and thunder in a convincing approximation of the devil’s death.
I’ve watched that clip over 30 times and the hairs still go up on the backs of my arms. I’ve spoken to the girl herself and several people who witnessed the scene first hand and all have said their appreciation for Cave as an artist is now greater than ever before.
Some first timers were converted right there and then.
But it wasn’t an unusual opportunity for Nick fans. Way back in the early ‘80s, with his band The Birthday Party, Cave refused to allow the audience to be a passive entity – goading them, testing them, even kicking a few in the head (they were willing victims). His current fondness for clambering into and onto the multitudes began during 2011’s shows with his alter ego band Grinderman.
During their performance at London’s Alexandra Palace, Cave pushed his knees into my face (he smelled suity) and leaned his entire weight onto my upstretched hand so as to yell his sordid story at the people a few rows behind me. In half a lifetime of attending his shows, it was the best Nick Cave gig I’ve ever seen.
But Nick isn’t alone in seeking to remove the traditional divide between themselves and the crowd. Nile Rodgers and his band Chic, currently riding the crest of another wave of deserved adulation thanks to his collaboration with Daft Punk, invite the audience up on stage with them at the end of the night. A small gesture, maybe even a gimmick, but one that places those disco classics back in the context of which they were written – songs to dance to, free from inhibition or ego.
Comedy writer Sam Bain is one of an increasing number who’ve experienced Nile’s Good Times up close. Writing on his blog, Sam describes meeting Rodgers shortly after joining him on stage and being told: “You were great, you never stopped dancing, I loved it.”
It was as good for him as it was for them.

The internet changed the relationship between an artist and their audience irrevocably

A gig can be one of life’s most elevating rituals; a genuine communion with something spiritual and beyond ourselves. It can also be a fan-fleecing exercise in corporate greed, ego onanism and hollow spectacle. Being asked by an artist if I’m “having a good time?” does not give me great confidence in their abilities to deliver the promised enjoyment. Give me a good time and you’ll know about it, said the vicar to the… you can finish that joke yourself.
As more and more of us turn to concerts and festivals for our musical thrills (an inevitable but generally positive side-effect of digitalisation), it follows that musicians themselves will seek to make the live experience more of a dialogue with those who’ve put them on the stage.
The internet changed the relationship between an artist and their audience irrevocably. A fan of atrocious boyband The Wanted, for example, can go to Twitter and talk directly to Tarquin or Barry (or whatever their names are) and often they’ll talk back (or at the very least give an affirming retweet).
A few years ago, the best you could hope for was a photocopy of some autographs posted to you five months later by the woman who ran your favourite band’s fan-club. “Dear [insert name], Gary Barlow loved your drawing of a tortoise but he’s too busy counting his houses to reply to you himself…” Now you can tweet @GBarlowOfficial personally to ask what his favourite biscuit is and he’ll tell you. Go on, try it.
Is that not part of this same lessening of the gap between them and us? Because of the way our pastimes have been repackaged, we need to feel a personal connection between the people who make the music we’ll be embarrassed of liking in later life. We’re no longer simply consumers of their product. Or at least, that’s what their social media managers want us to think.

Rex

Olly Murs poses with a fan

If you’ve ever, as we have, made the mistake of writing something less than complimentary about Olly Murs, you’ll have experienced, as we have, the full wrath of his loyal army of fans (who include his own Twitter-active father, somewhat oddly).  But one thing we noticed united them all, apart from their shaky spelling, was that every Olly Murs fan has a user-pic featuring themselves in a close embrace with their hero. They’ve all met him.
So if you find yourself wondering how the X Factor runner-up has so far notched up three platinum albums without recording a single song you wouldn’t punch a postman for whistling, that could be your answer.
Unlike his predecessors, Olly Murs has earned his fans like a politician on election day. He’s cuddled and kissed and posed for Instagrams with all of them. And so they love him just that little bit more.
And it may seem a strange leap from the sublime to the sub-awful to link masters of their craft like Nick Cave and Nile Rogers with the residue found at the bottom of an over-scraped barrel of pop. But it would be sheer snobbery to suggest that the palpable exhilaration that played across the face of the muse-like woman in white as she communed with Cave on a farm in Pilton was somehow more valid than the high-pitched excitement a teenage Murs fan must have when he remembers them from the last time they queued all night outside a faceless arena.
We all want to be acknowledged by those we look up to.
What this means for those stars who wish to remain un-mauled by their public remains to be seen. In a month in which Lady Gaga announced that her new album ARTPOP would take the form of an app enabling fans to “share in the adrenaline of fame”, we can’t help feel she’s out of touch with what her Little Monsters want.
Gaga hopes her interactive album will “bring the music industry into a new age” but all the signs suggest the future is in a simpler interface – one where performers and people meet, either online or onstage. And apps are just for firing furious birds at egg-fixated pigs while we’re waiting.