While I was at Tram­lines, some­thing happened which made me think long and hard about the role of secur­ity at an event. What are they really there for? I came up with a few the­or­ies. The first idea I mulled over was that they’re just there to be bas­tards to us all, and to make the gig a little bit worse for every­one going. I think a lot of people would agree with me on that one. There’s a legal oblig­a­tion to provide secur­ity at events, so their jobs are pretty safe, and the venue can’t choose to get rid of them to make the gig a nicer place to be. And if you look at recent events in Ger­many, where nearly 20 people tra­gic­ally lost their lives as a res­ult of poor crowd man­age­ment, the rapes at Lat­it­ude fest­ival, and the crush in Birm­ing­ham at JLS’s open air con­cert, there’s a solid argu­ment that secur­ity are use­less when they’re most needed. There are some very ser­i­ous ques­tions that need to be asked about why secur­ity were not able to pre­vent these things from hap­pen­ing. How­ever, I think it would be disin­genu­ous to sug­gest that secur­ity do nothing.

At almost every con­cert that could be loosely described as rock, people crowd-surf. I don’t want to turn this edit­or­ial into a dis­cus­sion of crowd surf­ing, so I’m just going to state that as a fact, and leave it at that. Secur­ity are, on the whole, respons­ible for deal­ing with crowd surfers, from mak­ing sure they don’t get onto the stage to mak­ing sure they don’t kill them­selves by diving head first over the front bar­ri­ers. And boy, do some of them “deal” with crowd surfers. One of the most shock­ing dis­plays I’ve ever seen was at Plug, dur­ing the Trans­gress­ive Records Road­show, when the secur­ity guards were at best doing the bare min­imum to ensure that no-one ended up in hos­pital, and at worst, they were act­ively lay­ing into the crowd surfers.

So, what happened at Tram­lines was not a huge sur­prise — people were crowd surf­ing, and secur­ity were treat­ing them aggress­ively. What was a sur­prise, how­ever, was what fol­lowed. Frank Carter, the lead singer of Gal­lows, obvi­ously saw some­thing he was not impressed with, and called secur­ity on it. His words were, and I remem­ber them as clearly as I remem­ber what I had for my din­ner, he said “Calm down mate, he’s like fuck­ing four­teen”. Admit­tedly, he swore, but it wasn’t dir­ec­ted at the secur­ity guy, and the rest of the sen­tence is more or less a fair com­ment. The secur­ity guard star­ted scream­ing, and appeared to be threat­en­ing Carter, who, to his credit, stuck to his guns without launch­ing back into any sort of attack on the secur­ity guy. Watch­ing the exchange was fright­en­ing — because this man rep­res­en­ted not only a group who were sup­posed to be there to look after and pro­tect us, but also one of the biggest event secur­ity con­tract­ors in the coun­try. (I’m not a law­yer, so I’m not going to run the risk of say­ing that G4S provided secur­ity at Tramlines).

I’m not sure it’s wholly appro­pri­ate to have a com­pany who deal in provid­ing private sec­tor secur­ity to pris­ons in the UK deal­ing with crowd con­trol at a free fest­ival. There is no doubt that in the major­ity of cases, secur­ity do an excel­lent job, and their work is import­ant. How­ever, if I go to a gig, I should be wor­ried about some­body tread­ing on my feet, or some­body mosh­ing too hard and knock­ing my glasses off, or acci­dent­ally punch­ing me in the face while throw­ing the horns, not whether or not the secur­ity guard is going to treat me as he would treat a riot­ing prisoner.

Of course, I’m not sug­gest­ing that a band should be able to dic­tate secur­ity policy, but equally, without the band, there would be no need for secur­ity, and so their input is essen­tial — and for a hard­core act like Gal­lows, not being pre­pared for, or being hos­tile towards crowd surf­ing is short-sighted at best.

I have to say, I respect the way Carter con­duc­ted him­self through the whole gig. Before any­thing kicked off, as they came onto the stage, he said some­thing along the lines of “if you show the secur­ity guys respect, then you’ll get respect back off them”, stand­ard stuff — but he obvi­ously val­ues his word, and he felt as though by mak­ing that state­ment, he was respons­ible for mak­ing sure secur­ity kept their end of the bar­gain. In my opin­ion, the secur­ity guy’s reac­tion to Carter was over-the-top, out of pro­por­tion, and showed him to be a volat­ile indi­vidual, and I was con­cerned that these were not appro­pri­ate char­ac­ter traits for a secur­ity guard.

I don’t really have a con­clu­sion, there’s no easy way to deal with a crowd who are set on crowd surf­ing, but equally, it is undeni­able that some secur­ity guys take it upon them­selves to be deterrents, which is not, in my opin­ion, what their role should be at any event, whether the crowd pay or not.

In the interests of fair­ness, I’m adding this state­ment from Tram­lines’ PR depart­ment, which I asked for in order to give the Tram­lines people (who work hard to make everything come right) a fair say:

“We are aware that there was an exchange between Frank Carter and a mem­ber of secur­ity dur­ing the Gal­lows set on Sunday even­ing. As with all music fest­ivals we expect our secur­ity ser­vices to ensure every­one attend­ing Tram­lines is kept safe whilst still allow­ing them to enjoy the enter­tain­ment on offer. We are cur­rently in the pro­cess of review­ing the entire fest­ival to ensure we can make Tram­lines 2011 big­ger and bet­ter. Of course the secur­ity ele­ment will come into this full review.

“The Gal­lows gig at Tram­lines was a very fit­ting end to this year’s fest­ival. Gal­lows had a fant­astic time at the gig, and as i am sure you are aware they are a band who like to take the crowd to the edge without over­step­ping the mark. Over the week­end, for the second year run­ning, there was an amaz­ing atmo­sphere across the city — only 7 arrests all week­end (among 125,000 vis­it­ors) and no major incidents.”