And Finally Artist News Beef Of The Week

CMU Beef Of The Week #132: Grizzly Bear v Grizzly Bear’s European fans

By | Published on Friday 19 October 2012

Grizzly Bear

Grizzly Bear kicked off their latest UK tour with a gig at The Sage in Gateshead on Wednesday night. They were very good apparently, though the audience performed awfully. Or so says the band’s Edward Droste, anyway.

Following the show, which seemingly saw a mature and quiet audience enjoy the band’s performance,
Droste took to his personal Twitter account to say: “FYI: We like it when people cheer between songs, during songs, yell shit, whatever. Please don’t be overly attentive for us”.

He then moved over to the band’s official account, adding: “Why does our fanbase skew so much older in Europe than the US? So random. Good ten to fifteen year age difference”.

It’s possibly not a great idea to call your audience quiet and old on Twitter, but you can see why a band might be annoyed if they get little or no response from their audience, especially if they feel they are putting on a good show. Although, you could argue that they just didn’t do anything special enough to warrant wild applause and screaming. And as for the age thing, well it’s not like they’re making music for ‘The Kids’, is it?

Whatever, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing for a band to muse on these things. Not least because differences in demographic appeal in different countries is interesting. Though maybe Droste shouldn’t have phrased it in a way that looked like he was saying he didn’t like his band’s European fans. They paid, after all, and surely enjoyment is entirely optional after that? Plus have you ever stopped to think what a weird thing clapping really is? Imagine trying to explain it to an alien.

Me: “Yeah, when someone does something we like, we slap our hands together. Actually, it’s considered polite to do it, even if you didn’t think what they did was that amazing”

Alien: “Fucking hell, earthling. We were expecting you to be fairly inferior beings, but this is beyond all expectations. I’m going home, you’re a lost cause as a species”.

Whether or not Grizzly Bear’s Gateshead fans are aliens we don’t know, but we do know they weren’t impressed with Droste’s remarks, and they took to Twitter to say so. Leading to some backtracking from the band’s frontman. Droste wrote: “For the record we had a great time playing Gateshead, [it] was just a really quiet crowd. Appreciate everyone that came, as we said [at the show] … Wasn’t slagging, it just was what it was. A very very quiet audience. I guess we should get used to it here?”

Oh, that was all going so well, until the final sentence that basically said ‘I guess you’re all just old and boring’. More annoyed fans. So Droste gave it another try: “So I have a personality and speak my mind. I still appreciate every person that ever comes to our shows or buys the record or cares. Honestly. But I’d rather be real than just blankly say ‘thank you x city’. C’est la vie. I love the idea that we should all just blindly thank everyone and smile. That’s not how the world works”.

The debate amongst Grizzly Bear fans in the North East continued, until Droste finally admitted defeat, posting one last dispirited tweet – “Being honest always gets you in trouble. Remind me not to be honest in the future” – and then he deleted the lot.

Thanks to the permanence of the internet though, you can enjoy all those tweets right here.



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