As my NME mind-control training really kicked in, I found myself struck rigid with terror at the idea that I was standing there helpless while, out in the real world, Noel Gallagher might have said something.īut having survived the show, I have to attest that Jack White has a point. Perhaps someone, somewhere, had paid an invoice in good time. Maybe the press trip of my dreams had landed in my inbox needing immediate confirmation. I found myself instinctively clutching for my pouch, some primal part of my brain stem sparking with desperation. I’ll admit, over that 90 minutes of enforced iPhone withdrawal, I suffered. A sense of watching something that won’t be on YouTube tomorrow, something truly unrepeatable, something special. A thrill not just to be fully connected to the music, but of a long-lost exclusivity too. It was as if, when the brainless mundanity of mobile phone addiction was removed from a situation, excitement rushed in to replace it. Instead of lit-up faces lowered like a 4G prayer meeting, there were bobbing heads entirely engaged with the show. Instead of screens in the air, there were hands. The crowd was more pumped and enthused than any I’d seen in the digital age. Through the doors to the venue, though, chaos was underway. But in times of such intense international tension, disallowing mobile phones at your gig seemed, in that instant, like the height of murderous irresponsibility. “We think you’ll enjoy looking up from your gadgets for a little while and experience music and our shared love of it IN PERSON,” White’s press release stated, promising a “100 per cent human experience”. Worse still: what if Russia attacked? Jack White’s London fanbase would be entirely wiped out, blithely air-guitaring away right up until the ICBM hit.
No chance for a self-important Twitter gig brag or any regular updates on my four-year-old’s lavatorial activities for the next two hours. No sifting through emails or having Quordle revelations in the boring bits. There’d be no comparing previous setlists or in-the-moment fact-checking for tonight’s review. The consequences of what I’d done crept chillingly over me like a Tory whip. She’d open it at the end of the gig, she told me, with all the finality of a ransom demand. Seconds later, she handed me back my phone, now encased in an impenetrable padded Yondr pouch. No doubt, if she’d asked, I’d have happily signed away the rights to several internal organs if Jack White had also made that a requirement of entry.
But having only recently lost my last phone to an over-friendly Madrid pickpocket, I was somewhat amazed that I dutifully – nay, pathetically – handed over my iPhone and all of its contents – the years of baby photos, the autosaved banking passwords, the irreplaceable Magnetic Fields playlists – to this smiling stranger. Now, we’ve all become accustomed to polite and sympathetic robbery every time we pay an electricity bill, and I was fully expecting it at the Hammersmith Apollo last week – only usually they let you get to the bar first. “I need your phone,” said a woman in the foyer entrance with the cold tone of a Squid Game guard. Barely had I waggled my ticket at the scanner when the mugging commenced.