Live musicians need to be protected from hecklers, who do much damage to the morale of indie artistes, say music industry experts post Samar Mehdi’s traumatic experience at a Delhi pub
Musician Samar Mehdi, who has been doing live gigs for the last four years, was harassed by a group of drunk men in the audience at the Imperfecto Ruin Pub in Delhi. Pic courtesy/Swarnava Mukherjee
For a musician who performs live, the audience’s response is everything. Composer and percussive fingerstyle guitarist Samar Mehdi, who has been doing live gigs for the last four years, would know better.
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But, an incident last week, involving a jeering crowd, left him rattled, forcing him to take cudgels for his community of musicians, which has been at the receiving end for far too long.
Sarthak Kulshrestha, a promoter and one of the founders of Bohemian Live, a touring, booking and promoting agency, says heckling has become commonplace in non-music venues
Mehdi was performing at the Imperfecto Ruin Pub in Delhi, when he was harassed and heckled by a group of drunk men in the audience, who extensively cussed and disrespected him. “The show went on and so did the hostility. I felt like the more the audience was cheering me on, the more the problem group felt motivated to put me down and vice versa. I couldn’t understand their issue, but I chose not to engage because I was focussing on delivering the performance,” a distraught Mehdi later shared on Instagram. He learnt that the venue managers did not act against the hecklers, because they had paid more money for the table they had booked. Mehdi felt it was necessary to speak about the issue on social media, because “ignoring the deeper social problem, would make these kind of situations normal for a lot of people”. “Saying no, demanding better treatment as a human being and a professional, or standing up to someone is not arrogance, [especially] when someone treats you poorly or beneath themselves. Accepting humiliation is not humility,” he says now in an email interview with mid-day.
Sarthak Kulshrestha, a promoter and one of the founders of Bohemian Live, a touring, booking and promoting agency, says such incidents have become commonplace. “They keep happening all across India, but it is mostly happening in non-music venues,” he says.
Akshay Kapoor, founder and editor of online portal The Indian Music Diaries, feels that the Indian audience is still not sophisticated enough to understand music and musicians
Indian venues are predominantly F&B non-music venues, where the main focus is not the music, but F&B. While the music venues are strictly for listeners, non-music venues tend to approach musicians as a means to fill a spot every night, rarely bothering to learn of what music they perform or inform the crowd about their work. The audience more often than not comprises guests who are there to eat, drink, have a good time, and listen to Bollywood music, say music industry experts.
A performer like Mehdi, who is known for his original indie tracks, doesn’t fit their idea of “fun”, and this often leads to heckling the artiste. “I know making money is important for venues, but they [venue managers] also have to understand that just because someone is paying a lot at the table, doesn’t mean they can disrespect anyone—whether it is the artiste, the venue staff or even the venue guard. This social class hierarchy needs to stop,” says Ritnika Nayan, owner of Music Gets Me High, a music consultancy firm in India.
Amit Gurbaxani, music journalist
Akshay Kapoor, founder and editor of The Indian Music Diaries, an online portal for Indian independent music, feels that the Indian audience is still not sophisticated enough to understand music and musicians.
Most Indian audience members, he feels, are still under the impression that the only kind of music that exists is Bollywood, cover music or tracks played by a DJ. “In fact, many are of the belief that English songs are synonymous with Hollywood music and thus, an indie artist performing their originals seems unfathomable,” says Kulshrestha.
Ritnika Nayan
But Amit Gurbaxani, a music journalist, feels that “it is not only disrespectful, but also stupid to request a Bollywood cover from an indie artiste, who is there to present his originals. “If the music doesn’t suit your taste, go somewhere else. Don’t ruin it for everybody else.”
Mehdi says the heckling is one reason why live musicians prefer doing curated intimate shows. “There’s a significantly smaller audience, but one that’s purely there for the music. This helps artistes avoid such situations.”
However, avoiding such gigs can come at the cost of the artistes’ career. “It might seem easy for us non-performers to say artistes should boycott or blacklist venues that don’t take action against misbehaving customers, but any real and significant change requires some amount of sacrifice,” feels Gurbaxani.
According to Kulshrestha, artistes should draw a contract and have an artiste manager state all the terms right from F&B, security, the kind of music played, etc., with the venue. Nayan, who has dealt with such situations as a manager in the past, feels that it’s very important for artistes to have a support team at the venue, which can immediately take care of these issues if they come up.
Another solution, Gurbaxani says, is that whenever an artiste is playing at a new venue, “they or their management could speak to those, who have performed there previously, about the hospitality, F&B arrangements and the kind of audience there.”
However, since music continues to be viewed as a hobby, Kapoor and Kulshrestha feel that it will take some systematic unlearning to accept artistes and what they do. “Now, music is a viable career and people are taking it more seriously, so it should be treated like any other art,” Nayan argues.
Meanwhile, Mehdi is urging more musicians and artistes to “come forward and share their own experiences”. “It doesn’t have to be on social media if they’re not comfortable with it; it can just be with people they trust in their own circles. The only way this can change is if we first make people aware of the problem and then they acknowledge it. The conversation depends on us coming together and collectively going forward.”
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