Mosh

Pit

This is a post I co-wrote with Marina.

Marina: A few weeks ago I went to my first concert with a proper mosh pit.¹ Jonny has been to many. Here are a first timer’s and seasoned mosher’s notes on the experience.

We were in the front/middle of the crowd, to the left of center stage. Once the main act went on, I noticed some people starting to crowd surf - they would go up to the front of the crowd, encounter security, and be deposited over a fence between the crowd and the stage. It took me a few times to realize that the security was just there for this purpose - these large men just stood by the front and were in charge of carefully lowering people to the ground as they arrived. The surfers would loop back into the crowd to continue; the whole thing reminded me of a child going down a slide in a park and racing back up to do it all over again.

As the set went on, there was more traditional moshing. People were briefly running around in a circle; there was kind of a main hub of activity in the center of the crowd, which would sometimes expand out by an extra layer or two of people as the music picked up.

I was standing mostly on the perimeter, and had this feeling that in being there, it was my job to hold the wall separating the moshing from the rest of the crowd. I held a solid stance and when people would bump up against me they’d bounce off, or I would push them back into the crowd. I adopted this dancing style of having my hands up near my head with my palms pointed in, so when people would come near me I’d push back on them with my wrists and forearms.

Sometimes the inner circle would surge out and someone would land against me and I would tip over to someone behind me, and we’d all push back in, like reversing dominoes being pushed back upright.

This experience seemed to be quite beginner friendly, with a good level of aggression in the dancing. People were moving around and throwing their bodies back and forth, but nothing felt dangerous or like there was any real chance of injury.

The act of moshing is much more community focused than dancing on your own. People were getting in each other’s personal space, but it was very easy to opt out of it. The crowd was loose enough to easily walk towards or away from the pit’s action; people were signaling when they wanted to be lifted up for crowdsurfing (or not); I had the sense that people were watching out for each other.

This all led to a feeling of camaraderie and friendliness which I really enjoyed. There was something really wonderful about being able to quickly understand the social norms at play, and then to be able to choose how much of it I wanted to go for.

Definitely looking forward to more moshing in my future, it felt very alive.

Jonny: I’m trying to remember my first “proper mosh pit”. There’s a good chance it was at Reading Festival in 2012, and at the very least, that festival looms large in my memory. I was 17, wholly enamoured with music, naive and unsure of myself at an event with a greater population than my home town.

I vividly remember Crystal Castles. I remember Alice Glass coming on stage holding a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, swigging it straight and spitting it into the front row. At the time I thought she was so cool, so punk! Needless to say, in retrospect I feel very differently about what I saw that day.

I remember the bass. I’d never been somewhere that loud, and I had no idea about earplugs, nor that they mattered. I remember that the vibrations were so strong, I felt them deep within my chest. It was such a shock to me, I was worried about my heart, was I damaging it? Was it going to keep working? The crowd was huge, it swelled and roiled. I felt like an individual cell in a much larger organism. Between the speakers rattling my bones and the bodies shoved up into me, it was scary.

But not as scary as Enter Shikari the next day. I knew their music better (they have a song that is basically my name!), and was deeper in the crowd. Their music is heavier, guitar-driven, screamier, more archetypal moshing music. Avoiding the pit wasn’t an option, the crowd was too dense; I had to fight to stay standing for the entire set. The fear sharpened everything; I didn’t just hear the music in my ears, I felt it in my whole body. I was so alive.

Alas, nowadays I am older and more curmudgeonly. My back and hips hurt, victims of over a decade of desk jockeying. My risk tolerance for a stray fist splitting an eyebrow is much lower than it once was.

A few weeks ago, my brother Charlie and I went to go watch Bring Me The Horizon celebrate the 20th anniversary of Pray for Plagues. I’d seen them before, in 2013, and knew that they would put on a ferocious show. Oli Sykes spent much of his patter in between songs goading the audience into enacting greater violence upon one another (while periodically reminding us to pick up anyone who fell). The genre isn’t called “deathcore” for nothing, and the aggression was relentless, both on stage and in the crowd. We hung near the back, carefully staying out of harm’s way.²

Charlie’s in a couple of bands, and I get the chance to see them whenever I can. Last time I saw him play was back in Guernsey, and I went with a contingent of his friends. Towards the end of their set, he said to the crowd “this is our only song with a breakdown, so if you want to mosh, it has to be to this one”. Once the drop came, four of us stood right at the front and did indeed do our best to mosh, jumping and shoving and twirling with abandon. I loved the physicality of it, making the connections between us more salient, everyone revelling in their love of the music. I managed to briefly free myself from feeling self-conscious under the watchful eyes of my stoic, statuesque parents.

Protest The Hero were one of the few bands left on my bucket list to see, and I managed to cajole Marina into accompanying me with some flimsy argument about all music sounding better live. They hadn’t played in the UK in a decade. I love their 2004 debut album, Kezia, and it’s been a seminal part of my music taste since first hearing it at 13. There are very few bands with albums that have been with me for so long, that mean so much to me, that I’ve yet to see in concert.

Perhaps because of that, my inclination was to repeat the same strategy I’d employed at the BMTH gig, and lurk at the back, somewhere I could get a good view of the stage and focus on the music without worrying about my bodily integrity. But, Marina likes to be near the front at shows, and who was I to deny her her first mosh pit experience?

And I agree with everything she wrote above about it; it was great! The crowd was friendly and the perfect size - plenty big enough to have a good-sized pit, but not so big that said pit felt inescapable. The band were phenomenal, everything I’d hoped they’d be; I felt euphoric to finally have this experience.³ Bouncing and cannoning into my fellow concertgoers heightened the experience, again allowing me to feel the music in my whole body and not just my ears. It was easy to feed off Marina’s obvious enjoyment in order to deepen my own.

This isn’t to say that my back doesn’t still hurt, or that I’m any less curmudgeonly. But seeing the pit through fresh eyes has certainly reignited my interest in it. I suspect I’ll also be doing a lot more moshing in my near future, and who knows? Maybe it’ll help me feel like an invulnerable teenager all over again.