Thou shalt not hold your own camera: how to livestream your gig
Do: Finish your songs
When news first circulated that Chris Martin was planning a surprise broadcast, dubbed #TogetherAtHome, to help entertain Generation WFH, the world expected to find him bouncing around his back ballroom surrounded by vagina candles. Instead, resembling a housebreaking busker, he awkwardly fluffed his way through Coldplay snippets at his home studio piano, making a pig’s ear of Viva La Vida and stopping Bowie’s Life on Mars? just as it got going. When 300,000 people are watching, attack your songs like the online stadium residency it is.
Don’t: Use Facebook
By contrast, the following day Frank Turner bellowed out a full set of brilliant, barnstorming folk-punk from under his stairs, so bristling with arena power that, in a room of just four, one of the audience managed to break his promotional Iron Maiden zombie hand. You feel for the neighbours because only the “meet the cat” segment didn’t threaten to burst 12,000 AirBuds. The police weren’t called, but Facebook eventually shut the stream down for “violating community standards”. Wassamadder algorithm? Can’t handle the rock?
Do: Put on a show
On Instagram, Christine and the Queens emoted her way around her studio to Mountains (we met), filmed from a squeaky bike and putting the “art” into “keeping two metres apart”. Lizzo livestreamed 30 minutes of flute mantra over steaming crystals to help calm the world’s chakras. And, like a Doncaster Joker guest-hosting The Tonight Show, Yungblud created his own talkshow complete with theme tune, live emo anthems, drinking games and a cookery segment making Hot Cheetos Pancakes With Sanitiser Drizzle. There’s a wide-open shed of possibilities out there – grab it with both hands.
Don’t: Hold your own camera
When Bono knocked out a half-baked tribute to frontline doctors from the corner of “Dublin” most resembling the Bahamas, it came in such extreme close-up it was like watching U2 from a seat in his beard. At least fashion your heaps of emergency gold reserves into a makeshift tripod.
Do: Have an enthusiastic spouse
On one hand, Keith Urban self-isolated in a guitar warehouse as his wife Nicole Kidman danced around to his “karaoke” canyon rock, the very picture of co-isolated bliss. On the other, when John Legend took up Chris Martin’s #TogetherAtHome baton, everything was going great until his unimpressed wife – model Chrissy Teigen – walked in wearing a bath towel, sat on the keyboard saying “you wanna hear The Butt Song?”, slow-clapped his most romantic tunes and started a row about having a third child. If they own an Iron Maiden zombie hand, it’s not lasting a week.
Don’t: Let quality control slip
Let’s just say, if you’ve kicked John Lennon’s Imagine to a brutal, painful death by getting your friends to record individual lines from it in more keys than actually exist, best keep it for the WhatsApp group-chat.
Do: Think big
Willie Nelson seriously upped the game with ’Til Further Notice, which transformed his annual backyard festival Luck Reunion into a bedroom-based bonanza, featuring the likes of Jewel, Nathaniel Rateliff, Lucinda Williams and himself broadcasting from various outhouses and chicken shacks across the US. It was dubbed the Lockdown Woodstock (Woodlock?), and peaked with Paul Simon and Woody Harrelson covering the Everly Brothers. Elsewhere, Courtney Barnett, Waxahatchee and Sheryl Crow arranged a livestreamed festival within days – who says there can’t be a bedroom Glastonbury?
Don’t: Give up now
We’re in this for the long haul, so one wonky cover of (Something Inside) So Strong won’t earn you our eternal emojis. We need a commitment to regular sonic sustenance. Take Jack White’s Third Man Records, which is hosting daily livestream showcases for the foreseeable future, or even the Vienna State Opera, which is giving us the chance to don evening dress (well, trousers) and enjoy archive operas that, production-wise, show up The Yungblud Show. I’ve also been hooked on Ben Gibbard from Death Cab for Cutie’s nightly home studio sets, his gorgeous indie paeans untainted by the sexbots invading the group chat. I think I’ve found my online safe room.
