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While my dad might still give me plenty to be embarrassed about, I'm just glad I'm not Liv Tyler. Her father, Aerosmith frontman Steve Tyler had to be hospitalised this week after suffering head, shoulder and whiplash-style injuries when falling backwards off stage, perhaps as a result of the constriction caused by his impossibility tight trousers.
Perhaps I'm ageist or just old-fashioned, but it just doesn't seem dignified to me that a 61-year-old cosmetically-enhanced man should be strutting and gyrating on stage like he's still an oversexed youth. Could it be that I'm responsible? Did Tyler develop sudden clairaudience and on hearing me order, "Get off the stage!", fall backwards in startlement - probably not.
At least he didn't compound indignity with a fit of pique: "He was good-natured about it. He was in good spirits when he got in the helicopter. He was talking and joking with the physician," a concert organizer said.
I, despite being a relatively youthful 38, am in no danger of being accused of hypocrisy; while I still like the odd bit of "concert-going", it is precisely on the terms that rather sedate-seeming phrase would imply.
Unless it can be proven that the concert organisers failed in their duty to provide a safe stage - and there are no indications to suggest this - it is unlikely that Tyler would have any success in making a no win, no fee claim for whiplash and other injuries.
The incident though did make me wonder whether any crowd member has ever suffered personal injury as a result of a big name performer crowd surfing.
Although a brief Google shed no light on the question, I feel pretty certain that it must have happened at some point. Perhaps we've just never heard about it because injured concert-goers might simply regard an injury caused by their idols as kinds of badges of honour.
One can imagine overhearing the following conversation:
"Why the neck brace, mate?"
"Whiplash".
"Sorry to hear that"
"Don't be sorry, fella. Yeah, it hurts like hell but I got it at a Status Quo concert. Francis Rossi was stage diving when he kicked me in the head. Can you believe it, his actual boot in my actual face?"
More commonly, it is performers themselves who suffer accident injury while stage diving. For example, in late 2008, plaintive-voiced playboy James Blunt broke his pinkie when stage diving at a concert in America – cruelly, many bloggers greeted the news by saying they wished he'd broken something else.
Blunt, in his bearded youth can be forgiven much - he still has time to learn. But Tyler, perhaps the accident was a way of telling him something...
