It’s not me it’s them: How disabled fans are written out of live music.
Around a quarter of the UK population is disabled. That’s one in four of us navigating a society that still treats access requirements as a commodity we should be grateful for. No wonder I feel like a burden. I was reminded of this, predictably and promptly when I went to buy tickets for Lily Allen’s UK tour The concert wasn’t sold out. Plenty of seats were available. The problem? The three rows of accessible seating were already gone. Three rows out of a seating capacity of 1,866. Spoiler alert: I’m still going (anything for you, Lily). Disabled people are very good at finding ways to just improvise when the world shrugs and says “that’ll do”. But let’s not pretend this is a novel inconvenience or a one-off glitch in the ticketing matrix. It’s a pattern. And it’s boring. And it’s political. Let’s start with the numbers, because they matter. Around 25% of people identify as disabled, according to the Government’s most recent Family Resources Survey. Disabled people are more ...
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