The front row of a gig is a sacred space. When you love an artist, you want to be as close to them as possible, without a view obscured by someone else’s hairdo. You want the possibility that the artist will pluck you from the crowd, form a deep and enduring connection and end up marrying you. Or at least notice you.

Last month, Olivia Rodrigo revealed how acutely she had noticed some of the fans lining the barriers at her shows. “People wear diapers so that they can be front row,” she said, adding, to everyone’s absolute horror: “That’s been an experience as a performer that I have smelled.”

This is no aberration, and while genuine medical needs should be taken into account, situations down the front have clearly got out of control. Also last month, video of a very stoic stadium worker cleaning up human excrement at a Noah Kahan gig went viral and prompted Kahan himself to post on X: “If you have to poop at a show please dear god just go to the bathroom lmao.” This week, a fan of US country star Morgan Wallen complained that he, his brother and his niece were urinated on by another concertgoer, and police are investigating. Must we be subjected to headlines such as “Someone Also Shit Their Pants at a 5 Seconds of Summer Concert”? And in 2024, someone urinated on the floor of the standing section of a Sabrina Carpenter concert, causing a run on a fairly horrifying item called a “pit diaper”, whose mere existence speaks to a wider problem.

Morgan Wallen on stage. Photograph: Jason Kempin/Getty Images for ABA

Since the pandemic, when music lovers missed out on two years of live shows and young fans were forced to wait for their first gig experiences, those hard-won spots on the front row have become more and more coveted. The cost of VIP pit tickets has rocketed, stan culture has grown ever more feral, and the social media value of scoring clear gig footage is at a premium, partly because surprise celeb cameos – as in Rosalía’s confession booth, Charli xcx’s Apple dance or Sabrina Carpenter’s on-stage “arrests” – are now built into many pop shows. So as well as the adult nappies, today’s barrier culture is a world of strict fan-run queue conventions, cross-venue sprints and specialist hydration systems.

In an effort to find someone who would admit to even considering wearing a nappy, I popped down to Wembley Stadium on night 11 of Harry Styles’ recent 12-night Together Together residency. The dazzlingly sequinned girls I spoke to weathering the heatwave to queue for the final section of floor standing were mostly horrified by the question. “I think that’s a bit ridiculous,” said Eloise, 23, having once queued for 10 hours to get the barrier at Harry’s last run of Wembley shows. What will you do if you need the toilet? I asked Shannon, who was hoping to leg it to the barrier when doors opened: “Hope for the best!”

A Harry Styles fan queues up at Wembley Stadium. Photograph: Hannah Cauhepe/The Guardian

Nineteen-year-old Keeley, who started queuing at 11am, said that she, “personally”, wouldn’t wear a nappy. “That’s not for me. Especially in this heat. It’d feel really unnatural to wee just in front of everyone.”

But if you’re paying hundreds of pounds for a show and are queuing for hours to be mere metres from Rodrigo or Styles, it does make a warped kind of sense that you might take the nappy route rather than risk missing a song or losing your spot at the front. On TikTok, plenty of Swifties claimed to have worn one to the Eras tour (and with shows of more than three hours, you’d assume even Taylor Swift took a loo break). But it’s hard to track down anyone who will admit to a Guardian journalist that they wore a pit diaper in order to keep their coveted front-row view.

When Katie, a seasoned Swiftie, planned her route to the Eras tour barrier, she forwent pissing herself in a crowd. Instead, she developed a hydration strategy that kept her show-ready but dry as a bone. “I drank loads of water the day before and then as soon as I got up at 4am to queue for the barricade, I had like two pints. I kept drinking until around midday then had a hard cutoff.” Energy gels, glucose tablets and mid-show waters handed by security over the barricade kept her from passing out – a sure-fire way to lose your spot. “No point in getting barricade if you faint during the first era!” she added brightly.

Taylor Swift performing in Amsterdam – hopefully not singling out a nappy-wearing fan. Photograph: Hollandse Hoogte/REX/Shutterstock

There is a long tradition of people (mostly cis men, let’s be real) pissing into pint-glasses in crowds – and in one particularly horrifying Primavera crowd, directly on to my friend’s leg. Concerts by US psychedelic rockers Phish have become notorious for fans supposedly pooping with gay abandon since an infamous incident in 2015. You can see how it might happen in a boozed-up festival crowd or somewhere drugs are being liberally consumed. And perhaps the Phish experience is so transcendent it elevates the listener outside the workings of their gastrointestinal tract. More desperately, fans could argue they are counterculturally rejecting toileting norms, though this behaviour is actually relatively mainstream: urination was apparently rife as far back as concerts by Frank Sinatra and the Beatles.

If you are minded to just let go, the potential for it to backfire is huge. “I tried this with a sanitary towel and it didn’t work,” confesses one gig-goer, insisting on anonymity for reasons that will become obvious. Let’s call her Fiona. She and a friend had travelled to see Arctic Monkeys in Finsbury Park in 2014. Fiona was a spritely 15-year-old who had got her hands on a bottle of rosé and reached the barrier right in front of where Alex Turner and co were soon to be asking Do I Wanna Know? The answer here is an emphatic: no you don’t.

“I was determined to stay there,” she says, bodily functions be damned. “I had some sanitary towels in my bag so I thought I could discreetly wee into one. But it just overfilled because, unsurprisingly, pads can’t hold a rosé-induced wee’s worth of liquid.” With huge wet patches all down her black skinny jeans, she had to shimmy her piss-soaked way out of the crowd to find a portable toilet to deal with everything. “The worst thing was, when I tried to squeeze back through to my place, no one believed that my friend was waiting for me at the barrier.” It’s hard to believe that really was the worst thing about the situation.

Toilet troubles are one thing; but just “getting barrier” in the first place is a whole other matter. The Harry Styles fans queuing in the heatwave had numbers written in Sharpie on the backs of their hands as part of a fan-run system that is supposed to ensure that whoever queues the longest gets the best spots. It goes pretty far back down the queue, at least to the hundreds. The idea is that no one can push in – or at least that it’s obvious if they do – though no one was clear exactly what anyone would or could do about that.

Fans show their queue numbers ahead of Harry Styles’ concert. Photograph: Hannah Cauhepe/The Guardian

There are some obvious flaws in this system. I could have written a number on the back of my hand and strolled to the front, and who could deny me? It’s an honour code that some people just don’t abide by, even in England, the spiritual home of queuing. Videos of the walk into the stadiums for Styles’ shows often become popular on socials: the ones from the night I investigated had just as much panicked jostling and yelling as there would have been without the numbers.

Fans of all stripes have always staked out venues to sprint in and nab a space at the front – the forthcoming documentary Metallica Saved My Life shows the every-man-for-himself combo tactic of camping out then legging it in – but the newly regimented, numbered, self-policing approach seems to have stemmed from teenage girls. Anecdotal evidence suggests these “roll calls”, as fans call them, started proliferating in the mid-2010s. “Fans policing the order in which they’re in the queue to get into the venue first has always been a thing,” says Hannah Ewens, author of Fangirls, in which she documents how the teen fangirl queue community has its own microcommunities, complete with influencers. The spirit of the community, infused with a deep love for the artist plus the need for a decent view – teenage girls tend to be among the smallest in any given gig crowd – is all part of the barrier-questing experience.

Styles fans ready themselves for the dash to the front. Photograph: Hannah Cauhepe/The Guardian

But while it’s always been about getting to the front, getting a spot on the front row has also become a lot more about clout. “TikTok has made it so much more rewarding,” Ewens adds. “It’s ramped up a sense of competition.” Getting to the barrier could be the difference between your videos of the show going viral or disappearing into the digital ether, and that gives the numbering systems even more perceived weight. “Fandom is about being in a community and being part of something, but it’s also very hierarchical,” Ewens says. “Queuing scratches both those itches for fans.”

Some artists have made it clear that fan-run queue systems will not be entertained. For Bring Me the Horizon’s Manchester gig earlier this month – which had no barrier at all, just free-flowing rockers right up to the stage – the FAQs included a note: “Queueing will begin from 10am on show day … Fan numbering will not be acknowledged. Order of first entry will be selected at random.” The band and promoter would not comment on the decision, and whether or not it had any effect on the toileting habits of the crowd is unclear.

Fandoms are starting to push back against fan-made queuing systems, too. Search Reddit or TikTok for this subject and you will find just as many people rejecting it as participating. Louis Tomlinson brought in randomised wristbands to take away the incentive to queue for hours for his shows earlier this year. Whatever time fans checked in, they were assigned a number to determine the order they could enter the pit. Venues including Wembley Stadium have also banned camping, making the process fairer for people who can’t give up several days to the cause.

But despite the horrors of dirty nappies and enforced fan regimes, the barrier is generally a place of bonhomie. Friendships are made, core memories created. Whenever a member of BTS chucks a worn T-shirt to a specific fan at the barrier, no one around them tries to grab it (much as you know they desperately want to). If fans need help or water, those around them will signal to security to fetch it. And some of the photos and footage coming from front-row fans at this summer’s stadium shows are of professional-level quality. Whatever they did to capture them is between them, God and the nostrils of their favourite pop star. Even Fiona has no regrets: “It was worth it,” she says, 10 years removed from the wet jeans. “And I’m glad I have the story too.”