Crowd surfing is the process in which a person is passed overhead from person to person (often during a concert). The "crowd surfer" is passed above everyone's heads, with everyone's hands supporting the person's weight.
Iggy Pop leapt into the crowd at the 1970 Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival, an early example of crowd surfing.[1]
In early 1980Peter Gabriel crowd surfed during performances of "Games Without Frontiers" by falling into his audience "crucifix style" and then being passed around.[2][3] Gabriel would later crowd surf during performances of his song "Lay Your Hands on Me".[4]
Said Gabriel:
"Iggy Pop had jumped into an audience prior to me," Gabriel explained toMark Blake, "but he hadn't done that thing of lying on the hands and being carried around by the audience. I had the idea from agame you did with a therapy group where you had to fall backwards and trust the person behind to catch you...At an open-air show in Chicago I was passed around and returned to the stage minus every piece of clothing except my underpants. There was an edge to doing it and part of you was praying you'd get back to the stage in one piece."[5]
The first official video release to depict Gabriel crowd surfing wasPOV, a concert video released in 1990 and produced byMartin Scorsese.[6] WhenBilly Joel crowdsurfed in a concert during his 1987 concert tour of theSoviet Union, bandmateKevin Dukes described it as the "Peter Gabriel flop".[7]
Crowd surfing extended for the first time to the classical music scene, when in June 2014 at the Bristol Proms an audience-member was ejected by fellow audience members during a performance of Handel's Messiah after he took the director's invitation to "clap and whoop" to the music a step too far by attempting to crowd-surf.[8]
