Jean-Paul Sartre must have been anticipating a night at a gig when he declared “Hell is other people”. More specifically, the recent Paul Simon concert in the 3Arena. Simon may be small in stature but he’s a giant among songwriters. He is also 84 and deaf in one ear, so it’s unlikely he will tour again. And so I ignored the dismayed shrieks from my credit card and bought two exorbitantly priced tickets. These weren’t even the most expensive tickets but they came in at more than €350 for seats so close to the rafters I felt a nosebleed coming on. You’d reasonably assume that anyone shelling out this sort of money was a diehard fan, keen to catch every second of the event. Perhaps the people who may have sold a kidney or two to acquire the best seats were hanging on every note but up in the rafters attention was, at best, wandering.Minutes before he was due to take to the stage, rows of seats were still empty. And then, for the first half-hour, a parade of people drifted in aimlessly. This opening part involved him playing his album Seven Psalms in its entirety. The songs constitute a quiet, thoughtful meditation on life but it was difficult to think about anything as rows of people bobbed up and down to allow the latecomers into their seats. One woman arrived looking like she had been on an early Christmas shopping spree. Another patron a few seats over noisily explained that her friend had given her the ticket but she had no real interest. There were small children being escorted in and out by their parents. There were people sitting in the wrong seats. All human life was present.Finally, everyone appeared to be seated and he moved on to playing the hits, accompanied by some masterful musicians. His voice was understandably more tremulous and vulnerable, which added a poignancy to songs such as Slip Sliding Away and Homeward Bound.But then the exodus started. At first a trickle, then a torrent and the rows of seats resumed their bobbing dance. He was singing The Boxer accompanied by virtuoso Martin Hayes on the fiddle and people were standing up to leave. I longed to interrogate them. What were they expecting when they bought the tickets? But I was too distracted by the constant raising of mobile phones to intervene. The earlier repeated requests over the speakers to not use phones during the performance were cheerfully ignored as the wannabe videographers held their phones aloft in a manner reminiscent of a priest raising the chalice before Communion. The harried 3Arena employee in our section flew up and down the steps, shining her torch on the offenders. Some defiantly refused to stop filming and she had to make her way along the row to deliver the message again. The rows of heads bobbed up and down to let her pass. The encores came, the band reappeared and then for a final time Simon reappeared on his own to sing The Sound of Silence. But there was no sound of silence in Block P as people continued slip-sliding away. It would be nice to blame this on the callow youth of today but at least half the audience could have used their free travel pass to get to the arena. I felt some kinship with WB Yeats, who famously stood up in the Abbey Theatre and told the audience they had disgraced themselves again after demonstrators had disrupted The Plough and the Stars.Someone reportedly threw a woman’s shoe at his head for his troubles. If any shoes were to be thrown in the 3Arena that night, they would have been of the soft type that you can slip on without bending down.The reviews of the Simon concert were rapturous so he wouldn’t have been unduly worried about the lacklustre reception from some audience members. Another artist fond of exploring the human condition was Samuel Beckett and he also got his share of unappreciative audiences. But let’s hope he never read one particularly caustic review of Waiting for Godot in 1955. CW Heriot attended the play at the Criterion Theatre in London on behalf of the Lord Chamberlain’s office, which acted as censor for public performances.He complained he had “endured two hours of angry boredom”. At the interval, the man next to him cried “Brother, let me out of this” and fled, never to return. “The general feeling seemed, like mine, to be one of acute boredom – except for a sprinkling of young persons in slacks and Marlon Brando pullovers ... who applauded pointedly.”I, too, applauded pointedly at Simon but the errant gig-goers were long gone at that stage.