Going to a Harry Styles concert with my adult daughter: practical tips, crowd survival and unexpected feelings

If your adult daughter ever invites you to a Harry Styles concert, I recommend saying yes.
I also recommend concert earplugs unless you want to spend the rest of your life opening conversations with: “Sorry, what was that?”

Years ago, I was the person organising family life. I knew where everyone needed to be, who had football practice, who needed lunch money and who had mysteriously forgotten to mention a school project due tomorrow morning. Now my children are adults and occasionally the roles have shifted. Sometimes I’m still in charge. Sometimes I’m support staff.

This is how I found myself agreeing to a Harry Styles concert and discovering that modern concerts involve strategy, queue etiquette, military-style ticket buying, navigation skills and enough people to populate a small country. I also discovered something else.

This is not a Harry Styles concert review. Those aren’t difficult to find. Suffice it to say he was good. Actually, he was excellent. If you have the chance to see him live, grab it with both hands. He also seems like a genuinely nice person who wants the audience to have a great time. Which we did.

But somewhere between trying not to lose each other in the crowd, getting everyone into the venue and watching thousands of people singing along, I realised I wasn’t really there for Harry Styles. Or not only for Harry Styles. I was also there because my daughter was having the time of her life, and watching that turned out to be one of my favourite parts of the day.

But before we get to the emotional growth and life lessons, let’s start with ticket sales. Because apparently those now require operational planning.

Practical tip #1: If tickets are likely to sell out, recruit people

Apparently modern ticket-buying is no longer a simple matter of opening a website and politely purchasing tickets. It is nothing like my own teenage years, when buying concert tickets just involved getting up really (really) early and queueing at the venue. Not anymore. These days, you join an online queue before sales even begin, and then when they open, you are assigned a mysterious queue number that appears to have been generated by fate itself. Could be 68. Could be 387,000. No way of knowing.
This is not a job for one person.

My daughter assembled a team. Multiple devices. Multiple queues. Constant messages arriving at alarming speed:

“I’m in!”
“No, not those seats!”
“They’ve added another date!”
“WAIT THOSE ARE 400 EURO!”

If tickets are likely to sell out, recruit people. Decide beforehand exactly what you want: floor tickets or seats, VIP or standard, preferred dates and your absolute spending limit. Because the moment tickets actually become available, everyone immediately loses the ability to make rational decisions. Do not become the person texting: “Wait… what exactly were we trying to buy again?” while losing their place in the queue.

The operation succeeded, and this is how I ended up in the Amsterdam Arena with my daughter, her best friend and the best friend’s mum.

Practical tip #2: Don’t forget the city you’re in

The concert was wonderful. But so is Amsterdam. I lived there for years, so we skipped the sightseeing and headed straight for the Arena, but the city itself is absolutely worth visiting.

Our afternoon turned into one of those quietly perfect travel afternoons where very little happens and somehow that’s exactly right. We wandered, sat outside, ran for cover during a sudden downpour, drank wine and chatted.

In my teenage years, I approached concerts as endurance events: wake up early, get there first, stand for hours and eventually lose all feeling in my feet. Now I have developed a much greater appreciation for sitting somewhere pleasant with a glass of wine and pretending I have become sophisticated.

If you’re travelling for a concert, don’t make the mistake of treating the entire day as one long queue. You’re already in a city worth exploring.

Practical tip #3: Arrive early if you have standing tickets

We got there early enough that we spent a long time sitting on the floor inside but not early enough for front row. That requires arriving at the venue very early and sitting or standing in the queue all day – either in the pouring rain, the freezing cold or the blazing sun. Sometimes all three in the same day. This is after all the Netherlands. Been there, done that, don’t particularly want to do it anymore.

Even though we enjoyed our wine and food truck finds and then breezed through security into the Arena, this is not a great strategy if you want to be up close.
We were quite far back and direct sightings of the man himself mostly involved screens or tiny movements in the distance that we chose to believe were Harry Styles.

The advantage of being at the back: room to dance and, if that one six-foot person in five-inch stilettos steps in front of you, the freedom to simply move elsewhere.
We had a wonderful time, but if you actually want to see anything, you need a different strategy. Let me talk you through the options.

Option 1: seated areas.

Pros: You can skip the support act and most of the queues, stroll in five minutes before the main act and your seat will be there waiting for you. Go to the bathroom, get a drink, wander around a bit… your seat isn’t going anywhere.

Cons: You’ll probably be quite far away. It feels more like watching the show and less like being part of the party.

Option 2: standing areas

Pros: If you arrive early, you’ll have a good view of the stage and possibly even a front-row spot. It’s an amazing experience. It’s also an endurance event.

Cons: You need to queue very early and, once you’ve secured a good spot, leaving becomes complicated unless you’re willing to sacrifice it. The 1980s problem of being crushed against crash barriers has improved because tickets are now often sold for different sections of the standing area.

Option 3: pay a fortune for VIP packages.

Pros: If you pay premium price and get in the queue early, you will have the best view in the Arena. If you pay premium price and you arrive later, you will still have excellent views but you won’t be at the very front waving a sign at Harry hoping for him to notice you.

Cons: You have paid a premium price and may now spend the rest of the evening mentally calculating how many nice holidays that amount of money could have funded.

My daughter did later discover that if a stage partially blocks the view, compensation and even free tickets can unexpectedly enter the picture. Cue some creative book keeping. By the end of it, she had concluded the whole thing was practically a bargain.

Practical tip #4: Create a “lost in crowds” plan

This one sounds dramatic. It isn’t. Large concerts involve huge crowds and people inevitably disappear temporarily. People go for drinks. Or go to the loo. People get distracted by merchandise. Possibly they faint over merchandise prices. People confidently walk in entirely the wrong direction.

I know this because I became one of those people. Returning from a loo break I emerged into what appeared to be several thousand people standing in very similar places. I had absolutely no idea where I was.

I texted my daughter. Her reply arrived immediately: “Stay where you are. Send me a photo of your view.” A few minutes later I saw her making her way through the crowd towards me. She took my hand and led me back.

The whole thing felt oddly familiar. Years ago in Berlin we briefly lost both children. We had decided it was a good idea to give them little scooters so they wouldn’t have to walk and complain. This was not an overly bright plan. They did not complain about walking. What they did was disappear in the middle of Alexanderplatz. My daughter was nine and her little brother was four.

Cue instant catastrophising and doom-spiralling, until I remembered we’d given them very specific instructions: stay where you are, don’t wander off and we’ll find you. My daughter did not panic. She calmly reassured her little brother: “If we just stay where we are, Mummy and Daddy will find us.”

Years later I was apparently the one needing recovery procedures. Oh, how the tables have turned.

Of course these days we have phones and can send photos of our view and “I need extraction!” messages. But it’s still worth agreeing on a few things beforehand: keep your phones charged, remember which exit you used if you leave the area, and decide where to meet if everyone suddenly has to evacuate.

Practical tip #5: Bring ear plugs. Seriously.

I cannot stress this enough. Concerts have always been loud. After one gig back in the eighties my ears rang for weeks. But these days the volume seems to have reached Armageddon levels. Spend several hours exposed to that without protection and you’re significantly increasing your chances of hearing damage.

And don’t just grab wax or silicone plugs designed to block out barking dogs, traffic or a snoring partner. Get proper concert earplugs. You can still hear the music perfectly well, just without the deafening side effects. If you don’t have them: most venues sell them.

Practical tip #6: concert etiquette, or how not to be That Person.

Large concerts involve tens of thousands of people, which means everyone has silently agreed to cooperate for several hours. Mostly.

If you need to get past people, a smile and “sorry, excuse me” still work surprisingly well. When someone lets you through, don’t suddenly reveal the twenty-seven friends apparently travelling behind you. If you leave your spot, do not return two songs later expecting the crowd to part like the Red Sea.

And then there is the issue of height. Far be it from me to be the footwear police, but if you are already six feet tall, adding five-inch stilettos and positioning yourself directly in front of someone considerably shorter does feel like a choice. Of course people are entitled to stand where they like and wear whatever they like. I merely mention it because, from several rows back, there were moments when I felt I was watching Harry Styles through a herd of unusually well-dressed giraffes.

If you’re filming, remember that the people behind you did not pay good money to spend the evening watching Harry Styles through your phone screen.

Singing along at enthusiastic volume is also part of the experience. Screaming lyrics directly into somebody else’s ear from a distance of three centimetres perhaps slightly less so.

The general rule is simple: enjoy yourself enthusiastically, but not in a way that accidentally turns you into somebody else’s concert problem.

Final tip: Say yes

I loved watching Harry Styles do his thing. I loved watching my daughter and her best friend singing, dancing and having the time of their lives even more. But there was one moment I loved most of all.

When the show was almost over, during one of the slower songs, my daughter put her head on my shoulder and yelled directly into my ear:

“MUM, I’M SO HAPPY YOU CAME!”

There is something wonderfully ridiculous about having a deeply moving moment while several thousand people are screaming around you. Harry Styles was singing something beautiful. Apparently it was Matilda. I had to check the set list afterwards.

At the time, I wasn’t really paying attention.

Have you ever said yes to an event, trip or experience mainly because someone you love wanted to go? Did you end up enjoying the experience itself, or was watching them enjoy it the best part?

Other stories you might enjoy:

• Will I fit? Will I cope? : about worrying beforehand and discovering reality had other plans
• Driving to Poland Without a Passport : featuring doom-spiralling, legal research and my conviction that I was almost certainly heading for prison.
• The Jungle Rafts Incident : involving a river, panic and my husband unexpectedly becoming rescue personnel