"The whole Instagram thing is kind of a slippery slope".

A leading concert designer has said that music lovers should be banned from using their smartphones at live shows.

LeRoy Bennett, who has previously designed lighting for the likes of Madonna and Paul McCartney, says that concert-goers have becoming overwhelmingly obsessed with attempting to secure the perfect “Instagram moment.”

But as well as proving detrimental to the show’s atmosphere, Bennett says that musicians become self-critical of their performance and appearance when they see poor footage posted on social media.

“The whole Instagram thing is kind of a slippery slope because there’s a lot of people in the audience not all in the same spot, so some people take better shots than others, and artists see it and go, ‘this is terrible'”, he told Rolling Stone.

“If you’re in front of the stage looking at it, it’s easy to take a good Instagram. If you’re off to the side, pointing your camera sideways, it’s not necessarily the best angle.

“It can be a pain in the a** when it comes to the lighting side of things because artists will look at these Instagrams and they get upset thinking that’s how they looked during the show when someone just took a bad photograph.”

Although a uniform ban for smartphones is yet to be introduced at concerts, Jack White banned phones from his tour earlier this year in order to achieve a “100% human experience”.

“We think you’ll enjoy looking up from your gadgets for a little while and experience music and our shared love of it IN PERSON”, a statement confirmed at the time.

Instead, fans were encouraged to place their phones in lockable pouches that are only accessible when the gig ends.