You're beautiful when your angry.

they should be made to leave their bags at the cloakroom - you aren't allowed to take them into chavy clubs (for fear of them being filled with knives) so why are you allowed to take them into a gig? makes no sense

What you need is a stout pair of scissors, or possibly hedge trimmers. Snip snip, bag falls to ground. Now they are forced to use the cloakroom or cling to their bag all night like a prat.

What about if they have medication in their bags?

Teenage Mutant Emo Turtles.

Although I do sometimes take a thin backpack if I'm going to a gig after work. But I won't go down into the front. So there.

Preaching to the choir here baby.
I don't have that chap on facebook. Have we had particularly odious blogs this week?

I prefer the backpackers to the fuckers who insist on talking throughout a gig. Why pay to go to a gig to talk about work/life/shoes for the entirity of it?

Sadly some f***ers are just too tight to pay for the cloakroom.... *sighs*

As well as all of that, those stupid bags take a good 5 - 10 minutes to be searched by the door staff.

First they have to open the bloody thing which will undoubtedly have a dodgy zip which keeps getting caught, then they have to pull out the massive over-sized hoodie with a band name printed on the front that no one recognises, then they have to go through the shrapnel of keys, deoderant, cash, pens, scraps of paper, tangled headphone cables and anything else which lurks at the bottom of the bag, then they have to confiscate the half full bottle of water tucked in the side pocket as they want the scummy bag carrier to only drink liquids that they've purchased at the venue, then... THEN they let everyone else in.

Make the twat stand at the side and wait, instead of making the rest of us wait outside in the pissing rain!