critic-conscious

[Vladv1]

"Playing essentially the same set as they had been doing for months now in Australia – except shorn of covers bar the proven-winner encore, ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go’, which was considered obscure enough to be cool even in critic-conscious London – road-hardened by the 238 shows they had already played in the preceding 365 days, bristling with the added confidence of having two chart albums in that same period, and so bored by their limited London experience thus far, they ignored the deficit of audience members and simply went for it with even more abandon than had become their stock-in-trade".
Mick Wall, "Hell Ain't A Bad Place To Be".
What does critic-conscious mean in other words?

 

[jutfrank]

It means that bands were especially conscious of how critics would judge them.

 

[PeterCW]

I read it as being the London audiences who were conscious of the critics' opinion.

 

[Tarheel]

The phrase we should be looking at is "critic-conscious London".