So glad to see that Sal’s bank has signed up for some kind of efficient anti-fraud system. And they’ve clearly tested it so well: booking flights online last night, we were redirected to a third-party site to sign up to the “Verified By Visa” program, and then, somehow, we ended up here:
It’s the sort of thing that gives you faith that your money’s in good hands…
So, the Camden Crawl then. I snuck out of work early and found myself in Camden just after five. I waited for Sal just up the Kentish Town Road, close to the wristband exchange (my suggested meeting place of just outside the tube having been vetoed on the account of there being “too many weirdos there…”; of course the Camden of twenty meters away is refreshing crazy-free). As I waited, a steady stream of young indie kids, fresh off the production line with their tight skinny jeans and porkpie hats, wandered past in groups, each excitedly checking the lineups that they’d just collected. Hanging around in Camden makes me feel old.
When Sal finally turned up, and we too had collected our wristbands, free CD, lineups, and complimentary bag of promotional tat, we popped into the nearby noodle bar to grab something to eat. As we munched through our noodles I sorted through the bag of flyers we’d been handed to determine whether any of it was worth keeping. Amongst the promotional items within was a small NME badge, on which the paper’s logo is set against a union jack background. My, how things have changed.
Noodles consumed, and a couple of tigers later, we headed round the corner to the Electric Ballroom to catch the first act of the evening, selected purely on the basis of being the only thing on so far (As we passed the tube I noticed that teh kids were already queueing at the Underworld, presumably to see Foals, even though they wouldn’t be on for another hour; maybe they knew something we didn’t.)
Anyway, instead we saw “indie singer-songwriter” Kate Nash. Slightly entertaining, even though she’d clearly been signed by a record label desperate for an indie Lilly Allen. The first set of the night out of the way, and with a firm “no queues” policy established, we set off up Chalk Farm Road for some random crawl action. Sal wanted to go somewhere we’d never been before, so we opted for The Cuban Bar in the market, where a bloke with a Yorkshire accent mixed us Mojitos beneath posters of Che and Cuban flags. 
The band, when they eventually played on the small stage in the corner, were ultimately forgettable, but did boast a lead singer who looked uncannily like Stephen Mangan (he of Green Wing fame).
Where to next? We’d already made the decision to head towards Koko for the end of the evening, so we decided to head back along the high street (after a brief diversion via Lock 17, which instantly failed our “no queues” policy with a line that snaked around the courtyard in anticipation of who knows what). I’d decided that I would see anything, regardless of the band’s name or type of music. I only realised that this strategy may have been a mistake when we found ourselves in The Oh! Bar: it was only after we’d bought drinks that I noticed the Kerrang logo on the walls. Oh! Dear. Well, how bad could “Flood of Red” be?
We stopped just long enough to down the remains of our pints and for me to take a couple of photos, and scampered, the first song barely half over…
After a brief detour via The Purple Turtle (where I rather enjoyed the unusually-titled Untitled Musical Project), we headed for a busy Koko, where we watched first Tom McRae, and then The Charlatans from a prime vantage point just above the DJ booth (which is now covered over, thus, preventing any Mani-asking-Sal-for-a-light style shenanigans like last year).
And that was that. Just time for a Woody’s kebab, and then home. Same time next year?
Just a quick one to apologise to anyone who might have popped in this morning for the usual fix of sarcasm and cynicism and found themselves not at www.pastemagazine.org, but instead at www.pderoode.com. Or indeed at any one of these sites (or indeed several others):
– www.cliftoncoffee.co.uk
– www.d-log.info
Our hosting company, Freedom2RunAReallyShittyService, in their infinite wisdom, appear to have decided to randomly serve up one of the other sites on the same server instead of this one.
Perhaps they were trying to tell me something.
Or perhaps they’re just utterly incompetent.
You decide.
I know that the “isn’t it funny how the media always over hype how quickly an event sold out” thing is one of my key themes, but I’m quite amused by some of the coverage of this year’s Glasto ticket sell out. For example, here’s the indie’s story: Log on, sell out: Glastonbury tickets go in just 90 minutes
Which is funny, obviously, because tickets went on sale at 9AM, and I definitely remember buying ours at 10:43, which would mean they were definitely on sale for more than 90 minutes.
Oh, but what’s this half way down the article:
“They had all gone by 10.45am, it’s brilliant,” said Mr Eavis. “We had 250,000 people queuing to get through at any one time.”
That’s odd, isn’t it: 1 hour 45 minutes isn’t the same as 90 minutes, is it? Let’s ignore for a minute the fact that it was only the standard tickets that had sold out by around 10:45, and that some of the 22,000 combined ticket plus coach tickets were definitely still on sale well past 11 (when I posted my previous blog, for example, at 11:17 there were definitely still tickets on sale), but I wonder how the indie can have made that mistake?
Is it because they can’t add up?
Or will they just lazily reprint any old press release that gets sent to them (changing the odd word here and there) even if there’s a really obvious contradiction or error in that press release?
Surely not…
Oh. It turns out they aren’t the only ones…
The Telegraph: Tickets for this year’s Glastonbury festival were snapped up in 90 minutes, a record for the ever-popular event… Tickets costing £145 went on sale at 9am this morning and were sold out by 10.45am.
Metro: Tickets for this year’s Glastonbury Festival sold out in a record-breaking time of just 90 minutes… By 10.45am a record 137,500 tickets had been snapped up for the festival
The Sun: TICKETS for the biggest ever Glastonbury Festival have sold out in a record-breaking 90 minutes. Thousands of music fans were left disappointed after a record 137,500 tickets were snapped up by 10.45am – less than two hours after they went on sale at 9am.
The Times: Tickets for this year’s Glastonbury Festival were snapped up yesterday in the record-breaking time of 90 minutes. Music fans swamped the event’s booking telephone line and website after they went on sale. By 10.45am 137,500 tickets had been sold for the festival, which returns after a year’s absence to its Worthy Farm home, in Pilton, Somerset.
[Although there’s something rather ironic about the fact that the only major UK newspaper I could find that hadn’t reprinted this mistake was the Grauniad: Glastonbury sells out in two hours.]
Of course
there will be resales, but gosh, that was a bit close: up at 8AM and couldn’t get near the See Tickets site even an hour before this year’s Glastonbury tickets went on sale, then it was F5 all the way until I finally got through at about 10:45… and by 10:55 the main order page was saying that the regular tickets had sold out (although when I last checked they still had some of the 22,000 coach package tickets that were part of the deal agreed at the licensing hearing last week).
I won’t be totally comfortable about it until the confirmation email arrives, but that was about as close as it has ever been.
Interesting system they were running this year as well: they’d restricted the number of connections available to http://www.seetickets.com, which was mostly timing out or redirecting to a “Busy” page, but I noticed fairly early on that you could at least get the first page up quite easily if you tried https://www.seetickets.com (i.e., the secure site) although sadly attempting to get to the booking form itself via https just redirected you back to http.
So I mostly spent the two hours when I was trying to get my tickets watching Firefox tell me it was:
“Connecting to www.seetickets.com…”
“Waiting for www.seetickets.com…”
“Connecting to busy.seetickets.com…”
(and then it would timeout trying to retrieve the server busy page, which is perhaps somewhat ironic).
But once you were through to the actual booking form, you were basically guaranteed tickets, because it redirected onto the secure site, which was only serving pages to people who had been able to get a booking form up, rather than having to serve pages to everyone who was hitting F5 and hammering the server. I guess they have learnt their lesson from 2004: it might be deeply frustrating for anyone who can’t get near the site, but at least they then had the server capacity to process the transactions of the people who had got through.
[Well, I would say that, I got tickets…]