666 : Down and Out in Hammersmith and Manchester

On Friday the Foo Fighters played a late-night show at the O2 Ritz here in Manchester. Whilst the prospect of seeing perennial stadium botherers in a 2,000-capacity venue is in itself unique, its most noteworthy point is how they managed ticket distribution. There was no mad internet dash for tickets, no ludicrous presale (there is no such thing as a presale, tickets are either available or they are not) and no secret codes and loops to jump through. You simply queued up last Sunday at the Ritz and from midday and a REAL person sold you a paper ticket. It was like the last thirty-odd years hadn’t happened, and instantly they did away with all the issues around touts, bots, scammers or fakes.

For the younglings on here this is how we used to do it. Tickets in the eighties were only available from the box office. You could ring up and surreptitiously buy them using your parents’ credit card number (N.B Rockflesh.com don’t condone this behaviour though without it I wouldn’t have seen Rush, Metallica, Anthrax to name three)  or you could send in a cheque or postal order (that latter manner is how I bought my monsters of Rock ones from ’86 to ’91. However, if you really wanted the tickets and were concerned that they would sell out, you went and waited outside the venue on the morning that they went on sale.

In 1988 I sat outside Hammersmith Odeon from five in the morning to ensure that I got tickets for the Iron Maiden UK tour that miraculously appeared after they had played their “only UK show” at Donington. Two years later at the same venue I queued over night for the only London show of their low-key intercity express tour. In both instances, I remember the experience of queuing much more than the shows. Both times it was a group of my metal mates, and we brought illicit booze and nicotine and essentially had the times of our lives. Once we eventually got to the front and got the tickets in our hands (yes paper tickets) we felt that we had earned them.

For one afternoon, Dave Grohl brought that magic and excitement back. It was a communal atmosphere as real fans waited for real tickets. I know there is a convenience to online purchases, but has it removed the romanticism and the adventure? Where there is finite demand, should we return to the organic and potentially democratically fair pursuit of queuing as opposed to randomly pressing refresh? Maybe when the next Sleep Token or Malevolence tour goes on sale, we should do it old school and we sell actual tickets from an actual place and if you want to make sure you get them, well you have to stand in line. As said, it solves the tout issue overnight. They are not going to stand around for six plus hours. It’s the fans that will queue and therefore the fans that will get the tickets.

Ok the thrill of sleeping overnight on the hard pavements of Hammersmith probably appeals more to the fifteen-year-old me than it does to the fifty-three-year-old one, but the Foo’s ruse of having only one point of purchase, and it being a physical one, opens up the debate about the whole charade of internet ticket sales, fees and supply and demand. If we want to ensure that tickets end up in fans hands and only fans hands do we need to think of a mechanism that means it is fairer and easier for them to get them? I know that standing in line won't work for everyone, but as I struggled on Wednesday to get tickets to see the aforementioned Rush because I wasn’t eligible for the “people who can hop on one leg and are called Nigel” presale, I found myself misty-eyed for the past and the hard pavement. Whatever we do, current practices aren’t fit for purpose and aren’t designed with the consumer in mind.