How many bombed hospitals do you want to hear about
Having said that I ve already forgotten the singers name
Having said that I ve already forgotten the singers name
Off Topic The Review Thread
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Tried ITV News last night. Not great but much better, less personality driven (ie the journalist’s personality) reporting, and actually more stories covered than both BBC and the nightmare that is Channel 4 News.
Nice article about The Cure and ticket pricing. Robert Smith hunting down the touts...
Sick of overpriced gig tickets? Here’s the Cure
Stewart Lee
Robert Smith, defiant leader of the post-punk stalwarts, has shown that secondary markets can be bypassed, enabling ordinary people to benefit from culture
Sun 27 Oct 2024 06.00 EDT
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The first time I saw the Cure was on 29 April 1984. The Birmingham Odeon show opened with a set from rural Worcestershire’s pre-Raphaelite goths And Also the Trees, whose early albums remain a guilty pleasure, and about whom I once sent a self-aggrandising letter to ZigZag magazine. The Cure’s set drew heavily on the dark post-punk fundamentalism of Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography, but previewed eight songs from the unreleased The Top, evidencing a worrying drift towards melody, not what the 15-year-old me wanted at all.
The ticket cost £4.50 and I bought it before Andy Anderson, who was black, was announced as the new drummer. This was lucky, as my family discouraged me seeing bands with black members. I remember making the case for Big Country, despite them having a black bassist, because of their reliance on a bagpipes-styled guitar sound. I think UB40 slipped under the net because even gran loved that Neil Diamond cover. Different times!
The last time I saw the suddenly much bigger Cure was 18 months later, alone, at the National Exhibition Centre, for £5.50. It was an amazing 25-song, career-spanning set. Apparently. I was in the first tier of raised seating and, emboldened by my success on the Army Cadets’ assault course, as the lights dipped when the support act Hard Corps came on, I decided to grasp the barrier at the front with both hands to do a forward roll 20ft or so down into the main stalls below. But I fell on my head owing to not being a member of the SAS, so the rest of the night is a blank. It says on the internet that the Cure encored with Gary Glitter’s Do You Wanna Touch Me?, but I don’t remember. Different times.
After that I parted company with the Cure – I don’t know why – until my kids started listening to them, astonished that I’d seen their early incarnation twice. Having realised what I’d been missing, I dutifully pulled over in a layby by the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire the Thursday before last to try to secure us tickets to their only show of this year, at London’s Troxy cinema this week. Of course they were all gone in one second. But, because of the ethical bloody-mindedness of frontman Robert Smith, pretty much all of them seem to have sold for the price they were supposed to. Suddenly, the 65-year-old post-punk panda is a beacon of hope against the seemingly insurmountable super-monetisation of every aspect of modern life. Here’s why.
For 14 years, the Tory mindset didn’t see culture as a spiritual or intellectual benefit to the citizen, merely as something that was failing to generate as much money as it could. The culture war they stoked was partly about preventing any of us from experiencing any culture. Affordable tickets weren’t a good thing, enabling ordinary people to benefit from culture, but a terrible failure to maximise income potential. Being allowed to pay £850 to see Oasis in a football stadium is one of the things that tells us that we live in a free society.
The one or two touts pushing tickets at £831 on Viagogo are currently being hunted down by Robert Smith’s trained vampire bats
I’ve said it before, here, only last month, but in 2015, when the then Tory culture secretary Sajid Javid was asked to address secondary market ticket prices he said that ticket touts were “classic entrepreneurs” and their detractors were the “chattering middle classes and champagne socialists, who have no interest in helping the common working man earn a decent living by acting as a middleman”. But even then the “touts” were bots run by organised criminals, or tacitly legal ticketing loopholes created by the ticket agencies themselves. Concert and theatre-going audiences were not citizens in search of self-improvement or the sublime experience of temporary transcendence, but pigs to be farmed by big business for the monetary value of their pathetic enthusiasms.
Attempting to set ticket prices at the level the artist wanted was regarded by the last government as a socialist intervention in the marketplace, even if the ticket price had already been subsidised by government arts investment. This shouldn’t be a surprise given that their whole ethos was based around selling big business the infrastructure we’d already paid for. But allow a ticket to actually sell for face value and the next thing you know we’ll all be lining up in the town square, waving our hoes, and singing The Red Flag, because we could now see Oasis for the price of a month’s, rather than a year’s, wages.
In opposition, the Tories are furious about Starmer accepting two Taylor Swift tickets. In government, they allowed it to become impossible for most people to attend anything remotely popular unless they had connections or LOADSAMONEY! Viagogo’s subsidiary StubHub, which wouldn’t answer any of my emails, stopped selling my tickets at a 500% mark-up after I spent a day hanging around its Oxford Circus outlet, shouting and eating all the free sweets on the counter while frightening the customers, as the bloke behind the desk recited a prepared script about how what it was doing was legal. Liam Gallagher will pick a fight with a post-box, but not with a ticket agency.
But for next week’s Cure show, everything went through the Dice ticketing app at £45, with no extras, and the one or two touts pushing tickets at £831 on Viagogo are currently being hunted down by Robert Smith’s trained vampire bats. It can be done! And maybe this precedent means when the Cure embark on that final tour, fans will pay what the band wanted them to. Robert Smith is the Mr Bates of ticketing, surely due an OBE and an ITV drama staring a black-wigged Toby Jones in eyeliner as its reluctant hero. Mr Smith Versus Viagogo. I volunteer to play an idiot falling out of a balcony on to his head.
I assume so...this was at end of article
Stewart Lee’s 2025 tour Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf begins at London’s Leicester Square theatre in December, with a July Royal Festival Hall run just announced
My review of some neighbours that live just down the road, on the opposite side of the streets' so-called idea of being 'fun'.
Your full-house and garden christmas illuminations are SH!T.
It's october 31st you chavtastic fecktards.
Your full-house and garden christmas illuminations are SH!T.
It's october 31st you chavtastic fecktards.
BBC gone all out in The Cure love-in, special on BBC2 just now with The Cure at the BBC to go along with the sessions they've already done for Radio 2 and 6 Music
The Cure live Radio2
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0024s59
6 Music Session: The Cure Live: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0jzvv4n via @bbciplayer
The Cure live Radio2
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0024s59
6 Music Session: The Cure Live: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0jzvv4n via @bbciplayer
The reviews of the new album sound good. Properly dark.
Vinyl turned up yesterday, just not had chance to listen yet
I've recorded it and will watch either later or tomorrow.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds tonight.
Firstly, the bad stuff....the OVO Hydro, a corporate 10,000+ capacity dungheap on the outskirts of Glasgow City Centre...my least favourite venue in town. Normally a headache to get in, made ten times worse by a bunch of pro-Palestine protestors campaigning outside as Nick Cave has played in Israel and refuses to condemn the war in Palestine (he's not condoned it either, but why let that get in the way of a protest). Additional security checks, queues snaked around the building which took ages to get through meaning we missed the support act, Black Country New Road, a band I am a huge fan of (seen them three times - would recommend to anyone).
Once in, huge queues for the bar - I was driving anyway so that didn't really matter, but it's a pain if you're on the bevvie.
It's been about 15 years since we last saw Nick Cave, and it was a bit of a blur then - final act after a day on the beer and substances at a festival....Bang on half eight, the big man strolls on and he was note perfect for the next two and a half hours. A fine spread of songs from across his back catalogue, and about eight tracks from the new album. Great rapport with the crowd, what a brilliant show...probably best of the year so far (still have a few to go to). Just what we needed after a **** couple of weeks. Hope to **** he plays Glastonbury next year.
Firstly, the bad stuff....the OVO Hydro, a corporate 10,000+ capacity dungheap on the outskirts of Glasgow City Centre...my least favourite venue in town. Normally a headache to get in, made ten times worse by a bunch of pro-Palestine protestors campaigning outside as Nick Cave has played in Israel and refuses to condemn the war in Palestine (he's not condoned it either, but why let that get in the way of a protest). Additional security checks, queues snaked around the building which took ages to get through meaning we missed the support act, Black Country New Road, a band I am a huge fan of (seen them three times - would recommend to anyone).
Once in, huge queues for the bar - I was driving anyway so that didn't really matter, but it's a pain if you're on the bevvie.
It's been about 15 years since we last saw Nick Cave, and it was a bit of a blur then - final act after a day on the beer and substances at a festival....Bang on half eight, the big man strolls on and he was note perfect for the next two and a half hours. A fine spread of songs from across his back catalogue, and about eight tracks from the new album. Great rapport with the crowd, what a brilliant show...probably best of the year so far (still have a few to go to). Just what we needed after a **** couple of weeks. Hope to **** he plays Glastonbury next year.
Glad you liked it mate. He has a magnificent set of songs to pick from. He seems to have found God (again) in a big way, but I reckon he’s too canny and professional to broadcast it too much at a gig. Afraid I’m still appalled by the ticket prices and the venues he’s chosen to play at.
For someone of his stature, I didn't think £65 was too bad and would be willing to pay that again to see him.
Here's the rub though...we're going to see IDLES in the same venue later this month, also standing, and they were £40 each. And I've just bought tickets for my son for Tyler, The Creator (yeah, me neither but he's a big deal apparently among the yoof), also standing at the same venue and they are just under £110 each. So the Nick Cave tickets are middle rangw for that venue.
The prices were much higher down south (£150 in London and close to that in Birmingham, Taylor Swift prices) and once I’d factored in travel to Glasgow…..and the barn venues which make me cross before things start - though Nick is probably one of the few who can make it a direct experience - I figured I’ll skip it. Unless he downsizes it means it’s unlikely that I’ll get to see him now.
I get that acts nowadays make their cash from playing live rather than from their recordings, but this level of gouging fans makes it highly unlikely that I’ll enjoy the experience over about £70 (£20 for the Libertines in Cov!) - I want an amazing spectacle and a high level of personal comfort for that. As an annoying old man I remember the days when the cost of seeing a big name band, or a top league football match (Villa charging £95 to see them in the Champions League) was never an issue even for a teenager with a part time job, or even as a student, but buying an LP was an investment requiring thought. And an occasion to savour when first playing the record, which you automatically listened to all the way through, with the songs in the order that the artist intended.
Most gigs that we go to are in smaller, more intimate venues with prices normally in the £20‐35 range, but even some of the smaller venues are raising prices - staff need paid and rents need covered before the artist even gets a cut. My son is supporting Meryl Streak (Dublin based punk) on Wednesday at King Tuts, capacity 300, and they're £12 a go, of which they'll see a fiver if they are lucky.
Seeing bands like IDLES and Fontaines DC headline the Hydro later this year will be strange as we saw them in their infancy in tiny venues, then moving up to places holding a couple of thousand before doing arena tours