Choose Your Masque

Day started with a wee bit of excitement and anticipation; a link for presale tickets to see Peter Gabriel. Nine o'clock came and it didnae work... bawz.
So I end up phoning ticket soup (SECC ticket agency) and the tickets they offer me for the soon to be completed Hydro Arena are less than stellar. Seems that they have only certain blocks and other agencies have different blocks. I hang up not knowing exactly what to do and look at the other agencies; Ticketbastard, Ents24, etc. and right enough they all have public sales at 9 on Friday morning. Get back on the phone to Ticketsoup and give my tale of woe and they agree to sell me tickets over the phone in a quite reasonable section. What the hell is going on? It would appear that buying gig tickets has gone the way of air travel, rail travel, buying gas and electricity etc. In other words instead of technology making things simpler you are left perplexed, with little choice and more often than not, fucked over.

So anyway this leads to a conversation in the office about the sharp practices of ticket agencies including the touting of tickets (which would have you hung by the balls during the Olympics but is OK every other day of the year) by subsidiaries of agencies, that have never been offered to the public in the first place ,at grossly inflated prices. I received an email from one such agency the other day that there were now "freshly released" Vaccines tickets for Glasgow. Not wanting to go but obviously people had stuck two fingers up to the touts brokers and they have decided to "freshly release" them to recoup the cash. I also mentioned to my colleague that we'd missed out on The Lumineers tickets, my mate could only find them for £44 a pop on getmefleeced.com, "Try this place", says the boy, "no' got them", says I after getting them on the web. ""Give them a phone....." says he.

"Yes sir, that will be £13 each...." Happy!! but what the fuck??

What happened to going through to the Apollo box office buying four Hawkwind tickets, and getting the train back to Falkirk?