A Shiver In The Dark

I don't recall going to a rock concert between 1992 (Genesis at Earls Court) and 2008 (Porcupine Tree, indigo at The O2) and in that period the means of getting tickets for such events went from the traditional method of queuing up, phoning the venue or going to a ticket agency to booking online; and we all know what a frustrating experience that can be.

Inevitably it seems, tickets for concerts go on sale at nine o'clock on a Friday morning and at one second before the appointed hour the website says tickets are not yet on sale, yet one second after nine (having worn out your finger pressing F5) they are sold out! It is all very different from the days when I first started getting tickets for gigs, way back in the 1970's, the first decade broadcast in colour.

In 1978 I was working in the City of London for the first time, at Midland Bank, Queen Victoria Street. Between Queen Victoria Street and Poultry there ran a lane (it isn't there now, since the whole block has been redeveloped), in which stood The Green Man pub and a record shop that had a ticket agency. On many a lunchtime I would find myself in that shop, perusing the list of upcoming concerts at London venues, and often would join the queue to book tickets. The counter was manned by a chap who had a phone permanently jammed between shoulder and ear, sourcing tickets. You made your booking, took a receipt and hey presto, a few days later would return to pick up your precious tickets. I don't recall ever being disappointed and not being able to get tickets for whatever it was I wanted to see - unlike these days when trying to book tickets online can be fraught and ventures into the secondary market may be a necessary evil.

The corner of Queen Victoria Street and Poultry, as it was before redevelopment.

One of the first concerts I booked tickets for back in those days was for Dire Straits, who I'd gotten into thanks to a girl I worked with (I think it was Denise Haskins). She recommended them, suggesting I must listen to Sultans of Swing. On first hearing, I wasn't terribly impressed, but after a few listens it grew on me and after buying the band's eponymous first album, it was off to the Hammersmith Odeon to see them play live. I also saw them at The Rainbow, Finsbury Park when it was (temporarily) a music venue. Nowadays The Rainbow a Pentecostal church.

"You get a shiver in the dark, it's raining in the park but meantime..."
Picture: Helge Øverås

The Hammersmith Odeon (now the Eventim Apollo, but forever the Odeon as far as I am concerned) has always been my favourite venue. I saw Ian Dury & The Blockheads there in what I would describe less as a concert but more as a raucous party with a live band, and also saw Jasper Carrott doing his stand-up routine in the days when he was just finding fame. Dressed in trademark rugby jersey and jeans, he berated the 'cabaret set' comedians who, resplendent in DJ's and bow-ties, played to a scampi-in-a-basket audience. Ironic because years later I saw him play at the Circus Tavern in Purfleet, where he wore a dinner jacket and bow-tie and performed to an audience that had just munched its way through just such a meal.

Ian Dury

The thing about getting tickets for concerts -and this is stating the obvious - is that if a band are playing a number of nights at the same venue, it's much easier than if they are doing a one-night stand. And a one-night stand is effectively what a sporting event is, hence the fact that for cup finals and the like, tickets are at a premium. Which they were back in 1979 when Essex county cricket club reached their first one-day final, in the Benson & Hedges Cup. Prior to 1979, Essex had had a pretty poor record in both one day and county Championship cricket (actually they were a bit of a joke), but that year the county had a chance of their first major honour. Having qualified from their group, they beat Warwickshire in the last eight, and then defeated Yorkshire in the semi-final. I was at that game, having bunked off for the only time in my thirty-six year working life. I wasn't the only one: the game was televised and I, like many others in the crowd at Chelmsford, was trying to keep a low profile in case I was captured by the cameras - explaining that at work the next day would have been tricky.

Naturally my fellow Essex supporting friends and I wanted to be at Lords to see the final against Surrey, but this proved to be difficult. The ticket allocation was such that there were more club members than tickets, so getting one through Essex was out of the question. We tried Lords, we tried the MCC (no chance if you weren't a member), we tried the ticket agencies; it was no good. Then someone suggested trying Surrey. This seemed pointless since their allocation was the same as Essex's and they had more members, but more in hope than expectation, I phoned them. Have you any tickets available? I asked. You may imagine my surprise when I was told, "Yes, but they're limited to four person." I got hold of someone and we went to The Oval that lunchtime (it's only a short tube ride from Queen Victoria Street) and bagged eight tickets.

Essex won the Benson & Hedges Cup Final, their first major honour and I - with a host of friends - was there to see it, sitting on the grass in front of the Lords Tavern. It's hard to imagine these days that spectators at a major sporting event were once permitted to sit on the grass just yards from the pitch and chat to the players as they fielded on the boundary. After the obligatory celebratory pitch invasion, a crowd of us went directly to Brighton for a week. Happy days.

The reason for this week's nostalgia-fest (apart from a desire to get away from the EU referendum) is that I've been reading Danny Baker's excellent autobiography, Going To Sea In a Sieve and since Danny is roughly the same age as me, I could relate to a lot of what he has written, and a lot of what appeared in Cradle to Grave,  the TV adaption of his book. 

It has to be said of course that Danny Baker's formative years were more adventurous, exciting and much more likely to end up in a book or on TV than mine were. While he was serving Elton John and Marc Bolan in a Soho record shop, I was serving secretaries and solicitor's clerks in a City bank. We both lived in council flats and saw Ian Dury in concert though, we at least have that in common.