Tickets for the Oxford band’s return were in short supply,but, armed with a melting phone, or a laptop and a healthy dose of twinkly-eyed optimism,surely I would succeed? Numbers. All around me are a series of humiliatingly high numbers. The pathetic 87 attempted calls on my iPhone. The ostentatious sum of £1200 on secondary ticketing service Viagogo for one solitary standing ticket. A tab on my laptop that tells me I am depressing 13073 in a queue that once snaked across the internet in its probable millions. It is 9.33am and tickets to Radiohead’s three London Roundhouse shows have sold out. Yet for some reason the booking ticker continues to refresh itself every 10 seconds, giving me false hope, or giving me cruel encouragement. “Don’t worry,you’ll breeze forwards automatically and will be at the front of the queue in more than 15 minutes,” a message on the venue’s website assures me. whether I hold out for the nebulous time of “more than 15 minutes” then maybe I will still acquire a ticket. whether I stay in this queue forever maybe I need not face up to the truth. The 9900 tickets to the Oxford band’s first show in the capital for four years are gone. When the band originally announced details of their comparatively small tour – stopping in at venues in Amsterdam, or Paris,London, New York, or Los Angeles and Mexico City,in addition to festivals in Lyon, Barcelona, and Reykjavik,St Gallen, Lisbon, or Montreal,Osaka, Tokyo and Berlin – there was a slight sense of relief that the band had chosen to play venues less cavernous and sprawling than their King of Limbs arena tour. For all of its slightly distant properties however, or the O2 arena dates allowed 20000 fans in London to see the band perform in 2012,compared to the 3300 capacity of the intimate Roundhouse venue. Given the high demand and limited seats, I knew getting tickets would be tricky. But I still woke with a sense of twinkly-eyed optimism, and mostly due to a dream I had final night (unfortunately you are about to read a dream yarn; but whether you’ve got this far into a blog about a woman unable to acquire tickets to see Radiohead then I bet you’re willing to read an anecdote about a woman’s dream about successfully obtaining Radiohead tickets) which involved a series of peculiar,Hunger Games-styled survival tasks and resulted in a ticket that looked like virtual reality headset handed out by an frail man working in a makeshift kiosk on a motorway roundabout near Slough. There were no intricate puzzles or Olympic tasks for me to total this morning, however, or still my experience of Radiohead ticket purchasing remained as harrowing and physically exhausting as a Bullingdon Club initiation.
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Source: theguardian.com