Wednesday, 25 June 2008

Hail to the thief: Radiohead rip-off

Why do we put up with it? I paid £98.45 for two tickets to last night’s Radiohead concert at London’s Victoria Park (great music, lovely lightshow and a muggy head this morning), roughly what a couple would get as weekly jobseeker’s allowance. That’s £85 for the tickets, an extra £8.50 ‘service charge’ and an extra £4.95 postage. I think they charge another fiver per ticket if there’s an ‘r’ in the month, so we were fortunate it’s June.

For that we got one hour, 59 minutes and 35 seconds of Radiohead, with the sound turned off 25 seconds short of the licence-requirement curfew of 10.30pm (fair enough, it’s a weekday at an outdoor venue in a residential area). There was one support act (Bat for Lashes, a cross between Bjork and Portishead), who might have played for an hour if the power hadn’t packed in part way through; and a near three-hour void for anyone who turned up when the gates opened during which the only thing to do was eat, drink and buy merchandise.

And get searched by security on the way in, of course.

These sorts of events have progressed from bans on people bringing glass or cans into the arena into a wholesale prohibition on any personal food, drink and funny-looking cigarettes. And the searches have progressed from perfunctory checks that you’re not carrying crates of alcohol, wholesale quantities of MDMA or an Uzi machine pistol under your jacket into something one stage short of a full-body strip search.

One man was made to finish his Pret A Manger BLT before he was permitted through the barriers. We had to empty our bottles of water onto the ground before being permitted to proceed on the grounds that the rules of the gig provided for only one unopened 500ml bottle per person and we’d taken a sip from ours while waiting to be searched.

I pointed out that the rule at the last event I’d been to in Victoria Park (Love Music Hate Racism in April) had been that you couldn’t bring unopened bottles in and that the stewards confiscated the top off your permitted bottle. (To make them less effective as missiles, supposedly, as at football matches. The fact that you could buy bottles, with tops, once you were inside the barriers rather undermined that claim.)


If they are going to have rules designed to make us give our money to the stallholders selling food and drink at these things, can’t they at least be honest about it and make the rip-off strategy consistent?

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Radiohead don't like criticism. They have removed your message "Why do we put up with it?" and the discussion following from their message board.

Look here http://www.radiohead.co.uk/msgboard/dim.html?ID=272228437

Pathetic censorship.

Anonymous said...

It now says The message you have selected is not valid on this messageboard. Not valid to criticise them =- puleeze

Anonymous said...

Moron. Radiohead probably just pissed off cuz they only got 49p per download for their album and they want to make some money to make up for it.

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpSP26MgxXM

Thom Yorke is a total toss......er. This is how he treats his sound guy.

Anonymous said...

I don't think that's fair on Thom. Maybe the sound guy needed bawling out. I'm surprised at Radiohead censoring their messageboard though. Are you sure it isn't that they ban all links to other boards?

Steve Platt said...

I enquired about this. It's not 'censorship': it seems all messages get wiped after a certain time.

Anonymous said...

What do you people hold back to use when you really want to insult someone?

Anonymous said...

does anyone have anything to say about the content of this post or is this all about calling each other names?