Numbers. All around me are a series of humiliatingly high numbers. The pathetic 87 attempted calls on my iPhone. The ostentatious sum of £1,200 on secondary ticketing service Viagogo for one solitary standing ticket. A tab on my laptop that tells me I am miserable 13,073 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, giving me cruel encouragement. “Don’t worry, you’ll move 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. If I hold out for the nebulous time of “more than 15 minutes” then maybe I will still get a ticket. If I stay in this queue forever maybe I need not face up to the truth. The 9,900 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, Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles and Mexico City, in addition to festivals in Lyon, Barcelona, Reykjavik, St Gallen, Lisbon, 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, the O2 arena dates allowed 20,000 fans in London to see the band perform in 2012, compared to the 3,300 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, mostly due to a dream I had last night (unfortunately you are about to read a dream story; but if you’ve got this far into a blog about a woman unable to get 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 strange, Hunger Games-styled survival tasks and resulted in a ticket that looked like virtual reality headset handed out by an old man working in a makeshift kiosk on a motorway roundabout near Slough. There were no intricate puzzles or Olympic tasks for me to complete this morning, however, and still my experience of Radiohead ticket purchasing remained as harrowing and physically exhausting as a Bullingdon Club initiation.
Having spent some quality time lurking on the Radiohead Reddit forum in the past week, attempting to uncover some expert ticket booking tricks, I hoped that going using Ticketmaster and See Tickets might allow more chance; given the regularity with which these sites deal with mass ticket demand. Both sites failed immediately, however, and when a page did load I was told that the maximum possible number of bookings was already reached. I didn’t know what this vague message actually meant, and realised that with my fidgeting left hand I had accidentally started calling an old housemate’s phone. Every ounce of optimism had now been obliterated.
Tickets seemed to disappear within seconds, even though I was assured they still existed. I quickly turned to the faithful Roundhouse website and managed to arrive at 2,323 in the queue. A friend texted to say this was a relatively promising, as his friends were around the 4,000 mark. The panic subsided for a moment and I began to daydream about potential food options before the show. Nando’s or Papa John’s? Or both! Treat yourself, Harriet, you ticket-booking legend! Suddenly my page automatically refreshed; I was 13,685 in the queue. It was 15 minutes into the process. How had this happened? Why was there nobody to shout at about this? Perhaps I should call my old housemate again.
The statistics now seemed unlikely: tickets to Kate Bush’s 22 nights at Hammersmith Apollo sold out in 15 minutes. Beyoncé’s Mrs Carter Show sold out in 12 minutes. U2’s 360° tour sold all of their 7.2m tickets within minutes. The dream was almost over. In a last-ditch attempt, I turned to my faithful phone, and began furiously calling the venue, whose line was entirely busy. I was able to get through to the agonisingly slowly articulated automated messages twice, which allowed me to press 1 a few times before I arrived in the booking section. I was told the service was busy and the voicemail man hung up on me. Twenty minutes later, and the Roundhouse website told me that all three dates had sold out.
I am not alone in my frustration. Thom Yorke has since tweeted that he is “as fucked off as you are”, while others seem to have fallen victim to this tragic queue-hopping. To seek solace in my sadness, I checked the Roundhouse Facebook feed, which is filled with unsuccessful candidates who similarly got chucked to the back after waiting patiently in line. Others have complained that sites such as Gigsandtours sold out in less than five minutes. Another tragedy is the amount of sales on secondary ticketing sites: to cut down on this, we were told tickets would be limited to two per transaction, with fans needing ID in order to enter the venue. Yet shortly after the sales ended Viagogo and StubHub have listed tickets for about 18 times the original price. Even Adele, who tried to take on the touts, banning thousands of them from buying tickets, lost the war against these evil, money-grubbing overlords. We are destined to be forever ripped off by the big businesses. Thom, if you are reading this, and you’re running dry on lyrical themes for album No 9, consider the injustice of secondary ticketing sites – a cause we can all get behind.
An hour since the event, and hope is starting to creep back into my system. Perhaps there will be more opportunities to see them this year? More gigs, surprise gigs. A Rough Trade East in-store. A Park Show appearance at Glastonbury. An impromptu set in Lianne La Havas’ living room. Before I get too deep in my fantasies, I check the ticker. I’m 8,501 in the Roundhouse queue. A few more 15 minutes wouldn’t hurt, would it?
- This article was amended on 18 March. The original piece stated that StubHub had sold Radiohead tickets at inflated prices, when the tickets had instead been listed.
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