Calm down, not gigs I'm playing, gigs I'm going to.

Festival season is upon us, I realised, as I found myself watching the Amazon Prime streaming footage of this years Primavera Sound. Primavera seems huge now, and I'm surprised/pleased to notice I'm not really getting any pangs of FOMO. It's fun to dip in and out of the streams though, and the Amazon presenting team / live mixing are endearingly sloppy and untogether. I guess PS has outgrown me, or I've aged out? I think it's them not me, it's only just about recognisable as the buzzy hip live music mash-up I first started going to almost twenty years ago. Maybe I'll go for 2027 (which by my count will be the 25th anniversary year) - or maybe I'll find something a bit smaller and leaner and odder. I've been eyeing OFF in Poland for a while...

Live music has changed so much recently. I was gently flabbergasted when the Beta Band, a band I used to gently follow around the country, announced a reunion cash-in tour, and sold out the early access, and the general access tickets in about five minutes flat, while I sat there bewildered trying to figure out which Ticketmaster entry-point seemed the least likely to meltdown while I was using it. This being a band I regularly used to pay a fiver on the door to see play in a half-empty student union bar, back when they were hot stuff 🤣.

That appears to be the way things are nowadays. You have to pre-register for the pre-register, and get a code from pre-ordering some merch, and know how to game the electronic queues. And then you have to remember which one of sixteen different apps (all owned by Ticketmaster) your electronic tickets are squirrelled away in them, when you finally arrive at the show dates, up to a year later. That's if you remembered to put in your diary, and didn't just forget about it entirely. Anyway, I'm not too sad about missing the Betas, might as well let some other people have a chance - although I expect I'd have had all the nostalgia, I'm quite sure they'll do the festivals in another year or two after this level of interest. While I was in Ticketmaster, failing to get Beta-d, I saw some St. Vincent tickets for Somerset house in July, on sale before any announcement, so I picked up a couple of those instead.

I have had a bit more success with some of my other pre sales. Upcoming I have

• HAIM - in Margate (?!)
• Lana Del Rey - at Wembley bloody stadium. (my first arena show since the Sisters of Mercy in 1990?)
• St Vincent - as previously mentioned: Somerset house, although I already watched her on this tour in Bristol last year
• the glory of CMAT, at the Brixton Academy
• Cate Le Bon at the Barbican

I think that's it so far. I might have forgotten some, as I said. At my age I need to write things down. Like this.

Two things all of these have in common - I had to buy all of them months and months in advance using a 'pre-sale code', and, somehow they're all female artists. I don't think those two facts are related. It's fairly noticeable that women artists really dominate popular music these days. I cynically suspect this might be related to the fact that all the money fell out of it a couple of decades back. The boys have all moved on to being startup founders.

I'm not going to see Oasis, but I will be tracking the integrity of their reunion over at my hand made personal oasis bust-up tracker https://haveoasissplitupyet.lol

My children are going to Glastonbury without me 😬. Most likely, I will watch some of it on the TV.

Oh, I am going to Latitude again, although I'm so spectacularly uninterested in almost all of the musical acts playing, I hardly count it as a gig. I expect I'll be down the front for Alison Moyet though.

posted by cms on 2025-06-24