Tickets and touts

All this talk in the news about ticket touts (or scalpers) making huge profits on World Cup tickets reminded me of a couple of tales from my past. The first is a nice one. The second not so much...


Way back in May 1990, Billy Bragg was due to play at the Hay on Wye Literary Festival. However, by the time I'd found out about it, the tickets had all sold out. Several of my friends had tickets already, but these guys were new acquaintances, which is why we didn't all buy at the same time. Anyway, I figured, What the hell, Hay on Wye is only 30-odd miles, I'll drive there and see if I can get tickets from a tout.

So I did. But there were no touts anywhere. It simply wasn't the sort of event that scalpers turned out for. (Certainly not back then; maybe it is now.) So I tried going into a few of the shops and asking whether they knew where I might be able to get tickets. Turns out that no one knew. Several of the shop owners and staff had tickets but were using them. "Just keep asking around," they would say. "I'm sure someone will have a spare ticket."

Fortunately I had arrived quite early in the day, half expecting it was going to be a long one. I continued my walkabout. And before long I bumped into my friends at a pub. "Any luck?" they asked. "Nope," I said, and set about asking the people sat around the tables. Suddenly, success. "Yeah, I've got a spare ticket," this chap says. "How much?" I ask. I knew that the face value was £5, but I had come prepared to pay around £30. "Fiver," he says, like it says on the ticket. I couldn't believe it, and I couldn't get the money out quickly enough.

But this tale of good fortune doesn't end here. I joined my friends for a drink. Then one of our party got up to go to the little boys' room. "'Scuse me, is anyone using this seat?" came a voice. It was Mr Billy Bragg himself, talking to us (though not about poetry). "Yeah, they are actually," said one of our party. "Oh," said Bragg. "But it's all right, he's a big fan, he'd be only too happy for you to have it." So the Braggster took the chair. When the now-dethroned friend returned, we told him what had happened. "Oi!" he shouted over to Bragg. "Did you nick my chair?" Billy says, "Sorry mate, they said I could have it!" And of course he could. Awwww...

Another tale of touting goes like this.

Wife and I had bought tickets to see Aimee Mann and Michael Penn at the Shepherd's Bush Empire. We weren't convinced they were particularly good seats. I think we knew they were a bit tucked away in the corner. So I thought I'd ask a tout if he had anything better that we could perhaps part-exchange for.

"Excuse me, mate," I said, approaching said tout. "Any chance you've got anything better than these," showing him the tickets. "I got one upstairs and one downstairs," he told me. Now, call me old-fashioned, but when you're going out with your missus with tickets to a show, ideally you want to sit together. "Nothing better than that?" I ask, optimistically. "Yeah," he says, "my cock up your arse."

Now that's customer service.