The Cure frontman Robert Smith has displayed how the secondary markets can be bypassed and helped ordinary people benefit from culture.
Stewart Lee talks about The Cure
Stewart Lee in an article on The Guardian, recalled the first time witnessing the band live and revealed the price of the tickets back in the day. He wrote:
“The first time I saw the Cure was on 29 April 1984. The Birmingham Odeon show opened with a set from rural Worcestershire’s pre-Raphaelite goths And Also the Trees, whose early albums remain a guilty pleasure, and about whom I once sent a self-aggrandising letter to ZigZag magazine. The Cure’s set drew heavily on the dark post-punk fundamentalism of Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography, but previewed eight songs from the unreleased The Top, evidencing a worrying drift towards melody, not what the 15-year-old me wanted at all.”
He revealed that the cost of the ticket was £4.50. He then talked about witnessing the band 18 months later at the National Exhibition Centre, for £5.50. Lee then wrote about witnessing them again. He penned: “After that I parted company with the Cure – I don’t know why – until my kids started listening to them, astonished that I’d seen their early incarnation twice. Having realised what I’d been missing, I dutifully pulled over in a layby by the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire the Thursday before last to try to secure us tickets to their only show of this year, at London’s Troxy cinema this week. Of course they were all gone in one second. ”
He wrote: “I’ve said it before, here, only last month, but in 2015, when the then Tory culture secretary Sajid Javid was asked to address secondary market ticket prices he said that ticket touts were “classic entrepreneurs” and their detractors were the “chattering middle classes and champagne socialists, who have no interest in helping the common working man earn a decent living by acting as a middleman”. But even then the “touts” were bots run by organised criminals, or tacitly legal ticketing loopholes created by the ticket agencies themselves. Concert and theatre-going audiences were not citizens in search of self-improvement or the sublime experience of temporary transcendence, but pigs to be farmed by big business for the monetary value of their pathetic enthusiasms.”
He noted that the previous government viewed attempts to set ticket prices at the levels desired by artists as a form of socialist interference in the marketplace, even though the ticket prices had already been subsidized by government investments in the arts. This reaction shouldn’t be surprising, given that their entire philosophy revolved around selling big businesses the infrastructure that we had already funded.
However, if tickets were allowed to sell at face value, it might lead to a scenario where we’d all gather in the town square, waving our tools, and singing “The Red Flag,” simply because we could see Oasis for the price of a month’s wages instead of a year’s.
He wrote: “In opposition, the Tories are furious about Starmer accepting two Taylor Swift tickets. In government, they allowed it to become impossible for most people to attend anything remotely popular unless they had connections or LOADSAMONEY! Viagogo’s subsidiary StubHub, which wouldn’t answer any of my emails, stopped selling my tickets at a 500% mark-up after I spent a day hanging around its Oxford Circus outlet, shouting and eating all the free sweets on the counter while frightening the customers, as the bloke behind the desk recited a prepared script about how what it was doing was legal. Liam Gallagher will pick a fight with a post-box, but not with a ticket agency.”
But for next week’s Cure show, everything went through the Dice ticketing app at £45, with no extras, and the one or two touts pushing tickets at £831 on Viagogo are currently being hunted down by Robert Smith’s trained vampire bats.
