I'm going back there one fine day....

Glastonbury tickets went onsale today.

It's an exciting - and usually very stressful and frustrating - day. Success today is a passport to the best weekend of the year. This year, all 137,500 tickets sold out in a little under two hours... but thanks to a bit of organisation (and with no little thanks due to Sarah), I think all of my lot managed to get tickets.

Buying the tickets to this festival just seems to have got harder and harder as demand always massively outstrips supply.

I've been going for a while now, so here's my Glastonbury ticket buying history (as best as I can remember it):

1993 -> I wander into an actual shop (Selectadisc in Coventry, I think) about a week before the festival and buy a ticket. Go to festival with a bag of supplies including several loaves of bread - a mistake I never make again. Camp next to toilets - a mistake I also never want to make again). The most entertaining act that I see is a guy playing the spoons on the jazz stage.

**small pause of 9 years as I experiment with other festivals and generally don't really go to many gigs at all for some reason now lost in the mists of time**

2002 -> Tickets go onsale. I wander back from a holiday in Cornwall, log onto the web sometime after lunch and buy a ticket. No problem. Discover that almost everyone else has forgotten to buy any and only remember once they have sold out. Muppets. We manage.... (and this is before Ebay, if you can remember that far back). Bargs breaks his arm, but still makes it to see Rod Stewart.

2003 -> I have no recollection of buying the tickets at all. It can't have been very hard, can it?



2004 -> A nightmare. They haven't provided enough phone lines or a big enough capacity on the website. Tickets go onsale at 8pm on a weeknight, so thousands of people spend all night trying to get through, but very few people actually manage to buy tickets. I get up every two hours through the night, but still have no joy. I am tipped off just after 7am that the international ticket number is on the Nottingham telephone exchange and that as a Nottingham resident, I may have a slight advantage. I get my tickets by about 8am. I leave work at 6pm and still none of the rest of the gang has managed to get any. I try again when I get home and manage to get tickets for about 10 other people, only failing to get the last two I need when the operator tells me that they have just sold out. A kindly friend sells me a couple at just over face value. We all go.

2005 -> I'm in Korea, but the Pollstar does the honours on his broadband, apparently without any bother at all. I turn up on the Wednesday night with a coolbag full of beer and a 2 second tent. We have a gazebo this year. We survive the flood.



2006 -> No Glastonbury this year. Boo!

2007 -> Post off my address details and a photo during February and receive a registration number in return. 395,000 people have registered for 145,000 tickets and we all try to buy tickets from 9am on Sunday 1st April. I am completely unable to get through to the website or to the phone number, but luckily Sarah has some sort of a "magic connection" and is able to get everybody sorted by about 10:30. Nice one.

Three cheers for Sarah then -- and as for Rich, Laura, Pollstar, Statue John, Bargs, Hen, Leon, Ali, Sarah, Ben, Leon, Zoe, Sean, Ems.... and for the 130-odd thousand other people going.... see you 22/23/24 June!

Mine's a pear cider.



Incidentally - the Glastonbury Festival is "In The Dock" over on The Art of Noise at the moment. Guilty or not? You decide.... (I'm defending, but don't let that sway your thinking).