11am 30th March.... I get an email from the Ten Club(Pearl jam's fan club), tell me that Pearl jam are playing at the London Astoria on the 20th of April and there are 50 pairs of tickets to be won if I phone a special number at 14:00 that day. I get on the blower and arrange for everyone I know to be phoning to try and be one of the lucky few that win the tickets.
I am jumping around all day like a little kid, full of excitement, but feelign sick cos I know my chances of tickets are minimal.....
The Astoria has a capacity of around 1500.... 100 are going to the fan club... a few hundred will go the music indsutry and press... leaving around 1000 for the general public. It's Pearl jam's first concert in Europe for almost 6 years and they are currenntly at numebr 1 in the iTunes download chart. If I can't get the fan club tickets....I have to try to get the public tickets.... if I don;t get them I have to consider how much I want to go and see what Ebay has to offer...
How much do I want to go? I've loved pearl jam since I was about 13 or something... They are hands down my favourite band. They have only played in Scotland twice and I was 11 the first time round. Now They have announced that they will be touring Europe later in the year.... so why is this so special? The first and so far only time I;ve seen pearl jam was in the SECC:
While this was one of the best days of my life so far... the SECC is a large barn. It's hardly intimate. I had assumed I would never see pearl jam in a small intimate club. The Astoria looks like this:
So anyway.... I'm bouncing about my empty office like a pea in a whistle... flitting between writing project deliverables at an adrehnalin fuelled pace like I've never seen before, and checking times. etc.
13:00 on 30th March, and I get another email from the Ten Club... The phone number and the time were wrong... so I have to wait until 20:00. I'm not sure if I can survive or not!!!!
The Ten Club are great... I always imagine them in a little office run by three people and a dog.... I phoned the corrected number to make sure it was connected, and I was honestly worried about waking up some unshaven student who was sleeping on the couch with a cold pizza stuck to the side of his face....
But I digress.....
Given that I was going to have to wait until 20:00 before I could start phoning, I was going to have to do soemthign with the energy... so I went to the gym. I cut out the middle man and just lifted the machines rather than work out what to set the weights too given my arehnalin pumped energy!!!!
I make it home... and 20:00 arrives. through the wonders of skype, Mowgli, Luke and I are able to converse as we continually get the engaged tone for an hour... eventually giving up around 21:00. I go to bed disappointed... it wasn't to be. I head off to bed, hoping that by some minor miracle I can get one of the 1000 tickets available to the public.
I hardly sleep a wink... the prospect of seeing Pearl Jam in a little club has got me all wired up.... I forgot how excited I got. I'm like a little kid.. all the time knowing that I can't be too disappointed when I don't get a ticket. What worries me is how much I might be willing to pay on eBay should I not get a ticket. I paid over the odds for a Nine Inch Nails, so by logic that pearl jam are my favourite band, I would have to pay more. Anyway... such thoughts kept me rolling about all night.
The ticket lines were opening at 10:00 Amsterdam, so I make it to work early and work out what numbers I can phone and what websites I can use. Again Skype comes into play to keep our spirits up as we phone from our different points in Europe. I have three computers on different websites and a phone in each hand. My hands are shaking with excitement, but deep down I'm already securing my sell witha good defense to not getting a ticket..... I've deliberatly not looked at my bank balance, or I'll start the financial equations tow ork out how much I could spend on a ticket on ebay.
So 10:00 comes and all systems are go... eventually someone answers the phone and I get two tickets as I simultaneously put credit card details into two online forms that are repeatedly crashing.
I'VE GOT TICKETS... relief washes over me.... but is replaced by numbness. It;s not sank in. Mowgli isn't up and about yet. I need to phone hi to get excited...
So after almost 24 hours of nerve tension and adrehnalin, I'm going to see pearl jam in the smallest venue they've played in Europe for at least 10 years. They're getting older, but I know they;ll still rock our socks off:
WOOOOOO HOOOOOOO!!!!
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