Nick Cave London O2 and Amsterdam Ziggo Dome – Sept 30 and 6 Oct 2017.
A tale of two tickets.
I wanna tell you about a girl…I met on Facebook, on a Nick Cave page, we shared a birthday and a love of The Bad Seeds…we got on, we clicked, we talked, we arranged to meet, we fell out.
And so began a saga of the Nick Cave tickets which unfortunately will be a lasting reminder for me of Nick Cave’s 2017 Skeleton Tree tour.
It all started simply enough with me seeing a post saying “Nick Cave tickets bought for the O2 and it happens to be my birthday”…it happened to be mine also so I replied and slowly became infatuated with someone I had never met.
I had already purchased a ticket for the Amsterdam leg, and had arranged to travel with a friend who chose not to go to the gig but just accompany me on the trip, and soon I found myself booking one for the London leg too. Me and my Facebook friend made plans to meet at the London gig, as the time passed we made plans to meet in my home town of Brighton before the gig and in hers afterwards. We were a virtual couple. We’d spend hours on the phone talking and weeks anticipating the arrival of tickets. I’d send her photos of my guinea pigs…she liked them.
And then just a matter of days before she was due to fly down to visit a dropped phrase led to a misunderstanding and in the space of a few seconds a 7 month virtual relationship disintegrated over the phone line in front of my eyes. I told her to keep the plane ticket I had bought her to visit me but suggested she used it to visit a daughter instead. And I, wanting to avoid accidentally running into her in London, was left with a ticket to a gig I no longer wanted to attend.
I posted the ticket to her, I had standing whilst she had sitting, and urged her to use it to attempt to participate in the onstage encore the North American legs had shown were happening, and perhaps attain the hug I know she longed for from the god that is Nick Cave.
And then there was nothing…we didn’t talk for weeks until I rang her to see if she had used the flight ticket…she hadn’t and said she was unlikely to use the ticket I had sent…I asked her to send it back as I knew someone who would love to use it…it returned a couple of days later with notification that she too was now in possession of tickets for the Amsterdam leg.
So 72 hours before the London leg I sold the ticket to a friend …24 hours later she gave it back to me amid concerns that anti touting measures might see her turned away from the venue – suddenly with no other option of ridding myself of the ticket it again looked like I would be seeing Nick Cave on my birthday…no bad thing and I consoled myself that the chance of running into someone in a crowd of 20,000 were next to zero.
I got to the gig with hours to spare before the doors open and skulked around the O2 eyes peeled, not really knowing if I was hoping to see this friend or was trying to avoid her. The doors opened and I entered the venue and secured myself a place as close to the front as possible, also desperate for the chance to be on stage within touching distance of the band.
As to the gig itself, it certainly didn’t fail to deliver, I had heard all the tracks played live previously with the exception of the 7 from the latest album, and I had been intrigued to see how these would play out live. The Skeleton Tree album is embroiled in trauma and heartache so I was curious to see how they would play out live. As always I feel Cave’s music benefits from the live performance and the new tracks were certainly no exception. The event managed to both raise you up and drop you down from ecstacy to despair. The standout tracks for me being Distant Sky which somehow seemed to sum up the events surrounding the album and the title track where Cave reassures us everything is alright. In addition to these, Jubilee Street, From Her To Eternity and Higgs Bosun Blues never fail to deliver. A great birthday present.
Full Set List London O2 – 30 September
Encore:
Push the Sky Away (with Bobby Gillespie)
And that’s where the tale of the tickets took a new turn, so impressed was I with the London leg I wanted to share this with my Amsterdam travelling companion ( a lover of live music) and surprise him with a ticket for one of 2017’s hottest events. So I started making enquiries into finding another standing ticket. All to no avail, until 48 hours before the gig, I found someone who had two standing tickets at face value, wanting £115 for the pair, I spoke to a Dutch friend to see if he would want to accompany us and when he said he would love to I went ahead and purchased them scarcely unable to contain my excitement.
The night before the gig I made arrangements for my neighbour to feed my guinea pigs in my absence and went to bed a happy man. Imagine then my horror waking the next morning to find in my excitement I had failed to return my pets from their garden run to their secure shed over night and they had fallen prey to an urban fox. I was devastated by the loss and my own stupidity.
I went to collect my travelling companion for the ride to the airport and let his partner in on my secret purchase – she thought he would be delighted. But, as we sat at breakfast at the airport when I broke the news it was met with a stony faced “you shouldn’t have” which I took to mean “I wish you hadn’t” so as we made our way through passport control I voiced my concerns and suggested we see if our Dutch friend had anyone interested in accompanying us instead, a suggestion my travelling companion readily agreed to. At the prearranged time and place our Dutch friend joined us, alone, having been unable to locate anyone able to join the show at such short notice. I hoped and expected my UK friend would at this point offer to use the ticket rather than it going to waste, but no such luck, armed with Pringles and a waffle he returned to his hotel room to chill and watch a Cream documentary on his phone rather than join the show. And so I watched my second leg of the tour, not with one of my best friends, nor a virtual partner but with a distant friend – and with an unused ticket in my back pocket.
Amsterdam Ziggo Dome 6th October Full setlist. (Identical to London show).
Encore:
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