On Saturday night I took a dear friend to see La Roux at the Camden Round House. It was one of the nights during the iTunes Festival that happens every year in London.
Despite not really rating La Roux, I was quite excited; I love the Round House and, better still, the tickets for the festival are free – instead of buying tickets you just add the iTunes Festival application on Facebook and apply for the tickets for the nights you want to go to.
Even further up my street, the tickets are an emailed PDF with two of those square barcodes on it (one for each guest) so you just rock up with your confirmation, one of the many Apple-clad door staff fire a barcode reader at your print off, a MacBook beeps in confirmation and they give you a wristband and a little credit card token thing that gives you 10 free downloads from the iStore.
From application to entry – not even a suggestion of cash, not even a traditional transaction; at no point did I let go of anything I owned, I just showed a barcode and walked in. Perfect.
Saturday night unfortunately followed Saturday daytime, like usual, and that particular Saturday saw me haul myself and a gang of another 5 or 6 colleagues around East London flyering all the markets to death in the name of our agency’s huge public event the following day (see below).
I was tired, sodden and impressed I had managed to drag myself out of the house in the first place – if I was going to make it through an entire gig, I wanted a drink.
We went to the bar at my suggestion, queued for quite a while and, when we finally got to the front I did my usual recognisance, “you take cards, right?”
I say it so blasé these days, I am so used to, “yeah of course,” or “yeah but you have to spend a £5er.” It is so rare to hear anything else, especially at a bar… like this time…
“Nope. None of our bars do. There is a cash point around the corner in the foyer. Get cash out there.”
Brilliant.
A venue that doesn’t allow re-entry under any circumstances has completely cash bars and a private cash-point that stings its users £1.50 per transaction. It is like it is 2002 again.
For the first time in a long time I had that embarrassing situation of having to rely on my friends (despite my final ‘don’t’ in the hung-over video) and I didn’t like it one bit. Especially as it was my idea in the first instance!
It has been so long since I’ve found myself caught out like this and I didn’t think for a second it would be somewhere like the Round House… one of London’s leading cultural venues?!
Further more, despite our best efforts of getting ruined and numb to whatever the performance would be like, La Roux finally waltzed on stage and failed to wow just about anyone than her hardcore fans in the front two rows. She sang like she personally hated every one of us in the audience, that playing this show so unbelievably inconvenient for her and we were just in the way of her and her bed.
Beyond her attitude she also sang like she was on a hen-do karaoke.
It might just be me but I’d be phenomenally grateful for even the slightest attention I received after a DJ took one of my averagely bland tracks and made it good. Not a monosyllabic, obstinate child-in-a-huff.
Oh, and this is the footage from our big dance stunt on Sunday, we got the best part of 1000 people down to Shoreditch to act out the street scene from the 1980 film, FAME.
I got sun burnt. But it was one hell of a day!
Losing Face 