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Sick of overpriced gig tickets? Here’s the Cure | Stewart Lee
Robert Smith, defiant leader of the post-punk stalwarts, has shown that secondary markets can be bypassed, enabling ordinary people to benefit from culture
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. I was in the first tier of raised seating and, emboldened by my success on the Army Cadets’ assault course, as the lights dipped when the support act Hard Corps came on, I decided to grasp the barrier at the front with both hands to do a forward roll 20ft or so down into the main stalls below. 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.
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