Second Best is Good Enough

Reading the Wire archives one innocent day when what do I see? A post entitled "London Tickets for Sale on Ticketmaster!". U2.com had a little article also, announcing that a new allottment of seats for certain European shows would go on sale on May 14th. Among them were Manchester, Birmingham, and London. London.. the Holy Grail of U2 tickets. I'd sell myself into slavery for London Earl's Court tickets.

I went to Ticketmaster UK's site and tried finding London tickets. No such thing. The website said there were no tickets on sale for that event... none of the dates. Just what I thought. They had been sold out of London for a long time now. What were the people on Wire smoking? Or does my computer log on to a different TM UK than everyone else? Whatever. Wire tips have come to naught in the scramble for Elevation tickets. It's really been every fan for himself in all this. Maybe I'm just cynical, but that's the way it's been. The only ticket that being on an online list has helped has been Boston, otherwise a 0% shooting average.

Going back to the Wire archives, I saw a new post that said the London tix were now sold out. Keen observation, genius.

Pissed, I went to U2.com to loiter. Saw the headline in their news column that said more tickets were going on sale for London. I clicked the headline and it took me to the story. There was a list of all the shows for

which more tickets had been released along with a link to where you could get them. Instead of Ticketmaster, the dealer listed for the UK shows was a place called buyupfront.com... which I had never heard of. Glad that U2.com wasn't shoving Ticketmaster down everyone's collective throats, I clicked on the link.

The site was nice and looked well-maintained. I had never heard of the place, but if U2.com was recommending them, then they were probably fair players. U2 wasn't advertised among the events on the first page so I did a quick little search.

I just about fell out of my chair. The search results showed London was sold out again but Manchester 2 and both nights in Birmingham had an ON SALE sign next to them. Should I do this? I hadn't been to any U2 shows yet, London didn't look like it would happen, I had been reading lots of great stories from other fans... I was buying tickets just to mkae myself feel better in a way. I logged into Manchester 2, and the page said there were seated tickets left. How many did I want? I put in for two, and the payment page came up right away! I grabbed my Mastercard and filled out the fields. The confirmation page came up and I copied the confirmation number. Manchester 2! Cool.

I went back to the main U2 page. London was still sold out. Birmingham was available. Should I? This U2 thing was starting to cost me a fortune. Oh, well. I went for night #2 in Birmingham and had no trouble buying two seats for that one, too.

So London was still a no deal, but seeing two more UK shows was above awesome. I still haven't gotten the tickets, but I'm still psyched. Looking forward to seeing U2 strut their stuff in England. This time, second best was good enough.