Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.I must admit I was not mad for it myself. I saw Oasis the first time around and remembered them as good but not great. But the family felt otherwise. The girl, who for no obvious reasons is obsessed with the brothers grim, was frenetic in her planning. My wife and even the boy were surprisingly keen. So a gig became a family outing — and getting the tickets a family endeavour. Even the dog seemed interested, but then the guitarist is called Bonehead.Except, of course, we failed. Multiple machines, several hours of cursing in the kitchen and the sudden questions over whether I am in fact a bot also textured our Saturday. I was pretty sure I wasn’t a bot. But then Harrison Ford thinks he isn’t a replicant. In my defence, I am very good at identifying pictures of traffic lights and I always tick the “I’m not a bot” box on websites. But you don’t care about this story, and nor should you. I don’t want to hear about your Oasis ticket saga either, any more than I want to know about your journey to work, the traffic on the M25 or the details of your holiday when I ask how it was for the sake of politeness. Either you are insufferably smug or your story is the same as mine, and I know our tale wasn’t even interesting to those of us living it. There was, I accept, a brief window of social acceptability for about two hours on Saturday night when the ticketless were still licking their wounds, although a glance at the current account balance on your banking app should have acted as some consolation. Failure still stung and your family were regarding you with that look that quite clearly said “loser”, so there was a communal need to share the frustration, which had thus far been limited to fuming on the website formerly known as Twitter. But that moment has passed, and now there’s no excuse.Nor do I care about your gripes over dynamic pricing, never having doubted that the band’s sudden reunion was all about the money. Of course they chose to up their profits by raising prices as they sold out (in both senses). Of course it is a contemptuous treatment of fans, but more fool you for believing all the “working-class lads worrying about their fans” shtick. In fact, they almost certainly should have done it sooner, because people were prepared to pay. By the time we made it through the various digital queues, the only tickets left would have cost as much as a week’s holiday in Suffolk, so we dynamically passed on them. This was a good outcome both for us and for whoever snaffled them up.In truth, we did not have long to think about it — about 60 seconds. By the time I’d checked and concluded this was too much to pay for no real view, someone else had concluded it wasn’t and grabbed them. I’m sorry, I’ve just done it. I’ve told you about my Oasis ticket experience. Next time I’ll charge more for those who want to skip this paragraph. My point, however, is that whining about dynamic pricing makes you look a) poor and b) fails to grasp the point that this was a rock gig, not the last tin of petrol in a Mad Max movie. Life will go on. Though the girl is threatening to take a picnic and sit near the stadium if she can’t score a ticket by next summer. This plan, I fear, overstates both the sound quality outside the stadium and the picnic potential of Wembley. Clearly there is no shame in looking, or being, poor. It’s just that the band has no use for you any more — and you don’t want to let the boys down after they have gone to all this effort on your behalf. They’ve given you years to scrape together enough cash for this moment.The girl is devastated, pacified only by the thought that resale prices will eventually fall, and that more dates will soon be added because a £50mn payout doesn’t go as far as it once did. The good news is that now the brothers Gallagher have bowed to the power of the pound, we can keep having this conversation for years to come. Though the issues of dynamic pricing may abate with the loss of scarcity. In the meantime, if anyone knows of a couple of tickets available at lethargic prices, it would get the girl off my case. Email Robert at [email protected] @FTMag to find out about our latest stories first and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
