“It’s great for Lincoln!”
That was the main discussion as our group made our way into the Castle to watch the often-erroneously labelled Britpop kings James. So often, you hear people talking about Blur, Pulp, Oasis, James and that sort of thing, not realising that Sit Down is, in fact, an eighties song.
Whatever they are labelled as, there’s no hiding from the fact that James are a huge band. I’d seen them as part of the festival scene in the late nineties and earlies noughties, but never as a headliner, and when they were confirmed as heading to the Castle, it seemed a great chance to get out in Lincoln. While I was growing up, the city had no real live music scene; I think the first band I recall playing Lincoln was Aswad. Now, we’re a city that gets bands, and part of me thought, ‘we should support this’.
Of course, Lincoln has a thriving music scene now, from the Drill Hall to the Engine Shed and any number of our smaller venues. I’ve written about the great work those at the Drill do, and I wanted to experience James and be able to write something similarly glowing about a major band thrilling in Lincoln.
That’s not what I’m going to write.
For the record, the music was good. I didn’t catch Tom A Smith, but enjoyed the K’s who I’d not heard before. James put on a terrific show, mixing what many would term as the old classics with newer material. I’m sure the purists found them excellent from start to finish, and those who wanted just the big hits certainly weren’t disappointed with the second half of the set. There was a vibrant crowd, the weather held, and the music was tight, as you’d expect from a jewel of the English indie rock crown.
What let the event down was an element of profiteering that I have not been exposed to in my fan-friendly recent gig-going experience. I go to a lot of gigs and some smaller festivals, and it’s always good value for money. I have no problem forking out £30 for a gig ticket, and thought at almost £70, this was a bit overpriced, but it is James, after all. I’ve heard of some pop punk bands changing prices of more than £100, so in terms of market value, while expensive to me, £70 is about the going rate for a big gig.
In fairness, for that, I guess you get the security, which was good. There were next to no queues to get in, the toilets were accessible and clean, and the only queues I spent any time in were between the K’s and James; otherwise, everything was fairly accessible. The site was clean, and watching music in such a historic location does have a certain romance to it, so £70 per ticket, on reflection, I can live with.
Maybe this is short-sighted of me, but when anyone asks me about James at the Castle, I won’t be saying ‘yeah, they were tight’ or ‘it’s great for the city’. Instead, my go-to will be ‘I got robbed’. Not literally, because the security was good, but I got robbed when buying drinks. Is it middle-aged of me to get angry about this? Maybe, but it has overshadowed the whole evening.
A 330ml can is the same size as a Coke can. If you want to buy 12 x 330ml Estrellas in Tesco, with a clubcard, you pay £12.50. For ten, in some places, you can pay £13.75, so we’re talking about £1.37 a can, max. No, I understand there’s going to be a markup, and I perhaps might have been able to live with £4? Maybe £5 at a push. Instead, we were forced to pay £6.60 for a 330ml can. For the Estrella alone, that equated to around a 380% markup!!
It got worse. A shot of vodka was £7.50. I only paid £10 for a shot of Tequila in Greenwich at a swanky bar. I didn’t dare check out the food prices, and probably for my sanity, it is a good job I didn’t. For the record, it’s assumed a regular bottle of vodka has around 16 shots in it, so that’s just the £120 per bottle. Smirnoff (the vodka of choice at the Castle) can be bought for around £16 per bottle, giving this a mark-up of around 650%.
I may feel like a moaning old man, but when a round of drinks costs almost as much as the ticket price, there’s a huge imbalance. Of course, we want big bands on in Lincoln, and the Castle is a great setting, but is that the norm? It works out at £11 per pint, but we’re not talking about being in London here, are we? There’s already surely a decent profit in the tickets, especially as this isn’t a one-off gig, but instead one of several, spreading the cost of equipment, staging etc.
I enjoyed James. I enjoyed a nice evening with good people in the warm summer sun, despite some personal issues. I enjoyed singing along to the classics in such a historic location. But today, I can’t help but feel those running the bar would have been thrown into the castle dungeons for the daylight robbery they performed on genuine music lovers last night. They might even have had an unmarked gravestone in Lucy Tower. Instead, they get to do it all again, five more times.
If this is what big bands coming to Lincoln look like, I’m not sure it really is that great for the city.