Tickets please!

When the tickets for my first Wonder Stuff gig arrived, I was very impressed that they were illustrated with the Hup album artwork.  Most of my previous tickets had been black and white and not particularly interesting.  After the show I decided to keep it as a souvenir and so started my collection of gig tickets.  There are some notable holes in my collection, every gig I went to before that one for a start.  There are also some notable holes in the tickets that are in my collection thanks to water damage, but more of that later.  Gigs that I have attended that I do not have the ticket for (grouped by venue) include:

• Bucks Fizz at Hastings White Rock Pavilion (my first gig – the shame);
• Budgie on Hastings pier;
• Carter USM, Electric Six, Big Yoga Muffin and Wrathchild at The Crypt in Hastings;
• Budgie at The Assembly Halls in Tunbridge Wells;
• Gillan at Brighton Dome;
• Monsters of Rock at Castle Donington in 84;
• Accept, Iron Maiden, Robert Cray and Dio at Hammersmith Odeon;
• Thunder, Fastway, Carter USM and Ozzy Osbourne at Folkestone Leas Cliffe Hall;
• Whitesnake, Kaiser Chiefs and Terence Trent Darby at Brighton Centre;
• Terrorvision at The Concorde in Brighton;
• Kingmaker at The Richmond in Brighton
• The Darkness and Eurythmics at Wembley Arena;
• David Bowie (Glass Spider Tour) and Michael Jackson (Bad Tour) at Wembley Arena
• The Fall at The De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill
• Several Miles Hunt gigs at The Half Moon in Putney
• Miles Hunt at the Forum in Tunbridge Wells
• A secret gig by The Wonder Stuff at the Marquee, and
• The Finn Brothers at the Royal Albert Hall.

There are almost certainly others.  We may well come back to some of those listed above at a later date.  For now though, I’ll be concentrating on the tickets I do have.  There are few things as tedious as someone showing you their holiday photos or the visa stamps in their passport so I’ll try to make this interesting by giving some context for the gig as well as my personal recollections of the event, but I can’t promise anything.  So, let’s start where the collection started…