Tom Dunne: Don't ask — I just couldn't get a ticket for Chappell Roan
Chappell Roan at the MTV Video Music Awards. Picture: Mike Coppola/Getty Images for MTV
When I begin writing this on Tuesday afternoon — winds moderate to fresh, gusting — a more macabre version of Dynamic Pricing is breaking out. It concerns the Chappell Roan gig at 3Olympia. People joined the queue for black market tickets expecting to part with a kidney to secure access. That has now risen to both kidneys. The queue hasn’t shortened.
It is the first gig I’ve ever known where people have contacted me out of the blue to tell me they can’t get me in. A friend in the business and a contact at the record label both phoned me to say, “Don’t even ask.”
“But I haven’t asked,” I’ve protested.
“Yeah, well keep it that way, and none of your last-minute passive aggressive texts either,” they both said, confusingly. I told them I don’t know what passive aggressive means but suggested that if they spent less time calling me and more time coordinating their wardrobe their lives would be better.
Mind you, I do have form. Call it naïveté, innocence, bone laziness or a neck like a horse pilot’s under-carriage, but I do have a habit or sauntering up late in the day and asking, as if it is the most natural thing in the world: “Can I come into your sold-out show?
What can I say? It generally works. With Taylor Swift, at the time the most sought-after ticket in Hades, it resulted in calls to my mobile from one Tree Paine. Weeks later, people had forgotten Taylor, but no one in the know was yet over the fact that I’d talked to Tree.
“Taylor is one thing,” a TayTay acolyte explained to me, “but Tree is God.”
There have been others. What can I say: Next year, Liam and Noel, I’ll see you down the front.
This time, even Tree couldn’t help. My friends didn’t need to tell me. I knew not to ask. “Meteoric rise” is generally overused. But this was meteoric. In February, she was booked to play the Academy. Last night, she could have played multiple shows at 3Arena.
And yet, in 2020, she was being dropped from her record company and was soon working at a coffee kiosk in Willard, Missouri, that prided itself on “all drinks in 60 seconds”. Strangely, the experience helped: “When you have no money and still make it by, nothing scares you,” she said later.
I thought of those words at the triumphant return of Snow Patrol to the Ulster Hall last Friday. I was at that one. I still have some contacts. The new album, , is superb. The gig was a triumph. They are a simply amazing band.
And yet, they have had their own Chappell Roan coffee kiosk in Willard moments. Their first album for Polydor in 2003 was called because that it what they thought their career had come to. This was the last roll of the dice.
Two albums for Jeepster records in 1998 and 2001, albums I loved, had won awards but not sold. When Gary turned his hand to a side project, the equally amazing but decidedly low fi, , you couldn’t help but fear the worst for Snow Patrol.
If you attended the show at the Limelight in Belfast in 2001, would you have suspected that within five years one of those on stage would have written the most played song of the 21st century on UK radio?
And yet, 30 years since having formed in Dundee University, there was Gary Lightbody, Nathan Connolly and Johnny McDaid on stage in front of an adoring audience performing an awe-inspiring body of work. The intimate Ulster Hall was a one off. The stadia of the world await.
The success of both Chappell Roan and Snow Patrol are testament to the fact that when songs that come from the right place connect with an audience, the depth of that connection and the speed with which it propagates can be dizzying.
It’s striking too how often self-belief and a determination to be true to yourself, whoever you might be, resonates with others. But the line between success and failure, or success and something much more modest is as thin as ever.
For every Chappell type supernova in a venue you can’t get into, there are others, equally dazzling, in intimate rooms with tickets at the door: MJ Lenderman, Waxahachie, Hurray for the Riff Raff, Kathleen Edwards, Jenny Lewis, Adrienne Lenker. Tickets available now.
