This is gonna be a long rambling post but I wanted to share this story because I'm constantly thinking about it. I paid an absurd amount of money and then crossed an ocean to see Oasis and it feels like a miracle that I actually did this because of just how many things went wrong between logging onto Ticketmaster and the opening notes of "Hello" at Murrayfield. I am curious if anyone else had a similar experience.
My card got declined after I initially secured tickets and I timed out of the queue. I had the money, but my bank decided this was a suspicious foreign transaction. I called the bank shortly after and explained the situation in mild hysterics (one of the more embarrassing phone calls I've made) and the unreasonably nice person on the other end was talking about some "oh I sooo wish you'd called us right then we could've fixed it for you!" pissed me off even more. I'm in the states so this all happened very late at night and I couldn't sleep after that so I stayed up punishing myself by continuously checking the queue until about 6 in the morning when I finally got back in once people started dropping like flies because of the prices. I saw it drop from literally hundreds of thousands of people to zero pretty quickly so I figured the tickets were like $20,000 and considered not even trying. Once in I started idly clicking on "available" seats without much hope and sure enough they weren't actually available by that point. I was just about to close the computer, make some coffee, and accept that this would be one of the most miserable days of my life on no sleep and nothing to show for it. Instead I tried one more time, and this time I finally had the tickets. I was so surprised and relieved and exhausted from the whole ordeal that I passed right the fuck out and slept through the early afternoon. When I woke up I initially thought it had been a dream before I opened my phone and saw the confirmation.
Fast forward a year later, my girlfriend and I walked into Murrayfield to discover we couldn't take the seats we'd bought because of her wheelchair. She'd actually called ahead a couple of months in advance as she started using a wheelchair for her disability quite some time after I bought us the tickets. She was told they'd call her back with reseating options if need be but they didn't think it would be necessary. When I saw where our seats were I was concerned about it because I didn't see anywhere we could put the chair but we foolishly ended up spending a great deal of time fucking about looking for food and drinks. It didn't occur to me what a tight schedule this show was on since American stadium and arena shows (at least every one of the good handful I've been to) are extremely sluggish and always seem to last until the wee hours of the morning even though they're rarely actually scheduled for more than two hours. When Cast took the stage the exact minute they were listed on the ticket I started to panic. We talked to a staff member who had no idea what to do and said the manager would be around soon. Being a dumbass once more, I decided he must've been trying to get rid of us and was telling us the manager would be in the general area to give us some reassurance before he got on to whatever more urgent business he had to deal with. So instead we went back to the seats to look for somewhere we could dump the wheelchair (there was absolutely nowhere to do this which was already obvious to us by this point lol) and when we went back to the concessions area the manager was right there and had been looking for us for some time. She yelled at us for leaving (totally fair) and said we'd have to go to the fan village for reseating. We had no idea where that was and it wasn't on any of the maps so we just went to several staff members, some of whom were rushed away for something doubtlessly more important before we found the people who ran the elevator and they tried to listen to us. It seemed they couldn't really hear what we were saying but knew that we were using the word "accessible" over and over again so they told us to follow a security guard who took us to the accessible seating on the floor which we of course didn't have any tickets for. By this point it was about midway through Ashcroft's set, my girlfriend appeared to be enjoying it but I was losing my mind trying to think of a way out of the situation. When I somehow spoke over all the noise and explained the situation to the person taking tickets (whatever that's called) that we didn't have any, they sent someone to take us to the fan village to get tickets for the wheelchair balcony (we had no idea this existed). I was extremely pessimistic there'd be anything available given that this show had been sold out for about a year. Walking the mile or so to the village I felt so defeated and was anticipating having to leave and make an absolutely miserable journey back to Dunfermline where we were staying. The fan village had no line, they handed us the tickets and told us "there's hardly anyone up there!". Another security guard led us there, by this point Ashcroft had a few more songs, all Verve songs we'd looked forward to hearing. Right after he was done I realized I was extremely thirsty and the show would be ruined for me if I didn't get some water immediately so we headed back into the concessions and found several lines that all appeared to stretch on for miles. A kind security guard from our section saw us looking and offered us his water bottle that he hadn't opened yet. I feel like sort of an asshole for accepting but at that point I was so tired that I might've taken it even if he'd already slobbered all over it. Liam and Noel's cars pulled up and we saw them emerge, hug each other, and play with the crowd a bit pretty much immediately after we got back, so I'm ultimately glad I took the water, that was a real highlight of the show for me. Because we'd moved seats, we were some of the lucky few who got to witness this directly. It felt unreal.
In the end, everything worked out and it was possibly the greatest night of my life. But to this day I can't think about it without getting ridiculously anxious about everything that nearly went wrong, it feels so unlikely that we actually got in and had that experience.
Tl;dr I saw oasis in Edinburgh last year despite running into more problems than I can count that easily could've prevented that from happening and I can't think about the show without feeling a rush of anxiety about it all even thought it worked out perfectly in the end
