I have a feeling that many summers ago I went to the Glastonbury music festival. I know I decided to go, bought a ticket, borrowed a tent, packed a bag and boarded some sort of bus. The rest is very hazy.
Were it not for the photo of me with longish hair, wearing an army fatigue jacket and not being surrounded by girls, I would not be sure I ever actually got there. But, apparently, I did, and judging by the fact that I remember nothing about it, I must have had a pretty good time.
My friend tells me that we watched the Shamen "when they were good", and that Carter USM were headliners. Those were the days. Now, if you want to go to Glasto (as I think I am supposed to refer to it) you either have to be associated with its organisers, or be prepared to pay through the nose for some eBay hawk artist who is better at procuring tickets than a B-list celebrity.
Things have changed at the summer festival. Once tickets were sold on a first-come, first-served basis. This year, prospective mud-standers have been asked to send in an application along with a photograph that could – if the application is successful – be affixed to the ticket, thereby preventing touts from selling "spares" to anyone other than their doppelganger, twin or a shape-shifting alien.
Just 145,000 tickets will be available for the event when public sales begin on 1 April, and about 395,000 people have applied. So, there will be roughly a quarter of a million disappointed people come Easter.
I think this photo idea is a good one. Of course, when I went, Glastonbury was still too cool to be that popular, and the biggest problem we had with our tickets was managing not to lose them before the event. Now, when tickets are changing hands for upwards of £1,000, the organisers see the ID method as the best way to halt the hawkers, and I applaud them for that.
What is also significant is that people appear to be willing to give up a bit of their personal data, in this case a badly posed passport photo, when they stand to receive a benefit in return.
Maybe Tony Blair should consider aligning his ID cards with a high-profile concert, perhaps Keith Harris at the Brighton Dome to bring in the grey population, Take That to lure the twenty- and thirty-something ladies, and something involving décolletage and cars for "da lads".
Blair has spent too much time extolling the virtues of ID cards – which most people think are really only for police and security purposes – and not enough time wrapping them up in shiny spandex and rhinestones.
