No Rock And Roll Fun

LET ME ENTERTAIN YOU - OR AT LEAST TEMPT YOU INTO A CONTRA-FLOW: Oddly, they're calling the three Robbie nights at Knebworth 'the biggest event in British music history' on the grounds that if you add up the three night's ticket sales, it comes to 375,000. Although this seems to be a bit of an odd measure to us - if you accept that you can add numbers like that, why not add together all the dates of, say, an REM tour to get a total? Or the numbers attending Reading and Leeds, and multiply that by three?

Ananova managed to miss out on the main story, of course which was not 'over-rated man attracts people to gig' but 'there's a good reason why other gigs - which could easily have sold as many tickets - haven't flogged this many tickets before', as thousands of people couldn't get to the venue. Oddly, the police are taking the blame for the enormous traffic-fuck-up, which seems to be incredibly noble of them - we'd have suggested that having too many tickets sold for an event which meant people would be trying to get to a place at Rush Hour on a Friday along a road which is usually working at full pelt at that time anyway isn't so much the Police's fault as the gig organiser's and the licensing authority. It seems to us that the number of tickets allocated for each night was set not at a level that could be comfortably accomodated but at a figure which would gently fellate William's ego. There are more people going than went to the Oasis gigs at the same venue for no reason other than to say 'there are more people here than for Oasis.' "After these three nights I don't think Britain will see anything like this for a long time to come" said Williams. No, mate, we're certain there'll be a large number of pointless and inexplicable tailbacks for years to come.

The police claiming responsibility for the snarl-up - and carloads of people with 160 quids worth of tickets getting no nearer the event than the hard shoulder of the A1 - might torpedo anyone's hopes of a refund. Neat.