When a concert ticket becomes a story

There’s a frame that sits in our hallway that contains a lot of my story, even though it never intended to. It’s just a wooden box filled with ticket stubs, setlists and half-creased bits of paper that somehow survived pockets, clubs, sticky pub floors and several changes of country. A lot of the ink has faded, some of it to near invisibility, but the nights themselves come back instantly. That’s the lovely thing about live experiences. The paper ages, the feeling doesn’t. These are all the concerts I’ve been to, or at least the ones I didn’t manage to lose along the way.

The Counting Crows tickets sit right in the middle. I think I’ve seen them seven times, mostly at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, and they’ve already crept into a few alotté posts over the years. One of the setlists is there because I’d managed to be right at the front, close enough to feel the monitors vibrating through my arms. When the lights came up I leaned in and lifted it off the floor before anyone else could grab it. It felt a bit cheeky and completely justified. There’s something satisfying about bringing home a scrap of a night that meant far more than anyone onstage will ever know.

Reef is in there too, a brilliant but short-lived English band, and their ticket earns its place because it’s the night I crowd-surfed for the first time. I can still recall the strange mix of chaos and softness, the way total strangers lifted me and passed me along with such casual precision that it felt as though I was floating on the music itself. It remains one of the clearest examples I’ve got of why live music matters. For a few seconds you trust a room full of people you’ll never meet again, and it feels completely natural.

The Black Crowes sit nearby. I clearly had a thing about crows in the nineties, although not Cheryl, and those shows were all heat and swagger. The sublime Stereophonics are there too from their heyday, I saw them three times but have a lost at least one of the tickets. The Damien Rice tickets sit there as well - his gigs always felt delicate and almost private, as if he was letting you overhear something rather than performing for a crowd. And then there’s James Blunt. He gets a lot of grief, but I liked him, and it was a great concert. Catchy songs, properly sung. I’d rather see him than Blur, who seemed to spend half their career slagging him off.

Tucked into one corner is an AC/DC ticket so faded it’s barely there. That gig at Madison Square Garden was my first one after moving to the United States, and the whole night was loud enough to rattle your bones. The details blurred, but the energy is still vivid. You can’t mistake an AC/DC concert for anything else. If the ticket has almost vanished, the memory hasn’t.

My Paul McCartney stub has faded almost as much, but I can still picture the moment the room lifted during Hey Jude. Everyone sang as if they were trying to protect something fragile. The two Pink Floyd strands sit on opposite sides of the frame, David Gilmour with those soaring, weightless guitar lines and Roger Waters with his theatrical, relentless intensity. Seeing them separately felt like visiting both halves of a very complicated family.

Radiohead is there too, not really my cup of tea once they went fully experimental after OK Computer, but the gig was good and the atmosphere even better. There’s a Coldplay ticket from just after their first album as well, when they were still an understated indie band in the United States rather than a global machine. Cat Stevens, or Yusuf by then, sits calmly in another corner. I saw him in 2017, and that concert felt warm and reflective, the sort of evening that leaves you steadier when you walk out than when you walked in.

One of my favourites is still the Athlete setlist, scribbled and signed after a tiny New York gig where I ended up drinking with the band afterwards. It’s the kind of night you don’t plan, can’t recreate and never quite forget, which is probably the most honest definition of a live experience you’ll ever get.

When I stand back and look at the frame, the thing that strikes me most is how joyful all of it is. Every ticket marks a night when a roomful of strangers chose to share the same sound for a while. The lights went down, the music began, and for a couple of hours life felt expanded. You walked out changed, even if only by a fraction. That’s why I kept these scraps. Not because I meant to, but because they became proof that some of the best moments in a life don’t announce themselves. They arrive in bursts of noise and light, and if you’re lucky, you keep the ticket.

So the frame sits there, messy and unplanned, but absolutely true. And every now and again I still get to add another night to the collection.