Excuse me for using an Neil Young song title for a post about the Tom Waits gig but as Fergal points out, there has been a touch of Waits-Fever online today as people finally got a chance to splash out on his upcoming Dublin gigs.
Having called in a few favours, dissolved a few assets and extorted a few shop-owners I managed to get the cash together to buy a ticket myself – one for Friday 1st August’s show (the last of the European tour so here’s hoping it’ll be something special).
The ticket-buying process this morning was kind of pot luck, as there was no seating plan to be found before 9am and by then there was no time to be picky about what you got. I just put in for 2 of the higher priced tickets (when you’re paying over €120 including booking fee for a ticket, are you really going to miss the extra €14 for better seats?) and hoped for the best.
What I came out with were pretty good. From what I can gather from the seating chart that finally appeared, I’ll be very near the front of Block A, just a little to the left of the stage.
Using the same seating plan you can work out the likely capacity too. With Block A consisting of (it seems) 31 rows with 74 seats in each row, Block B consisting of 26 rows with 105 seats each and Block C & D both consisting of 13 rows with 39 seats each you get the grand total of 6,038 people. If this is accurate it means the gig will need planning permission (apparently anything over 5,000 capacity demands it).
At the time of going to post the first two nights (30th and 31st July) still appeared had some seats left – however when I tested it out and put through for one ticket at any price, I was told there were none left. The third night was listed as sold out after less than 10 minutes of going on sale, though, which probably isn’t surprising giving its placement on the European route.
So how much cash will be generated by these three nights? Well it’s hard to say for definite as it’s not entirely clear which seats are “premium” and which are not. Block A is definitely within the higher price bracket, but some of the tiered seating seems to be too.
So assuming my capacity calculations are correct, assuming all nights are sold out and pretending that it’s just Block A that’s €131.25 a ticket; each night will bring in €736,304.56c at the door alone. That means all three nights will bring in €2,208913.70c before you include any possible merchandising, bar sales etc. etc.
Not bad for three night’s work – let’s hope Tom’s not too tired from his tour and the tent he’s playing in has what it takes to do him justice.