Waste My Time

The most amazing thing happened this weekend when I went to the cinema to catch an 8:30 p.m. film: at 8:30 p.m. the lights went down and the projector started playing. Sure, there were 15 minutes of ads and another 10 minutes of trailers, but as anyone who has been to a cinema in the past few decades would, I anticipated these. A few hours later, I was at home writing these sentences.

As a fan of live music, I couldn't believe how timely this was. The cinema's website indicated that the show time was 8:30 p.m., and shortly thereafter, it began. What a revolutionary concept! Give or take a few minutes, I had a large degree of prior knowledge about when to expect ads, trailers and ultimately the feature. So who granted the exception to rock venues?

Ever since I can remember, the most helpful advice found on a ticket or gig poster is the time that the doors open, but everyone knows that arriving when doors open is tantamount to wearing a band's t-shirt to their show. While it may be a good opportunity to get to know your bartender and sound guy better, you'll be bored long before the first act takes the stage. Your new friend behind the bar can help, but venue prices being much higher than those at your local pub, you're likely to fastly impoverish yourself sober. But if you don't arrive at the only time anyone's given you, how do you know when to turn up?

Through a long career of gig-going, you learn to turn up artfully late. If the doors open at 7, you know the first band isn't going on until 7:30 at the earliest, and most likely not until 8. If there are four bands playing in total, and you only care to see the last two and each opening set lasts 30—45 minutes... here's where those high school math skills come in handy.

It would be much easier if venues would save everyone a lot of trouble and publish the start times of each act, if not on the ticket, then at least on their website on the day of the gig. In Chicago, Metro always posts start times on the door, which is a good start and should set an example for everyone else. Generally no venues that I know of in London do this, but on the day of the recent X-Ray Spex gig , the Roundhouse helpfully updated their site with timings, a practice I'd like to see become habit for them.

This may seem quite demanding of me, but consider again the movie example. After going to the cinema's website, I learn that the new Bond film is showing at 8pm, so I arrive a few minutes early, find a good seat and wait for some international espionage. The usual ads and trailers fly past and soon it's time for 007, but what's this? They're showing some shitty Eddie Murphy film instead! There must be some mistake.

I quickly find an usher and complain, but he informs me that this is perfectly normal: 8 p.m. is just when doors opened for "Quantum of Solace", not when it was scheduled to start. Okay, fine, then when would it start? "I dunno," he said, "we close around 2 a.m., so it'll probably end a half hour before that, and since it's about two hours and fifteen minutes long, but has its own ads and trailers... sorry, I hated math in high school. My guess is as good as yours."