I was booked to play at Beat Hotel in Glastonbury. I was really, really excited; I’d played Glastonbury before, but it was for smaller, little bar gigs. This was Beat Hotel. But it was arranged in the classic Glastonbury way, where they tell you, “As long as you’ve got your own ticket, it’s cool for you to come and play.”
Big-ass names even have to get themselves a ticket, but I had one, so I was like, ‘Cool, sign me up.’ I told all my friends that I was playing on Wednesday and asked them to come down early. Everyone was gassed.
Someone from my area has sold a few of us these tickets saying it was through *******’s guestlist. I couldn’t get a ticket in the normal way, so I went along with it — we knew him, so I didn’t think that it’d be anything dodgy.
About two days before Glastonbury was due to start, I got a phone call: ‘I’m really sorry, but the guestlist that you were on has fallen through.’ I was like, ‘What do you mean? I’m ready to go. I’m on the line-up. You can’t tell me I don’t have a ticket.’
I’d spent £250 on this ticket; just from me and my friends alone, he’d got about a grand and a half. I’m panicking: I’ve got a set, what am I going to do? My agent was ringing Beat Hotel, saying this is the situation, but they couldn’t help. I had to find my own way to get in.
So, we started looking into this guy. He had sent an email that was supposedly from *******’s manager. It said, ‘I’m really sorry, but he’s no longer playing the Pyramid Stage so all of his guestlist has been cut.’ But when we looked into it, he was never even booked to play that stage in the first place!
We went on the website for the company he claimed to work for and it was a completely fake site; there were no full stops, bad punctuation, all this shit. ‘Oh my God.’ He’s gone on this big-ass scam to get our money.
I ended up going up on the day of my set, super early, to try and find a way of getting in. One of my friends said that they might be able to sort me out with another hospitality band. After about 14 hours of trying and waiting, I missed my set because I just couldn’t get a ticket.
I had to leave all the friends I was with to meet another mate. I’d gone from playing Glastonbury, to being under a cold pigsty at midnight with a sleeping bag at the edge of a motorway. It was the biggest fall from grace, awful. But I did end up getting a wristband for the rest of the festival, though, so all’s well that ends well.