Queuing for Bob

The first time I queued to buy a ticket for a Bob Dylan concert it took fifteen hours; the last time I did so it took fifteen seconds.

That first experience of queuing was in 1978. Out of the blue, or so it seemed, it was announced that Bob Dylan would be playing six concerts at Earls Court in London. Those of us in the UK who followed the man could hardly believe that they would ever see the man, so completely wrapped up in legend as he had become by then. He had last appeared in the UK at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1969 – practically in another lifetime.

I had just turned seventeen and had been following the man avidly for some three or four years. I had, however, known of his music years before then, owing to my parents having been keen followers in their time, until he picked up an electric guitar. I do not remember now how I learned about the concerts or the procedures necessary for obtaining tickets, but one evening in May 1978 I was taken up to London by my father to join the queue.

There were no postal tickets – and of course there were no online sales because online did not exist. Instead for one of the 90,000 tickets available for Dylan’s UK tour you had to join a queue at one of seventeen ticket boxes across the country, four of them in London. I chose the box office of the Palace Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue. Somehow I must have picked up the information that queuing overnight would be necessary. So it was that I ended up in the early evening, with sleeping bag, a thermos of tomato soup a paperback (a comic novel by Neil Boyd, as I recall), ready to sit out the night.

I was not alone. It was a long queue already, or so it seemed, stretching back from the Shaftesbury Avenue side of the Palace. It was to stretch back very much further as the evening wore on. I think my position was in Romilly Street, where the queue went down one side of the street and doubled-back along the other. I was on the latter side. My father placed me by some amiable university students (Cambridge, possibly), who agreed to keep an eye on my young self. I was hugely grateful to them, for their care and for the conversations about Dylan – though their knowledge of the man wasn’t a tenth of mine. I knew little of the world, but everything about Bob.

There was plenty nearby to widen the eyes of someone who knew little. London’s Soho district, today much gentrified, was then notorious as the centre of the sex industry. One of the students went on a tour of the area and gleefully reported back on the red lights, sex show displays and raddled prostitutes finding scant trade among the Dylan fans that he had seen on his travels. I nestled into my sleeping bag and managed to pour soup on Neil Boyd. The light faded, the queue grew longer, and night beckoned.

I cannot remember how well I slept, but on waking there was action almost immediately. Those on the two sides of the queue down Romilly Street stood up. Then the queue on the side that I was on all moved to the other side to part of the queue that was nearer to the box office. I hesitated, shocked by this display of bad manners, surprised that no one seemed to be protesting. This was a breaking down of the social contract that queuing represents, the respect for order and for others that it implies. But my student carers beckoned me across, so I crossed the road with the rest. What else could I do?

The queue started shuffling. I started worrying. I had a cheque in my pocket for four tickets at the top price (£7.50 each), but what if the top price tickets had gone by them time I got to the front? Could I buy cheaper tickets with the same cheque? I had never handled a cheque before. I briefly thought of quitting the queue before I could be turned away by whatever stern soul was manning the ticket office. Mercifully I supressed such nonsense and found myself, after I cannot remember how long, at the front of the queue. There was a box office window of tiny proportions, utterly unfitted for manging a queue long enough to stretch its way through Soho. I handed over the cheque to the figure within. They handed me four tickets. I was amazed at the easiness of it. Mission accomplished.

The other day I picked up the news on the wires that Bob Dylan was coming to London once more. In November 2025 the man who never stops touring came to UK but for what ever reasons, chose not to play in London. This time round he would be playing in the capital at the Royal Festival Hall for five nights. I had to be there.

No need to spend the night in a sleeping bag in Soho this time around. In today’s marvellous world of digital entrapment we have Ticketmaster. Now queuing, at least when it comes to purchasing tickets for high-profile events, has become a ritual of bewildering speed and daunting efficiency (in the telephone queues for more mundane activities, such as financial services or doctors, we may have a less happy experience).

The process began when I visited the bobdylan.com website and looked up the upcoming tour dates. Those for London gave me a link to a Ticketmaster page, where I was told that the price range of the tickets would be £105 to £206 (no ‘dynamic pricing‘ to adjust the cost according to demand, mercifully), and that booking would open at 10.00am on 22 July 2026.

I set up alerts for myself by phone and email and settled down in front of my laptop five minutes before the deadline. It was then that I noticed my first mistake. There was a queue for joining the queue, a waiting room as they call it, to which I could have signed on hours if not days beforehand. I considered ways of reversing time, then accepted my fate, selecting one of the days on offer. The last time I saw Dylan, in 2024, it was at the Royal Albert Hall, where I had little more than a very distant view of the top of his head. I would like to get a little closer this time, please.

10.00. You are number 195 in the queue. Well, that’s not bad. You are number 174 in the queue. Number 140. Number 98. The figures flew by, and within seconds a seating plan appeared with blue dots for the seats still available and all of the front twenty or so rows in the stalls already booked. I clicked on a blue dot – it was gone in the micro-second it took to make the click. I tried another, failed, and another, same result. I saw that Ticketmaster had defaulted me to two adjacent tickets when all I wanted was the one. Switched to one – more blue dots had disappeared. Cottoned on that picking something to the back of those still on offer rather than those nearest the front was smarter. Clicked on a seat on the back of the stalls. Success.

The purchase of the ticket could be done at a leisurely pace, since it was now reserved for me. The picking of a seat in the first place was a bewildering blur, in which comprehension, choices, errors and capture of my prey sped by in seconds. There was no time for consideration. I marvelled at how our minds, attuned to such things, can operate with such rapidity and ruthlessness (allowing for the occasional, only human, stumble). Having bought my tickets and had notice of it downloaded to my phone, I looked again at the tour list on bobdylan.com. All UK shows sold out.

In his book on British forms of daily life, Queuing for Beginners, Joe Moran considers the queue as a supposed feature of the English national character. He traces the idea of the queue as a social form back to the early nineteenth century, as a by-product of urbanisation and industrialisation. It started to become firmly linked as a facet of Englishness in the 1940s, when wartime privations and post-war rationing made queuing an every day experience for most. “An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one” George Mikes writes in his 1946 comic study of English life, How to be an Alien. The queue became a fixture of British life to the extent that it became viewed as aspect of national character. Its sense that we were all in a queue together could be either viewed negatively – Winston Churchill taunted the late 1940s Labour government as having created ‘Queuetopia’ – or as an expression of fairness, decency and perseverance.

Moran stresses that not all queues are the same. There is the festive queue, best exemplified by the queue for Wimbledon day tickets, which involves camaraderie, good-natured endurance and a sense that the queue is as much a part of the event as that for which we are queuing. Then there is the queue of the everyday, forever waiting for things, which is the antithesis of the celebratory.

The queue for tickets in 1978 was definitely in the former camp. There are numerous accounts to be found online where people recall the fun of queuing for Bob. It was a badge of honour, an expression of your dedication, a source of good stories. It was a part of the show.

There are no good stories to come from an experience which reduces everything to fifteen seconds, but the experience is interesting. Contrary to appearances it was not an anti-queue, a mere scrum of people pushing their way to the front, such as some of the English believe is a display of bad manners reserved for foreigners (Moran makes short shrift of this evidence-less folk myth).

Instead, all of the niceties of queuing had been preserved, just at break-neck speed. We waited in order. Fairness was maintained. Those who had queued first were served first. The essential egalitarianism of the queue had been upheld. Clement Attlee would have commended it. Had I read the rules more carefully I might have got to see the whites of his eyes come December 4th. As it is I might just be able to make out a face.

But the speed of it nullified the pleasure. Brilliant software tools and server management have been developed to reduce the queue – at least for high-profile events where too many want the same thing at the same time – to nothingness. Our brains have become so attuned to rapid digital decision-making that we operate almost faster than we can think. We are slaves to the machine whose rules we have to obey, but the machine takes care of us. It is marvellous in its way.

The story is lost, however. There is nothing pleasurable to retain about how I bought tickets for Bob Dylan in 2026 as opposed to 1978. The celebratory, festive side of queuing has been lost (the Wimbledon day-ticket queue itself could surely be managed by an app, were it not that dedicated followers like the queue and will insist on keeping it). I was better off on Romilly Street, with my sleeping bag, tomato soup, stained paperback and student guardians. The tribulation made the reward all the greater. And it was a fantastic concert.

Links:

• For an engaging account of queuing for Dylan in 1978 and the Earls Court concert that followed, see Pete (vintagerock), ‘Bob Dylan Earls Court London Sat 17 June 1978‘ (unlike me he kept a hold of his ticket all these years)
• There is a handy Wikipedia page on Bob Dylan’s 1978 world tour, of which the London concerts were a part. Known informally as the ‘alimony tour’, the tour not only promoted Dylan’s new album Street-Legal but was designed to help pay off losses on his film Renaldo & Clara, a house he had built, plus his alimony bills. “I’ve got a few debts to pay off … it costs a lot to get divorced in California” the man admitted.