The tickets for Morrissey’s upcoming UK tour went on sale today, London gigs only though.
The tour starts in April, to promote the new album, due to be released in March, Ringleader of the Tormentors.
I decided to take a look, to see how it went, by ‘test buying’ from Ticketmaster and Seetickets, just to see what type of demand we’re going to get next week when the other 27 or so dates go on sale.

Well, all started off well. Both sites were loading normally at 08:55.

08:58: Same response. Site’s both loading quickly, but obviously, still saying tickets on sale at 9am.

09:00: I refresh both pages and this is what I get from Seetickets.

It’s totally fallen over due to the demand.
Ticketmaster is no better. Very slow response times.

Finally, Ticketmaster refreshes, and I get the opportunity to select how many tickets I would like, 1-4.
Looks like if I had really been wanting to buy them, I may have just got them.

09:10: Seetickets has been showing the same error message for the last 10 minutes.
So, I go to their homepage, they have lightened it heavily to compensate for the huge amount of traffic that they must be receiving.

It looks like it’s not just Morrissey tickets that have gone on sale at 9am.
Other popular artists such as Richard Ashcroft & The Editors also appear to have been released, obviously generating a lot of interest.

09:16: Seetickets are sold out. As are Ticketmaster. That’s it. It’s all over.

I imagined it would be a little manic trying to get tickets to the London gigs and am now hoping that it won’t be as difficult for the regional ones. There are 27 or so, afterall.
Although, they are all in small venues which could add to the asperity.

What I shall take from this experience however, is that I should not rely solely on the two biggest online ticket retailers. I shall source other, less well known ticket websites to open up as tabs in my browser, and attempt to use them to get my desired allocation in the event See and Ticketmaster aren’t able to provide.

Wish me luck!