Mandy Woods
  • Home
  • Gigs/Reviews
  • Homelessness
  • Albums
  • Wags Lyrical
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Photos

An Evening of Missed Opportunity

18/3/2019

0 Comments

 
It was a very special treat courtesy of Carol – tickets to the C2C country music festival at the O2 in London. Amazingly for me, it would be the first time I had been to the festival, having managed to miss it for one reason or another every previous year. We were coming back from France for a week, and happily for us, the festival fell on the weekend we would be in the UK, so we could comfortably manage the Friday evening show.

On the bill, I was thrilled to see, was Cam, whose song ‘Mayday’ I love, and who I admire as a fellow singer songwriter. Also performing was Brett Eldredge, and headlining was none other than Keith Urban. I confess to knowing more about Cam than I do about Keith, other than that he is Australian, is married to fellow Ozzie Nicole Kidman, is quite cool looking and has a great song, ‘The Fighter’, on which he duets with Carrie Underwood. So I was looking forward to finding out more about the man and his music.

At this point I want to say that I don’t think the pre-event publicity for C2C was brilliant, especially for us C2C virgins. Before we got there, we hadn’t realised that the music events got under way much earlier than the billed start time of the evening concert with Cam, Brett and Keith, and as a result we found out too late that some other acts I would love to have seen, including Fairground Saints and Lainey Wilson, had played on smaller stages around the O2 earlier in the afternoon. Had we known, we could easily have got there in time to see them.

I have the eye of a magpie, I freely admit it, and as soon as we arrived at the O2 I was drawn in to the Town Square tent, where everything Western, from distressed cowboy hats to funky cactus earrings to woven Navajo jackets, was on sale – everything designed to appeal to the Calamity Jane in me. But we had to press on, to meet friends inside and take our seats in the main O2 concert venue.

Those seats turned out to be in the very highest part (bar one row) of the gods, and having clambered up the steep steps and teetered along the row to reach them, all the while trying not to topple over, I felt relieved to be there at last as I endeavoured to acclimatise myself to the vertiginous view of the stage way in the distance.

Once Cam came on stage, all was forgotten in the joy of finally being at the C2C in the presence of some of my favourite country artists.

But I couldn’t forget the trinkets of Town Square…

All through the next three performances – a singer on the secondary stage in the big venue, who did a sterling version of ‘Shallow’ from the Lady Gaga version of A Star is Born, then Brett Eldredge, who sang a very moving song about his grandmother having Alzheimer's, and then, again on the smaller stage, Runaway June, whom I enjoyed a lot – I kept thinking about the lovely leather and silver watch I’d seen, and wondering how much it was and whether it would still be there if I snuck back.

So as Brett disappeared off stage, I made the fateful decision: to teeter back down the steps in the interval before Keith came on, and go and have another look at the gorgeous goodies.

Down and down and down various flights of stairs I went, both inside the venue and in the outer hall, until I finally came to the security guards at the main entrance, who took no notice of me as I went through the scanner machines and into the area of restaurants and bars. From there I went outside into the cold evening, and there, to my disappointment, I saw that the entrance to Town Square was boarded up for the night. Bummer! I wouldn’t be getting that watch after all, as we were driving back to the south of France the next day.

So I went back inside, and thought I’d first go and see what music events were happening in the Blue Room venue while I was in the restaurant area. It was there that I made the awful discovery: not only was the Blue Room now closed for the night too, but I would only have been able to access it from inside the O2 concert venue, which, now that I’d come out of it, I wouldn’t be allowed back into.

So I wouldn’t be seeing Keith Urban either.

It was a shattering blow, and I felt utterly stupid and shallow, having been lured out merely by the prospect of looking at more Western-themed baubles. So I wandered into Starbucks, bought a cappuccino, and settled down to write a blog to pass the time and try to feel less glum. Even that wasn’t plain sailing, as no sooner had I sat down than a buxom young woman plonked herself next to me on the pretext of charging her phone using the socket under the seat there, but really just to keep asking me over and over whether I thought the O2 didn’t have many acts on in August because people were away on their holidays. There’s only so many times you can say ‘Probably, but there are also a lot of music festivals on then as well’ without sounding as much like a stuck needle as she did.

Anyway, when Carol came out of the concert at long last, I wanted her to say that Keith hadn’t been anything special. But she couldn’t lie – he had been brilliant and a consummate professional, and I had missed a spectacular performance. All for the sake of having another look at a few trinkets that I probably wouldn’t have bought anyway.

Lesson learned? Probably not…

​But should Keith Urban himself ever stumble across this, I’d just like to say how gutted I am that I didn’t get to see you, and how, since that night of abject failure on my part, I have promised myself that one day I most definitely WILL!
0 Comments

    Author

    Mandy Woods

    Archives

    August 2022
    June 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    January 2021
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    September 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    July 2017
    May 2017
    November 2016
    October 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    June 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    December 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    April 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012

    Categories

    All
    Angello Sound Studio
    Arran
    Bayonne
    Bazaar Cafe
    Bluebird
    Bluebird Cafe
    Brook Guitars
    Butterfly
    Butterfly Spirit
    C2C
    Calamity Jane
    California
    Cam
    Campervan Adventures
    Camping
    Cannes
    Carol Mac Photography
    Catweazle
    Cayman Islands
    Charity Shop
    Coda Music
    Copy-editing
    Corona Virus
    Country Music
    Covid-19
    Cowboy Hats
    Cowgirls
    Craft Fairs
    Dachshund
    David Naylor
    Deadwood
    Distinctly Blue
    Dolly Parton
    Doyle & Debbie
    Eastbourne
    Felix Macintosh
    Fisherman's Wharf
    France
    Freelance Work
    French Riviera
    Fringed Jacket
    Germany
    Gigs
    Gilet Jaunes
    Gilly Spencer
    Glastonbury
    Guitars
    Haight-Ashbury
    Handmade Guitars
    Hollister
    Holy Isle
    Homelessness
    Keith Urban
    Kibosh
    Kitten Kaboodle
    Las Vegas
    Le Mans
    Le Pilier Rouge
    Lesvos
    Lfest
    Little Silver Guitar
    Live Music In Norway
    Log Cabin
    Log Cabin Living
    Mandy Woods
    Memory Stick
    Mouans-Sartoux
    Musée Matisse
    Musee Mecanical
    Nashville
    Needle Felting
    New Life Abroad
    Nice
    O2 Concert Venue
    Oslo Open Mic
    Pandemic
    Peacock Butterfly
    Penny Arcade Museum
    Petula Clark
    Phantom Power Supply
    Pick-ups
    Proofreading
    Randy Moods
    Renegade Of The Road
    Rhinestones
    Roulette
    San Francisco
    Sausage Dog
    Scène Ouverte
    Scully
    Scully Jackets
    Seacliff State Beach
    Self-employment
    Self-reliance
    Social Distancing
    Social Separation
    Song Critique
    Songwriting
    Soquel
    SoulHuntress
    Southwest France
    Station Inn
    St Tropez
    Teaching Guitar
    The Chase
    Tigersonic
    Too Bad To Be True?
    Toyota Campervan
    Trail Of Goodbyes
    Under Ground Theatre
    Usa
    Virtual Open Mics
    Wags Lyrical
    Women's Centre
    Youtube
    Zoom Music Events

    RSS Feed

Mandy Woods