• Hand crafted smoked transparent Perspex box with gold plated metal tick mounted on outer front.

• 11 super heavyweight 200-gram vinyl records pressed on the classic EMI 1400, each featuring ‘Yes’ album track plus exclusive b-side instrumental version. With labels printed one special pantone colour per record.
• 11 inner sleeves featuring exclusive PSB artwork on front. with track title and lyrics on back.
• 11 outer sleeves printed one special pantone colour per sleeve, inside and out.
• Additional 12th sleeve contains giclee art print hand signed and numbered by Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, plus heavyweight information card containing full track list, credits and colour key.
• When correctly arranged the eleven album sleeves will allow you to make up your own tick, measuring some eight feet in length.
• Conceived and designed by Farrow working in close collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys, this highly collectible music and art edition is limited to only 300 copies worldwide.

Yours for £300, sir. eBay will eventually play some part in ending this particular madness.

It was two tickets to see John Mellencamp at the Manchester Apollo in July - Front row, dead centre - £195 for the two ;)

for I have sinned.

I have held their shapely bodies,
Ran my fingers down their necks,
And, oh so gently by the bridge
Pressed them into my chest,
I've fallen into slumber
With them lying in my arms
And woken with a start
To hope they never came to harm
And when the love affair was over
Their sad and lonely fate
To be traded in for something new
With six strings and a scratchplate.

Well if you like him. What the heck. Live the dream.

I remember passing the Apollo one day and seeing a queue around the block. I pulled over to see who it was for. Bruce Springsteen's solo tour (Tom Joad?). I joined the queue there and then, got 2 tickets at silly prices and sold them to a mate, at face value mind, because I knew he would appreciate them.

The first time I remember paying over the odds was for Pink Floyd on their Dark Side Of The Moon premiere tour. Bloody £1.25! First time I had coughed up more than £1 for a ticket. Outrageous.

My weakness is Disney memorabilia. I have been known to spend hundreds of $ on limited edition pin badges. My house is full of memorabilia that I dread to think what it cost in total. I am cured now - until the next time.

Most likely will pale into insignificance here, but the most I've paid was £45 (I think - have wiped the real figure from my mind) for a CD copy of Swans - White Light from the Mouth of Infinity, I had a scratchy cassette copy which had worn out long before and agonised over replacing it, but worth every penny, was my first real step into 'different' music when I was 17 or so and I never looked back.

Glasgow Apollo, supporting Thin Lizzy.

"I Need A Lover" was the single.

I don't have a particular peak in spending - my indulgence is still buying and listening to loads of music.

Unless you count a recent weekend in London to see Iggy & The Stooges supported by Suicide.

Or going to Paris to see The Cramps/ The Primevals / Alex Chilton in 86.

I'll declare purchases of guitars off-limits for this particular chat, though. That might get silly.

or Face value? Or is it premium prices because its at the Apollo and not the Manchester Evening Enormodome?

For my own indulgence I do occasionally travel down to London to see a band I really want to see who might have missed us off their tour itinerary, and actually once I've paid for travel, board and lodging (plus a trip to Rough Trade East) I've probably spent close to the price of a John Mellancamp ticket.

Got to treat yourself sometimes haven't you?

and record buying, the most I've ever paid for a concert ticket is 800 Swedish kronor (£77), for Stevie Wonder a couple of years ago. The most I've ever paid for a single CD is about £24, I think (for John Carter's "Castles of Ghana"). So I suppose those purchases don't seem too extravagant. But, like el hombre malo above, my weakness is buying lots and lots of music, all the time, rather than the odd mega-purchase.
Outside the musical field, my most recent indulgence was this little beauty:

handsome, eh?

Flew to Sydney last year for two Wilco gigs, paid a shedful of money for front block tickets for Leonard Cohen at the O2 (it was my birthday) and Liverpool. Went to Bonarroo in 2009 to see Elvis Costello, Decemberists and Wilco only to discover they were all playing at the same time on different stages! - I did get to meet Elvis Perkins though and had a great time. Brooklyn for a Glenn Tilbrook solo gig but that's a bit of a cheat because we were in New York anyway for a short break (met Steve Miller in a guitar shop just off of Times Square while we were there).

And for someone who plays as badly as I do I have far too many guitars.

in 1997. I went to the stage door and said to the bouncer "If I give you these notes, could you make that door open and let me see the show?" Oh yes he could. They were stunning.

I paid £78.78 for the 'Buba and the Shop Assistants' 7" single 'Something To Do'. I had waited 26 years to buy this so I justified it by claiming to myself it worked out at only £3 per year of waiting.

nestled in a savings account just in case:

Daft Punk play a festival in a hot country. 3/1

Tom Waits decides to play these shores again. 6/1

Aretha overcomes her fears and gets herself airlifted to London to play 500/1

Otherwise I will spend it on a vintage Telecaster.

from down to that London from Edinburgh in a few short weeks to see the Wall at the O2.

Then Rush go and anounce that they're playing Glasgow on the same night. Nightmare. So, I've arranged to take the family to Newcastle where the Tom Sawyer Hitmakers are playing the following weekend. Justification for that one was that I got cheap train tickets and the kids will enjoy a night in a Travel Lodge.

And there was the time (pre-kids) where we flew to Barcelona to see Silvio Rodriguez. Wife's fave so she had to justify the expense to me. That was easy.

I, too, am waiting for Tom Petty to cross the pond. Did have tickets to see him in '91 in Glasgow but I had a geotechnics exam the following morning and had to cram.

I didn't go in the end.

(I sold them).

At the Albert Hall about 18 months ago, £180 each Mrs BP immediately found lots of reasons why it was too much trouble to go: mid week, who'll pick the kids up, blah blah blah and she's a fan. I haven't bothered since. About a week after the gig I found out a friend was head of video on the tour and could have blagged tickets, bah!
My biggest non music indulgence was a 1954 linen backed 3 sheet cinema poster for The Ladykillers (the original Ealing comedy, not the Tom Hanks remake). it's taller than me, framed in conservation grade Perspex as glass is too heavy and hangs in the stairwell. A friend was astonished when I told him how much it was and said he couldn't believe I'd spent that much on it. This from a man with such a serious guitar habit that he had to hide them under the floor so his wife wouldn't know how many he had. It gives me immense pleasure very time I go past it. Oh, and it wont go down in value either.

"One never regrets one's indulgences, only one's economies"

...I just can't afford larcenous prices for tickets, or anything else come to that. Which got me to thinking, what was the most expensive music-related purchase I'd indulged myself with? I guess, probably a vinyl boot of Little Feat's Electrif Lycanthrope (see here: http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/little-feats-electrif-lyncanthrope...) It cost me £50, which seemed steep at the time but worth it. I've since downloaded it from the Internet Archive which, as DH observes, only features the work of "trade-friendly" bands. Anyway, the point is (hurry up, ed) that I bought it in about 1984 so given that extrapolating prices is tricky, I used the Mars Bar Index. In 1984, a Mars was 16p, now they're about 58p depending whether it's a corner shop or enormo-mart. I know, I know, they're smaller now, but ignoring the reduction in size (about 7.5%) the multiplier makes the boot £181.25. Impossible, of course, because the reason why economists use a Mars Bar is because the price is more stable than, say a bootleg or rare painting or whatever that's subject to trends. Some economists now use the Big Mac Index - there's a Wikipedia entry on it which also provides figures on how long it takes someone in a number of countries to earn enough for one. More recently, some economists have suggested the iPod Index because they're not subject to differing manufacturing costs for different nations. There's a Wiki entry for that, too...

...booked a hotel for Mrs Bob and me on our tenth wedding anniversary, which is coming up at the end of June. We're staying at the Tudor manor house hotel where we had our wedding reception, only it's been done up in a BIG way some time during the last decade.

Gulp. £410 for one night. Gulp.

She's worth it. But she'll kill me.