Hi David, gotta say I'm surprised that you and Mark hadn't heard the Gillespie/Luton Airport story before...I seem to recall reading about it in Q at the time ( and in many places since! )

You underestimate how much I am capable of forgetting.

The 'Scream obviously weren't frequent fliers. Luton may be the least fashionable of London's many airports, but it's a much more efficient operation than the big three.

I'd have thought this would have appealed to Bobby Gillespie & Co, not least for the fact that it would have meant less time spent milling round with the hoi polloi.

The report David cites is a major exception to the rule. I'm gonna be careful in what i say here, as the promoter in question MCD are notoriously litigious and the popular Irish messageboard site "boards" is presently on the wrong side of libel action for having the temerity to QUOTE a newspaper report of a festival they ran in 2006. (Look at this - even the Geek fest that is the Unix thread of the computers section has a sticky note about it http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2054977949) Suffice it to say, that when the said festival was done and dusted, and there was a certain level of disquiet among the punters (who'd be of the late teens-twenties bracket) the promoters allegedly gave a big Two Fingers to 'em and told 'em to stuff it. With regards to the Barbra Streisand gig, the punters were rather more monied, rather more influential and a sod of a lot more likely to go and take the initiative in taking legal action themselves. It was to pre-empt this that the report was drawn up. Mind you, it was a relief to go see the Stones in Slane Castle knowing that the promoter would be on best behaviour lest there be any more bad PR...

Not to undermine the authoritative position of "TV's Andrew Collins" but he's conflated two Disney revenue streams. High School Musical is a Disney Channel movie that makes Summer Holiday look like The Seventh Seal. Hannah Montana is a separate Disney series that features the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus as a schoolgirl who's secretly a pop star. Both brands are enormous amongst the pre-teens in the US. Cyrus set an attendance record at the Houston Rodeo of 73,000+ earlier this year (70,000 tickets gone in three minutes, 3,000 standing on the day). She did a 30 minute set.

I've read Andrew Collins' book. Did he not warn you what happened to Q when you led with Springsteen...?
And how splendid to look at La Streisand's complaints log. "People standing in front of them" and "the performance". We need more boards of enquiry like this.

Men who look like Kenny Rogers.

Speaking of the underwhelming (or is that 'polite'?) response the audience gave Count Basie and Frank Sinatra on Live At The Sands, check out the audience on Keith Jarrett's famous Koln Concert recording. There they were in the presence of a true musical genius, performing an entirely improvised concert - which goes on to be the biggest-selling solo piano album OF ALL TIME* - and how did they respond to him and his masterpiece? With some really rather nervous, underwhelmed applause. Mind you, they were German.

*Note: I could be wrong here. That record could be held by Richard Clayderman.

To be fair, the German audience do start clapping in time and whooping a bit at the end. But that was only *after* the encore. Not sure the Germans quite get the hand of concerts.

Here is a prediction for you:

The first one of the new enteries for the Concise Encyclopedia of Popular Music (see p.53 of latest word)to be back out on their ear will be... The Thrills.

How did that average load of indifference make the list?