My band Creepy Cool went to London on Sunday with a friend who was traveling there to a festival in Hyde park. Bands such as The Killers & Starsailor were playing there with a final 3 hour set by Bruce Springsteen. He played a storming set at Glastonbury the night before which I saw on TV.
Anyway, we got there by around 2.30pm. We actually traveled there to do some busking somewhere near the festival but it proved more difficult than we first thought. We caught the underground at Epping in North London to get to Marble Arch and there was a busker playing in the tunnel. As soon as we got out the station, we were met by those wretched ticket touts trying to charge 80 quid for the festival tickets when the real price is only 40 this later turned out to be a scam. We found Marble Arch and set up & played there but the traffic from the road was too noisy, meaning that people walking past didn"t hear us properly and we only got 2 pounds in 1 & a half hours. We also had someone taking pictures, poking their long camera lense in our faces and didn"t even ask our permission. If that wasn"t enough they didn"t even put any money in our guitar case which I thought was very underhanded.
We then made our way over to Hyde Park and met the busker from the underground who looked Chinese with long hair yet spoke realy posh & he told us of the best places to play. We managed to find somewhere in Hyde Park which wasn"t too loud with the music coming from the festival & it was much better. We had a woman"s daughter singing a song on the mike which was great. The woman said it"s a pity more people didn"t play like us but busking is still seen as a down & out occupation & the authorities make it difficult. Security people there saw that we were collecting a bit of money & said that wasn"t allowed in the park because they said that people don't want to be hassled for money but they knew we weren"t doing that - we weren"t exactly holding people at knife point to give us money. We closed the case after that but opened it again a while after they"d gone. This is the good thing about busking, people choose to put money in because they like you & people liked us and we still managed to get about 20 quid.
Although Bruce was a bit loud, we ended up playing until 9.30pm. We were supposed to be meeting our friend at Tottenham Court Rd after the show. As it happened he turned up behind us at marble Arch station. Anyway, the train turned up and the others got on but people pushed in front even though I was carrying a heavy keyboard bag and a stool which is sure to slow you down. This stopped me from getting on the train & it went without me, I was livid. You would think that people would slow down and give way a bit on a Sunday but hey this was London and no-one bats an eyelid for anyone else. It"s not the kind of culture I would put up with for long.
Luckily I managed to get on the next one a few minutes later and met the others at Tottenham court Rd. and we traveled back to the car park at Epping and set off back to Boston.
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